Canada's changing ethnic demography
Jan. 25th, 2003 08:21 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rfmcdonaldWave of immigration changes face of Canada
By GLORIA GALLOWAY
Saturday, January 25, 2003 – Page A1
Poor and hungry, Nick Iwanoczkow took a boat from his native Ukraine in 1925 and stepped into a land that was still little more than a British colony, a place where newcomers were foreigners, not new Canadians, and it took a long time for an immigrant to feel at home.
There were no classes that taught immigrant workers English as a second language; no social workers or immigration specialists to help those from foreign shores adapt.
"I had a hard time in that I did not understand one word of English, that's for sure," Mr. Iwanoczkow, 101, recalled this week from the Winnipeg nursing home where he lives.
"I suffered for a long time before I picked up some language."
Mr. Iwanoczkow was part of a wave of immigration last century, one that rivals the surge of the past decade in Canada. Census figures released this week found more people born outside the country than at any time since 1931, the last time immigration changed the face of Canada as much as it has in the past decade.
Immigrants arrived to a land governed by policies that, to a 21st-century eye, were overtly discriminatory. People who did not look British were viewed with suspicion. And instead of expecting public censure of racism, immigrants understood that they would be known as dagos or polacks or chinks or bohunks.
The attitudes on the streets were echoed in the halls of government.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier stood in House of Commons in 1911 to announce changes to the Immigration Act, prohibiting "any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada."
And an editorial in a May, 1928, edition of The Toronto Globe opined: "The country cannot go on if its national life is made up of races which fall short of the national standard."
Still, immigrant labour was needed. And in the years before the 1920s, members of Canada's ruling British class were forced, by necessity, to share the land with those deemed inferior.
Harold Troper is a University of Toronto professor and the co-author, with Irving Abella, of the acclaimed None is Too Many, a book about the role of Canada in the Holocaust.
He says the immigration spike of the early 20th century actually began in 1896 as the collision of several different phenomena.
With the completion of the transcontinental railway, a huge expanse of Western Canada opened for settlement.
The United States was more appealing to many European immigrants but, by the late 1880s, much of the good agricultural land south of the border had been claimed.
In addition, there was a huge population increase and an economic crisis in Central and Eastern Europe.
"There were an awful lot of reasons why people wanted to leave," Mr. Troper said.
"For Jews, for instance, there was the added impetus of political instability and pogroms and the Russian empire and so on."
Clifford Sifton, then interior minister, was beating the international bush for immigrants. But not just any immigrants.
Most of those who came to Canada in the 1990s began their lives in Asia -- China, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Taiwan topped the list. But in the early part of the last century, politicians devised ways to keep Asians out.
"And they were relatively successful," Mr. Troper said.
To appease a growing concern about "cheap Chinese labour" fuelled by the large numbers of Chinese men who came to work on the railway, a head tax of $50 was imposed on all Chinese nationals in 1900. It was increased to $500 in 1903.
But it wasn't enough. In June, 1914, an MP rose in the House of Commons to ask: "How can we go on encouraging trade between Canada and Asia and then hope to prevent Asiatics from coming into our country?"
Finally, in 1923, immigration from China was cut off entirely except for diplomats, students, children of Canadians and investors. The day the final act came into effect was known as "humiliation day" in Canada's Chinese community.
The burgeoning Sikh community in British Columbia also provoked fears among the British majority, sparking an "Anti-Asiatic" parade in Vancouver in 1907. In response, the government imposed the "continuous journey" rule.
"That meant that when you got into a ship in India, you could not enter into any other national waters until you got off the ship in British Columbia," Mr. Troper said.
There were no direct shipping routes from India, so there was no more Indian immigration.
But even among European immigrants, the government had favourites.
"The preference would always be given to Brits and people from the United Kingdom and Americans, and very closely linked to them would be northern and western Europeans," Mr. Troper said.
But "as the country needed immigrants desperately, they were prepared to reach down their ladder of racial and ethnic preference and take in people who might have been less desirable."
Initially that meant Eastern Europeans, the fabled peasants in sheepskin coats with the stout wives.
"The notion was that these are people who have enormous amounts of agricultural experience," Mr. Troper said.
The immigrants who arrived during the 1990s, by contrast, were not farmers. They were skilled workers, often professionals, who came from educated and often privileged backgrounds.
