From Immigration To Integration
The Canadian Jewish Experience:
A Millennium Edition
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From Immigration To IntegrationThe Canadian Jewish Experience:
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Harold Troper
Any decision to immigrate is a decision of a thousand parts. Even under the most oppressive circumstances, it is not always clear that it really is better to begin again far from home rather than to make the best of what is close and familiar. And immigration is fraught with so many “ifs.” If, on balance, the decision is made to leave, then the question becomes where to go. Assuming there are options, then why go to Canada rather than Argentina or Mexico or Australia or the United States?
Once the choice is made, for many would-be immigrants there is still the problem of finding enough money to pay all of the many costs associated with immigration. And during the past hundred years or more, few Jewish immigrants were so independent of means that they would not have to borrow money or rely on the resources and good will of family or friends. If money was borrowed, that required collateral, a guarantor, and a repayment schedule. Relying on often financially strapped family or friends could encumber the new immigrant not just with a burden of debt, but also with a burden of guilt. If money and tickets were sent by family already in Canada, was it an act of selfless generosity or were there strings attached?
With ticket in hand, there were still other difficult decisions to be made. Even packing was difficult. What should be taken? What left behind? It could not have been easy to sort through one’s personal possessions, separating what was dispensable from what was too precious to be left behind. With weight and space often at a premium, could family photos be abandoned? No. What about shabbat candlesticks and the family’s hanukkiyah? Space had to be found for them. What about books? They were so heavy and bulky. Heartbreaking as it was, the written word, even the holy word, might have to be left behind.
Hard enough that personal property, replete with memories, had to be abandoned. Worse still, people also had to be left behind. How painful must it have been to wave goodbye to parents and siblings, family and friends, knowing that you might never see them again. At that final moment of parting, how many closed their eyes in an effort to imprint in memory the power of a father’s last embrace, the sweetness of a mother’s final kiss, the fleeting smell of a sister’s hair. Whatever the immigrant’s reason for leaving home - and there were many - saying goodbye was invariably filled with regret and trepidation, regret for the loss of the familiar, the precious, and the beloved, and trepidation at the unknown that lay ahead.
But immigration was also an act of courage and hope. There was enormous courage in setting off on a journey toward an unfamiliar and distant land and there was hope, too often an unrealizable hope, that one’s life chances in a new land would be better than in the old. And this new land, this new country, had different names. For hundreds of thousands, it was simply called “America.” While America, for many, turned out to be the United States, in truth, America was not so much a specific country as it was a promise of new beginnings. Of course, the largest number of Jewish immigrants did find these new beginnings in the United States, but others found their America in Argentina or elsewhere, in Latin America, in Australia, South Africa, or other far-flung outposts of European empire. One of those lands of new beginnings was Canada.
In the almost 250 years between the British conquest of Canada in 1763 and the current era, hundreds of thousands of Jews resettled in Canada. For many, the attraction of Canada was primarily economic. They were drawn to Canada because they believed this vast land could afford them, their families and fellow Jews opportunities too often denied them at home. For other Jews, Canada was the land of second chance. Whatever the failures of the past, whatever the disappointments of an earlier day, they dreamed that in Canada they might reinvent themselves, start afresh unencumbered by the personal failures and disappointments of the past. Some succeeded. Some discovered that although they might successfully escape their old world, they could not escape themselves. Too many packed their failings into the same bag that carried their hopes.
For still other Jews, Canada was not so much a land of second chance as a land of second choice. They came to Canada because restrictive immigration regulations or lack of resources prevented them from reaching their first choice, usually the United States. For them, Canada was a second-best America. If many eventually set down roots in Canada and came to embrace it as their own, some continued to pine for the promised land to the south and eventually followed a well-beaten path into the United States.
Jews also came to Canada in search of refuge. Over the years there were those who arrived in flight from the pogroms of turn-of-the-century eastern Europe, those few who somehow survived the Nazi blood lust of the 1930s and 1940s, and still later, those who sought shelter from the anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist policies of Soviet and Arab regimes. Fleeing oppression in the old world, they hoped that Canada would provide a land if not free from antisemitism - that was too much to hope - then at least free enough from antisemitism that they and their children might have no fear for their personal safety. Canadians, not always appreciating the horror from which the oppressed were escaping and too often shutting their eyes and turning their backs on those in need, still provided sanctuary to those who managed to enter their borders.
