ARCHIVED – Forging Our Legacy: Canadian Citizenship and Immigration, 1900–1977

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Chapter 5 (continued)
Towards the Canadian Citizenship Act

• Mackenzie King makes a statement on immigration
• Canada opens the gates to displaced persons
• Immigration of Balts to Canada
• Canada welcomes Dutch farmers
• Contract labour

  Mackenzie King makes a statement on immigration

On 1 May 1947, in response to those who advocated a more liberal immigration policy, Mackenzie King made the following declaration in the House of Commons:

The policy of the government is to foster the growth of the population of Canada by the encouragement of immigration. The government will seek by legislation, regulation, and vigorous administration, to ensure the careful selection and permanent settlement of such immigrants as can advantageously be absorbed in our national economy.

Before concluding his oft–quoted speech, however, King stressed that immigration should not be allowed to “make a fundamental alteration in the character of our population.” In other words, Asian immigration would continue to be restricted while applicants from the “old” Commonwealth countries and the United States would continue to receive preferred treatment. Nevertheless, in deference to the United Nations Charter, the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 would be repealed and Chinese residents of Canada, not already Canadian citizens, would be allowed to apply for naturalization.

King’s statement paved the way for hundreds of thousands of Europeans to enter Canada in the next decade. For the first time since the turn of the century, a Canadian government had decided to use immigration as an instrument to boost the Canadian population and economy. Today, we would not consider this a bold move, but at the time it represented a dramatic shift in direction. Indeed, we can now see it as a watershed in Canadian immigration policy. For since that time Canada has made it possible for immigrants seeking a better life or refugees fleeing political or religious persecution to gain admission.

  Canada opens the gates to displaced persons

To its credit, Canada decided to admit displaced persons even before the international community had reached an agreement on the permanent resettlement of hundreds of thousands of Europe’s homeless. Taking independent action, this country passed an Order in Council in June 1947 authorizing the entry of an initial 5,000 non–sponsored displaced persons. Subsequent Orders in Council, passed between July 1947 and October 1948, provided for the entry of an additional 45,000 of these people, many of whom later sponsored European relatives. For several years Canada admitted more displaced persons (Canadians soon learned to call them “New Canadians”) than all the overseas countries combined—far more, for example, than the United States.

Nearly 250,000 displaced persons and other refugees were admitted to Canada between 1947 and 1962.Of the 165,000 refugees who entered this country between 1947 and 1953,Poles comprised the largest group (23 percent of all those refugees admitted). In descending order of numerical strength were Ukrainians (16 percent), Germans and Austrians (11 percent), Jews (10 percent), Latvians (6 percent), Lithuanians (6 percent), Magyars (Hungarians; 5 percent), Czechs (3 percent), Dutch (3 percent), and Russians (3 percent). All told, these groups comprised 86 percent of the Europeans allowed to enter Canada in this period.

Displaced person (from Second World War) who emigrated to Canada and worked at Dionne Spinning Mills, St–George, Beauce County, Quebec, 21 May 1948.

National Archives of Canada (PA 115767)

Five mobile immigration teams were dispatched to Germany and Austria in the summer of 1947 to select prospective immigrants. Composed of immigration, medical, security and labour officials, these teams travelled from one displaced persons’ camp to another, interviewing many desperate people and living out of suitcases or, where possible, the trunk of a car. In a sense they resembled itinerant “head hunters,” although their mission was to select able–bodied refugees. Preference was given to strong young men who could perform manual labour in Canada’s primary industries, which at that time were experiencing an acute labour shortage.

These immigration teams were later lauded by Dr. Hugh Keenleyside, the Deputy Minister of the Department of Mines and Resources (immigration was then one of its responsibilities) from 1947 until 1949 and a key figure in the resettlement of displaced persons in Canada. Addressing an audience at Dalhousie University in November 1948, the highly respected Keenleyside praised the work of these early immigration officers and then observed:

I think it is not an exaggeration to say that the achievement of bringing to Canada something over 50,000 D.P.s between July 1947 and November 1948 under the conditions that existed in Germany during that time, and in spite of the transportation difficulties which had to be overcome, is as remarkable a performance as anything to be found in the history of immigration to Canada.

  Immigration of Balts to Canada

Because they ranked high on the list of Canada’s preferred immigrants, Balts were among the first displaced persons selected by Canadian immigration teams dispatched to United Nations–run camps in Austria and Germany. Generally speaking, the Balts were Estonians, Latvians, and Lithuanians who had found themselves caught between Soviet and German forces in the Second World War. They had had to endure the 1940 Soviet occupation of their respective countries, the subsequent German invasion, and the advance of Russian forces in 1944.