And they did not go to the farms. The new census numbers show that three-quarters of the newcomers settled in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.
But the Canadian government of the early 20th century looked across the border and saw the vast numbers of immigrants filling up cities such as New York and Chicago "and thought that this would lead to an almost genetic mongrelization."
We wanted immigrants to move to the farms and stay there, Mr. Troper said.
Southern Europeans -- mostly Italians but also Greeks -- were considered ill suited to agriculture, he said.
But as the railway opened the West, it became apparent that Canada also needed miners and lumbermen and railway workers. And that meant men were needed to fill those jobs.
Like many immigrants today, one family member -- a breadwinner -- would often labour in Canada for years while sending money home.
But the world was a much bigger place 80 years ago and home was not just a plane ticket and a day away.
Adriana Albi Davies immigrated from southern Italy in 1951. Her father had come in 1949 to work on a farm in Winnipeg, then took a construction job in Edmonton.
To ensure that he could afford to keep them, he waited two years before sending for his family.
Ms. Davies's grandfather had also worked in Canada, leaving his family in Europe. So had one of her great-grandfathers. And a great-great-grandfather.
Today, Ms. Davies is the executive director of the Heritage Community Foundation in Edmonton, an organization dedicated to preserving, among other things, the heritage of early Italian Canadians. It runs a Web site called Celebrating Alberta's Italian community that contains recorded voices of some of the pioneers.
"My grandfather's name was Franco Albi," Ms. Davies said.
"He ended up working in Crowsnest Pass and Revelstoke [B.C.] . . . After a year of hard work in the Rockies, he died of pneumonia at the age of 25, leaving his wife."
Her other grandfather, Vincenzo Potestio, worked in the railways in Port Arthur, Ont. He got back to Italy to see his family about once every seven years.
Can you imagine, she said, "making love and creating a child that you wouldn't see again until this child was 7? This was a part of the norm.
"Can you imagine what it was like, not knowing the language and being brought over by a labour agent so your freedom was really curtailed?"
Many, she said, never returned to Italy. They lived in Canada without their family, "so it was terribly isolated. It was really a society of men."
Their bosses were British. And in their communities, "they were wops, they were dagos, they were all of those things."
But they had a philosophy they called arrangiarsi, which means "making do."
It means, Ms. Davies said, "that you were faced with these circumstances and harsh realities and that you just made do and you got on with it and you refused to be defeated by the hard work, you refused to be defeated by people treating you badly based on your ethnicity. And you refused to be defeated by the fact that you don't have your family with you."
Italians, after all, were still being let in.
It wasn't until 1967, with the introduction of the points system, which assesses each immigrant on the basis of merit, that the last vestiges of discrimination against Asian immigrants were removed from Canada's law books.
The change in attitude came about slowly after the Second World War, Mr. Troper said. The British Canadians had hoped to mould the offspring of the immigrants into likenesses of themselves. But the experiment failed.
Instead, as the numbers and influence of immigrants and their children grew, Canada adopted multiculturalism, and the nature of what it meant to be a Canadian was changed.
There are several ways to view the treatment of the early 20th-century immigrants, Mr. Troper said.
It is true that they were not called new Canadians. But they could still become citizens and vote. And they could own land.
So, while we may look back and see racism, from the perspective of most immigrants, he said, "the world here was light years better than it was where they came from."
"Measured from the point of view of a Ukrainian who was, in the classic sense, a peasant working on a piece of land that he would never be able to imagine owning, coming here and taking up a piece of land and have his kids go to school et cetera was unbelievable."
And the Jew who came out of pogroms may have faced anti-Semitism here, Mr. Troper said, "but he didn't face murder in the streets."
It's true that the adjustment was not easy for people like Mr. Iwanoczkow, who spent years working on the railway while living in Alma, Man., among other Ukrainians. Even today he struggles with his English.
But, despite the years of labour and the language barriers, he said he has never regretted leaving Ukraine. He has never regretted becoming Canadian.
"I never longed for my country. I came to this country and I liked this country," he said. "I worked here and I lived here and I loved it here."
WHERE THEY SETTLED
A look at 2001 census figures on where immigrants put down new roots.