Finally, there were Jews who did not so much come to Canada as they were brought to Canada by family who had arrived previously. Many a husband, once settled in Canada, sent home for his wife and children. Many a son or daughter who had already settled in Canada, in turn brought parents or brothers and sisters to join them. This was not always easy or possible. If family reunification was delayed or made difficult by harsh immigration regulations, many immigrants to Canada remained a critical part of the survival strategy of now-distant family. Money, hard earned in Canada, was sent home to pay off debt, sustain parents in their old age, or maintain a wife struggling to feed, clothe, and educate children until the promise of reunification could be realized. In the past, money from a brother who immigrated to Canada might even pay for a sister’s dowry in the mother country.
The beginnings of Jewish immigration to Canada reach back well over two centuries. During the colonial era, there were very few Jews in Canada. French colonial authorities officially frowned on the entry of non-Catholics into their North American holdings.1 Not so the British. Although tiny at first, the beginnings of a continuing Jewish community presence in Canada are found in the British colonial era. A few Jews of British and German origin settled in Halifax and a trickle of others found their way to Montreal following the British conquest of Quebec in 1763. Largely merchants, some of these early Jewish settlers gained prominence supplying goods to the local British garrison. As Canada’s population slowly grew, so did Jewish business horizons. Jewish businessmen, often connected to merchant families in Europe, Britain, or the colonies to the south, gradually broadened their operations to include the surrounding community and the threads of settlement that radiated outward from the larger centres. Some Jewish merchants, particularly those in Montreal, travelled well inland by canoe to trade with the Native people.
As they became more comfortable and prosperous, these merchants, and their wives and children in Montreal, clung together as a small frontier Jewish community. Fledgling Jewish institutions were founded. As in Jewish immigrant communities elsewhere, priority was given to organizing a Jewish burial society and purchasing land for a graveyard. A synagogue was also established in Montreal and, in keeping with the practice of other Jewish communities in the American colonies, this first Montreal synagogue was Sephardic in ritual. As the community grew, albeit slowly, so did the need for fundraising to meet expanding community needs, including care of the poverty-stricken.
As the small Montreal community took root, a Jewish presence gradually made itself felt elsewhere in Canada. Following the American Revolution, as Loyalists streaming northward into Canada from the newly independent United States and new immigration from Britain pressed into the Canadian interior, itinerant Jewish merchants and traders fanned out from Montreal to embrace new business opportunities. But even with this new immigration into Canada, the number of Jews in Canada remained small. In the early 1840s there were only an estimated two hundred Jews in Canada. Most were in Montreal, active in business and civil society. A trickle found its way to other centres including York, or Toronto as it was renamed in 1834. While never free from antisemitism, by and large, these few, scattered, early Jewish settlers integrated well, were accepted by their non-Jewish neighbours and, in many cases, became respected members of the local business and social elite.2
But compared to the United States, Jewish population growth in Canada remained slow. Political upheaval in Germany in the 1840s and the spreading word that there was a new world of opportunity in America sent tens of thousands of expectant Jews off across the Atlantic in search of new homes. Again, the vast majority settled in the United States, adding a distinct German-Jewish flavour to cities like New York, Baltimore, and Cincinnati. A much smaller, but none the less significant influx of German Jews, many emancipated, educated merchants and craftsmen, arrived in Canada. Comfortable with the ways of commerce and western European Jewish life, they were generally welcomed into the Jewish and larger non-Jewish communities.
On the Pacific coast a gold strike in the late 1850s set off a feverish rush of those hoping to find their fortune. A small number of Jews, some moving north from the gold fields of California, came to British Columbia not so much to pan for gold as to benefit from the business and commercial opportunities that were always the spin-off of a gold discovery. The boom town of Victoria soon had the second largest Jewish community in British North America, after Montreal.3 Like the Jewish community of Montreal, Jews in Victoria established a number of Jewish institutions - a burial society, a synagogue - and they too integrated well into the economic and social mainstream. But even with the gold rush on the Pacific coast and the arrival of German Jews in eastern Canada, the Jewish population of Canada stood at just over one thousand at Confederation in 1867.4
Confederation brought change to the Jewish community. The 1867 political union of five previously separate British colonies in North America that came together to form Canada involved a patchwork quilt of compromises and special deals. As the price of British Columbia’s entry into Confederation, the new central government guaranteed that a railway would be built across the vast Canadian prairie to link British Columbia to eastern Canada. Building this railway turned out to be a major fiscal, political, and engineering challenge. But this was as nothing compared to the human endurance it took to push a railway across the previously impregnable Canadian Shield, across a huge expanse of prairie and through the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific. In addition to eventually linking British Columbia to its sister provinces in the east, the Canadian Pacific Railway, completed in 1885, opened the Prairie West to agricultural settlement as never before. For the federal government and the Canadian Pacific, settlement of western Canada was soon a national priority.