When the Russians moved towards Estonia in 1944, thousands of Estonians fled their homeland by sea for Sweden and Germany. Of those who remained in Estonia, some later effected a dramatic escape to Canada. Between 1948 and 1950, almost 1,700 Estonians made their way independently by small, often unseaworthy, boats to Canadian ports, where ad hoc immigration machinery was set up to process them. The Canadian government admitted nearly all of these intrepid, would–be immigrants. Large numbers of other Estonians, usually displaced persons, would follow the “boat people” to Canada over the next few years, but their transportation and entry would be far more conventional.

  Canada welcomes Dutch farmers

In an attempt to increase the population of Canada’s rural areas, the Canadian government signed an agreement with the Dutch government that brought Dutch families to this country. Holland had been left with a surplus of farmers after retreating German soldiers had destroyed the country’s dykes, leaving much of Holland’s agricultural land flooded. Between 1947, when this immigration movement got under way, and the end of September 1949, nearly 16,000 members of Dutch farm families entered Canada. Many of these newcomers went to Ontario, but substantial numbers also settled in Quebec, Alberta, Manitoba, and British Columbia. The movement was so successful that the Immigration Branch continued to encourage farmers from the Netherlands to emigrate to Canada throughout the 1950s.

Lambertus Vandenberg and his family arrived in Ottawa via the SS Volendam from Holland to Québec City, 27 June 1949.

Jack Vandenberg Collection

  Contract labour

Canada’s need for additional workers to serve the unquenchable needs of its expanding economy led the government, in 1947, to establish a program that encouraged companies to adopt “contract” or “bulk–labour” schemes. Many displaced persons who entered Canada in these years did so under this program. Potential employers in the mining, logging, or lumbering industries would forward applications to the Department of Labour requesting that a certain number of labourers be brought to this country under prearranged contracts covering wages and basic living conditions. Shortly after its introduction, the program was expanded to include other types of labourers as well as specialized agricultural workers, such as the sugar beet farmers who settled with their families in Western Canada.

The legendary C.D. Howe, an American immigrant, an engineer, and the principal architect of the Canadian war effort, was one of the leading boosters of the contract–labour program. When Canada was converting to a post–war economy, Howe, who often represented the interests of the Canadian Manufacturers’ Association in Cabinet, became an outspoken advocate of increased immigration, including the immigration of displaced persons. As Minister of Reconstruction and Supply and Acting Minister of Mines and Resources, he directed a steady stream of requests to Cabinet for the admission of skilled and unskilled European workers—craftsmen for the clothing industry, workers for heavy industry, lumber camps and construction, woodworkers, and people who could perform domestic work in homes, hospitals, and similar institutions.

Although the bulk–labour movement was successful in supplying badly needed manpower to Canadian industry and the resource sector, it did not lack critics. The sentiments of many of these were summed up in a 28 May 1947 editorial in the Toronto Globe and Mail, which assailed the government for a bankrupt immigration policy and roundly criticized it for allowing a Quebec Liberal, Ludger Dionne, to “import” a hundred Polish girls to work in his rayon mill. Huffed the Globe, “Instead of a bold, imaginative, large–scale plan for bringing them [people] in, the Government offers paltry schemes allowing employers to recruit labour on a plan of semi–servitude….”

From a different end of the political spectrum, representatives of the Canadian labour movement and the Co–operative Commonwealth Federation (the forerunner of the New Democratic Party) denounced the program because they believed that it would undercut wages and threaten to displace Canadian workers from their jobs. Alluding to press reports of Ludger Dionne’s labour scheme, the Saskatchewan school teacher and CCFer Gladys Strum observed:

I do not think it improves our standing in the united nations [sic] to have appearing in our daily papers reports which sound like descriptions of scenes from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which remind one of the old slave market where girls were put up at auction with someone looking at their muscles and someone looking at their teeth.

Despite the heated attacks against it, the bulk–labour movement did not begin to lose momentum until after U.S. President Harry Truman prodded Congress into passing the Displaced Persons Act (1948), which made the United States the preferred destination for many of Europe’s homeless. This, coupled with the emptying of the camps in Europe, contributed to a downturn in immigration. When the Canadian labour market’s insatiable demands could no longer be met, the government was forced to conclude that other means had to be resorted to—measures that would admit more people to Canada and at the same time ensure the right kinds of immigrants.

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