Place..................Number of people
British Columbia.........370,615
Prairies.................173,630
Ontario................1,022,370
Quebec...................244,910
Atlantic..................17,490
By GLORIA GALLOWAY
Saturday, January 25, 2003 – Page A1
Poor and hungry, Nick Iwanoczkow took a boat from his native Ukraine in 1925 and stepped into a land that was still little more than a British colony, a place where newcomers were foreigners, not new Canadians, and it took a long time for an immigrant to feel at home.
There were no classes that taught immigrant workers English as a second language; no social workers or immigration specialists to help those from foreign shores adapt.
"I had a hard time in that I did not understand one word of English, that's for sure," Mr. Iwanoczkow, 101, recalled this week from the Winnipeg nursing home where he lives.
"I suffered for a long time before I picked up some language."
Mr. Iwanoczkow was part of a wave of immigration last century, one that rivals the surge of the past decade in Canada. Census figures released this week found more people born outside the country than at any time since 1931, the last time immigration changed the face of Canada as much as it has in the past decade.
Immigrants arrived to a land governed by policies that, to a 21st-century eye, were overtly discriminatory. People who did not look British were viewed with suspicion. And instead of expecting public censure of racism, immigrants understood that they would be known as dagos or polacks or chinks or bohunks.
The attitudes on the streets were echoed in the halls of government.
Sir Wilfrid Laurier stood in House of Commons in 1911 to announce changes to the Immigration Act, prohibiting "any immigrants belonging to the Negro race, which race is deemed unsuitable to the climate and requirements of Canada."
And an editorial in a May, 1928, edition of The Toronto Globe opined: "The country cannot go on if its national life is made up of races which fall short of the national standard."
Still, immigrant labour was needed. And in the years before the 1920s, members of Canada's ruling British class were forced, by necessity, to share the land with those deemed inferior.
Harold Troper is a University of Toronto professor and the co-author, with Irving Abella, of the acclaimed None is Too Many, a book about the role of Canada in the Holocaust.
He says the immigration spike of the early 20th century actually began in 1896 as the collision of several different phenomena.
With the completion of the transcontinental railway, a huge expanse of Western Canada opened for settlement.
The United States was more appealing to many European immigrants but, by the late 1880s, much of the good agricultural land south of the border had been claimed.
In addition, there was a huge population increase and an economic crisis in Central and Eastern Europe.
"There were an awful lot of reasons why people wanted to leave," Mr. Troper said.
"For Jews, for instance, there was the added impetus of political instability and pogroms and the Russian empire and so on."
Clifford Sifton, then interior minister, was beating the international bush for immigrants. But not just any immigrants.
Most of those who came to Canada in the 1990s began their lives in Asia -- China, India, the Philippines, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Taiwan topped the list. But in the early part of the last century, politicians devised ways to keep Asians out.
"And they were relatively successful," Mr. Troper said.
To appease a growing concern about "cheap Chinese labour" fuelled by the large numbers of Chinese men who came to work on the railway, a head tax of $50 was imposed on all Chinese nationals in 1900. It was increased to $500 in 1903.
But it wasn't enough. In June, 1914, an MP rose in the House of Commons to ask: "How can we go on encouraging trade between Canada and Asia and then hope to prevent Asiatics from coming into our country?"
Finally, in 1923, immigration from China was cut off entirely except for diplomats, students, children of Canadians and investors. The day the final act came into effect was known as "humiliation day" in Canada's Chinese community.
The burgeoning Sikh community in British Columbia also provoked fears among the British majority, sparking an "Anti-Asiatic" parade in Vancouver in 1907. In response, the government imposed the "continuous journey" rule.
"That meant that when you got into a ship in India, you could not enter into any other national waters until you got off the ship in British Columbia," Mr. Troper said.
There were no direct shipping routes from India, so there was no more Indian immigration.
But even among European immigrants, the government had favourites.
"The preference would always be given to Brits and people from the United Kingdom and Americans, and very closely linked to them would be northern and western Europeans," Mr. Troper said.
But "as the country needed immigrants desperately, they were prepared to reach down their ladder of racial and ethnic preference and take in people who might have been less desirable."
Initially that meant Eastern Europeans, the fabled peasants in sheepskin coats with the stout wives.
"The notion was that these are people who have enormous amounts of agricultural experience," Mr. Troper said.
The immigrants who arrived during the 1990s, by contrast, were not farmers. They were skilled workers, often professionals, who came from educated and often privileged backgrounds.