Fortuitously for Canada, the completion of the railway and the opening of the Canadian West to mass settlement coincided with both a surge in world demand for grain and other Canadian export staples, and a series of European population upheavals that cut loose hundreds of thousands of people in search of new homes. Among them were tens of thousands of eastern European Jews, particularly Jews from the Russian Pale. These Jews suffered the crush of overpopulation and dislocations resulting from politically inspired pogroms that swept across the Pale beginning in 1881 and set off a panicked Jewish flight westward.5
Sympathetic and hard-pressed Jewish leaders in western Europe protested the Russian attacks on Jews even as these leaders geared up to cope with the anticipated influx of Jewish refugees from eastern Europe. They sought out support. In January 1882 Alexander Galt, Canada’s first high commissioner in London joined other non-Jews in protesting the Russian outrages. But Galt had something more than humanitarian outrage to fire his passion. Galt wrote to Canadian Prime Minister John A. Macdonald that this crisis offered Canada “not a bad opportunity of interesting the Hebrews in our North West.” But, it was not just displaced Russian Hebrews, “a superior type of people,” he allowed, “partly farmers but generally trade people,” that Galt hoped to interest in the newly opened Canadian hinterland. For Galt an act of calculated kindness to hapless Russian Jews might pay handsome dividends in investment capital from wealthy European Jewish financiers. As Galt confided to Macdonald, welcoming a few Jews into the Canadian northwest could be “of great importance” in cultivating “future influence with leading Jews” in London and Paris, especially the Rothschilds and Montagues.
Macdonald was not adverse to courting Jewish capital by admitting a few Jews. “A sprinkling of Jews in the North West,” the prime minister mused, “would do good. They would at once go in for peddling and politics and be of much use in the new country as cheap jacks and chapmen.”6 In the end Galt’s scheme went nowhere. Compared to the drawing power of the United States, western Europe and Argentina, relatively few Jews arrived in Canada before the turn of the century - likely to the relief of many Canadian observers. The small, prosperous and generally well-integrated existing Jewish community in Canada was one thing. Eastern European Jews were something else again. Looking on from a distance, many Canadians suspected that London’s growing urban problems were aggravated by foreigners, especially eastern European Jews. Now Jews were invading eastern American cities. In Canadian eyes, New York’s Lower East Side was not a cauldron of Jewish renewal in the new world. Instead, it was the ashcan of humanity, a dumping ground for Jewish marginality, disruptive competitiveness, and social clannishness that served to aggravate urban blight. To Canadians, repulsed at what they saw to the south, the lesson learned was that Canada should not encourage urban-bound Jewish immigration.7
For almost twenty years following the Russian pogroms and the completion of the Canadian Pacific Railway, this was not a major problem. Jewish immigration into Canada was proportionately small compared to the huge inflow of Jews to the United States. With the turn of the century came change in Canada’s economic fortunes and immigration policy, and the growth of the Canadian Jewish community. Long an economic backwater, Canada found itself swept up in a surge of economic growth. World markets showed a seemingly insatiable appetite for Canadian exports of wheat, timber, and metals. But could Canadian production match world demand? Stretching westward out of the Ontario heartland along the lines of the completed transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway lay the newly accessible interior forests, mining frontiers, and, most of all, the vast agricultural prairies of the northwest, all ripe for development and exploitation. What Canada needed was the population necessary to capitalize on this vast interior.