And they did not go to the farms. The new census numbers show that three-quarters of the newcomers settled in Toronto, Vancouver or Montreal.
But the Canadian government of the early 20th century looked across the border and saw the vast numbers of immigrants filling up cities such as New York and Chicago "and thought that this would lead to an almost genetic mongrelization."
We wanted immigrants to move to the farms and stay there, Mr. Troper said.
Southern Europeans -- mostly Italians but also Greeks -- were considered ill suited to agriculture, he said.
But as the railway opened the West, it became apparent that Canada also needed miners and lumbermen and railway workers. And that meant men were needed to fill those jobs.
Like many immigrants today, one family member -- a breadwinner -- would often labour in Canada for years while sending money home.
But the world was a much bigger place 80 years ago and home was not just a plane ticket and a day away.
Adriana Albi Davies immigrated from southern Italy in 1951. Her father had come in 1949 to work on a farm in Winnipeg, then took a construction job in Edmonton.
To ensure that he could afford to keep them, he waited two years before sending for his family.
Ms. Davies's grandfather had also worked in Canada, leaving his family in Europe. So had one of her great-grandfathers. And a great-great-grandfather.
Today, Ms. Davies is the executive director of the Heritage Community Foundation in Edmonton, an organization dedicated to preserving, among other things, the heritage of early Italian Canadians. It runs a Web site called Celebrating Alberta's Italian community that contains recorded voices of some of the pioneers.
"My grandfather's name was Franco Albi," Ms. Davies said.
"He ended up working in Crowsnest Pass and Revelstoke [B.C.] . . . After a year of hard work in the Rockies, he died of pneumonia at the age of 25, leaving his wife."
Her other grandfather, Vincenzo Potestio, worked in the railways in Port Arthur, Ont. He got back to Italy to see his family about once every seven years.
Can you imagine, she said, "making love and creating a child that you wouldn't see again until this child was 7? This was a part of the norm.
"Can you imagine what it was like, not knowing the language and being brought over by a labour agent so your freedom was really curtailed?"
Many, she said, never returned to Italy. They lived in Canada without their family, "so it was terribly isolated. It was really a society of men."
Their bosses were British. And in their communities, "they were wops, they were dagos, they were all of those things."
But they had a philosophy they called arrangiarsi, which means "making do."
It means, Ms. Davies said, "that you were faced with these circumstances and harsh realities and that you just made do and you got on with it and you refused to be defeated by the hard work, you refused to be defeated by people treating you badly based on your ethnicity. And you refused to be defeated by the fact that you don't have your family with you."
Italians, after all, were still being let in.
It wasn't until 1967, with the introduction of the points system, which assesses each immigrant on the basis of merit, that the last vestiges of discrimination against Asian immigrants were removed from Canada's law books.
The change in attitude came about slowly after the Second World War, Mr. Troper said. The British Canadians had hoped to mould the offspring of the immigrants into likenesses of themselves. But the experiment failed.
Instead, as the numbers and influence of immigrants and their children grew, Canada adopted multiculturalism, and the nature of what it meant to be a Canadian was changed.
There are several ways to view the treatment of the early 20th-century immigrants, Mr. Troper said.
It is true that they were not called new Canadians. But they could still become citizens and vote. And they could own land.
So, while we may look back and see racism, from the perspective of most immigrants, he said, "the world here was light years better than it was where they came from."
"Measured from the point of view of a Ukrainian who was, in the classic sense, a peasant working on a piece of land that he would never be able to imagine owning, coming here and taking up a piece of land and have his kids go to school et cetera was unbelievable."
And the Jew who came out of pogroms may have faced anti-Semitism here, Mr. Troper said, "but he didn't face murder in the streets."
It's true that the adjustment was not easy for people like Mr. Iwanoczkow, who spent years working on the railway while living in Alma, Man., among other Ukrainians. Even today he struggles with his English.
But, despite the years of labour and the language barriers, he said he has never regretted leaving Ukraine. He has never regretted becoming Canadian.
"I never longed for my country. I came to this country and I liked this country," he said. "I worked here and I lived here and I loved it here."
WHERE THEY SETTLED
A look at 2001 census figures on where immigrants put down new roots.
Place..................Number of people
British Columbia.........370,615
Prairies.................173,630
Ontario................1,022,370
Quebec...................244,910
Atlantic..................17,490