A recently elected and development-minded Liberal government, under Wilfrid Laurier, seized the moment. It initiated an energetic program of immigrant recruitment that was primarily designed to fill the agricultural expanse of the Canadian prairies and create a pool of cheap labour for burgeoning Canadian mining and lumbering industries. As the demand for settlers outstripped the supply available from traditional sources - Britain, the United States and western Europe - the government approved immigration recruitment programs designed to reach further and further afield in the search for immigrants. But there were limits to Canada’s welcome. Canada’s immigration policy was as racially selective as it was economically self-serving. American, British, and western European immigrants were favoured over eastern Europeans. Eastern Europeans were favoured over southern Europeans and every effort was made to guard against Asians and Blacks. In the immigration sweepstakes, the more that foreigners could or would squeeze into the narrow social, geographic, and economic niche allowed them, the greater their desirability. As the need for labour continued to outstrip demand, immigration officials reached further down their ladder of racial and ethnic preference to actively pursue would-be eastern European immigrants, “stalwart peasants in sheepskin coats,” seeking new homes. The minister responsible for immigration, Clifford Sifton, explained Canada’s revised selection process to the House of Commons. Hearty foreigners who accepted the isolation of the Canadian prairies were welcomed. Those who were prepared to risk their lives working in mines with few safety standards or could tolerate the crudeness of life in the bush in lumbering camps were also well received. Others were unwelcome.8
There was little place in the government or Canadian public imagination for urban-bound “foreigners.” For many English-speaking Canadians, any influx into the cities of strange peoples, people of “lesser” racial stock, speaking baffling languages, people so recently loyal to foreign kings, czars and kaisers and who prayed to alien gods, raised the spectre of American-style urban blight, slums, social disorder, and political corruption. If urban Canada was to remain a North American outpost of British civility, immigrants into Canada would have to know their place - and that was not in the cities. Indeed, urban-bound immigrants defied the very purpose of the government’s immigration policy, a policy based on agricultural development and resource exploitation, and no group was more urban bound than Jews.
Active Canadian immigration recruitment swept up many eastern European Jews, not just from the Russian Empire but from Romania and the Austro-Hungarian Empire as well. These Jews represented but a small spillover from the hundreds of thousands of Jews who entered the United States during these same years; in larger Canadian cities, however, it must have seemed as though the flood gates had opened to Jews. The 1891 Canadian census counted 6,503 Jews; ten years later the number of Jews in Canada had increased nearly threefold to 16,717. More stunning, between 1901 and 1911 the number of Jews increased to 75,838.9 Although growth in Jewish numbers was dramatic, it was not the simple numbers that impressed itself on the public mind. Far more disturbing was the increasing realization that Jews, more than any other group, stood defiant of the social and economic assumptions on which Canadian immigration policy was built. Like the eastern European Jew who found his way to London and New York, the Jews arriving in Canada demonstrated little inclination to farm, mine, or work the lumbering frontier. Whatever they did in Europe, in Canada Jews were overwhelmingly city dwellers. In 1911, ten years after the government had initiated its program of encouraging agricultural settlement in western Canada, the Jewish population had grown by 400 per cent. Of these, less than 6 per cent lived in rural Canada. By 1921 only 4 per cent of Jews lived in rural Canada. By contrast, more than 80 per cent of Ukrainian immigrants, almost 70 per cent of Scandinavians, and 70 per cent of Dutch and German residents were rural. Indeed, no group had a lower rural residency rate than Jews. To make matters worse, few rural Jews were farmers. If they accepted the isolation of rural Canada, they were more likely to be small shopkeepers, tradesmen, or artisans than agriculturalists. In 1921 fewer than one in four of those few Jews living in rural areas was directly engaged in agriculture, forestry, or mining.10
For mainstream Canadians reluctant to accept foreign settlers, but seduced into doing so by promises of rich rewards that would flow from these hardworking and rurally-isolated foreigners, the urban Jew posed a problem. And not only was the Jew a city dweller, he was also seen as clannish. Indeed, Jews did cluster in a few cities. In 1931 more than 80 per cent of Canada’s Jews lived in Montreal, Toronto, or Winnipeg. They also congregated into specific neighborhoods. There was the Main in Montreal, the now legendary North End of Winnipeg, and first the Ward and then Kensington in Toronto - all regarded by established citizens as neighbourhoods apart, not an organic part of the urban mainstream.11 With deep-seated religious, linguistic, and social barriers added to the urban mix, what emerged were grave public reservations that eastern European Jews could ever be remade into real Canadians. As public gatekeepers, including educational authorities, public health officers, police, and immigration officials, debated the impossibility of ever turning “them into us,” anti-immigrant and anti-Jewish sentiment in Canada grew stronger.
The small, previously established Anglo-Jewish leadership in Canada was not unaware of or unsympathetic to the larger community’s concern about the wholesale influx of urban-oriented eastern European settlers. Like their counterparts in the United States, the Anglo-Jewish communities of Montreal and Toronto, strapped for resources and increasingly awash in a sea of eastern European Jews, reeled under the economic and status upheaval that threatened. Partly to ease the community’s financial and social burden and partly to prod eastern European immigrants to move westward out of Montreal, as early as 1890 Montreal’s Young Men’s Hebrew Benevolent Society petitioned philanthropist Baron de Hirsch for assistance. The baron, already committed to massive investment in Jewish agricultural colonization projects in Latin America, rerouted money to Montreal. Here an infrastructure of Jewish immigration aid programs was gradually established under the umbrella of the Jewish Colonization Association (JCA).12 The JCA initiated a program of Jewish urban removal, of shifting Jewish settlement westward to the prairies in conformation with government immigration priorities, all the while hoping to ease the burden, social and economic, on the established Jewish community. In spite of high hopes and expenditures, efforts to encourage Jewish agro-settlement were, on the whole, a failure. Whatever the current folklore of Jewish agricultural achievement in the Canadian prairies, the figures are telling: in 1920 fewer than seven hundred Jewish families were farming a mere 150,000 acres of land in Canada.13
In spite of poor returns on investments of time, money, and energy, through the 1920s and into the 1930s the JCA continued its efforts to plant Jewish agricultural settlements in the soil of western Canada, but any claim that Jews were conforming to the broad outlines of government policy had a hollow ring. Both the government and the growing Yiddish-speaking Jewish communities in major urban centres knew it. What is more, as Jews continued to reject rural settlement in favour of the cities, especially Montreal, it was increasingly recognized that the JCA was of no assistance to them in their dealings with immigration authorities, or in helping them through the urban settlement process.
In 1919 the inaugural convention of Canadian Jewish Congress, one of Canadian Jewry’s national organizations, founded the Jewish Immigrant Aid Society (JIAS) with a mandate to confront the problems of immigrant settlement in the urban context. JIAS assisted individual Jews and Jewish families through immigration procedures and helped smooth out rough spots in their settlement process. JIAS, headquartered in Montreal, also spawned sister offices in other larger Canadian Jewish centres, including Toronto and Winnipeg.14 But if the organization served the needs of urban-bound immigrants, it also gave organizational structure to what the federal government and much of the larger public increasingly understood as the problem of Jewish immigration - the failure of eastern European Jews to accept the rural role Canada assigned to foreign immigrants. For their part, some government officials understood some of this failure to be of the government’s own making. The government had shortsightedly ignored the precedents afforded by London and New York, the attachment that Jews demonstrated to city life, and misguidedly accepted the influx of Jewish immigration into Canadian cities, perhaps hoping that JCA could breathe life into Jewish colonization in western Canada. This never took place and showed no sign of taking place.
Just the opposite, Canadian officials concluded. In spite of all promises to the contrary, Jews would never conform to the social or economic formula that was the bedrock of Canadian immigration policy and defined the acceptability of the foreigner in Canada. Following World War I, as immigration officials sought to cut back on foreign immigration generally, the Jews caught the eye of officials more than any other group.15
In truth, of course, post-World War I Canadian politicians and immigration officials had more than Jews to contend with. A general post-war economic downturn, exacerbated by lingering war-inspired anti-immigrant sentiment, combined to create widespread popular sentiment in favour of immigration restriction. Feeling the political heat, government responded with a series of draconian immigration restrictions that severely cut the number of immigrants allowed entry to Canada. Of all European immigrants, the most severely affected were Jews. Between 1919 and 1923, immigration officials restricted the entry of both skilled and unskilled labour, raised monetary requirements for admission, instituted new passport and visa control barriers, narrowed the definition of those eligible for reunification with family in Canada, and moved immigration inspections from port of admission in Canada to port of exit in Europe. The door to unrestricted Jewish immigration was closing.
The most dramatic immigration restriction move took place in 1923. Without changing the Immigration Act, the government instituted several far-reaching administrative refinements clearly designed to block off most remaining avenues still open to Jewish immigration. First, the government closed the door to all unsponsored immigrants except bona fide agriculturalists and British and American citizens.16 The government then moved to control immigration of those described as belonging “to races that cannot be assimilated without social or economic loss to Canada.”17 The mechanics of restriction were as simple. They were also devastating to Jewish immigration. The government instituted a grand ranking of all other would-be settlers by their degree of similar “racial characteristics” to the Anglo-Canadian majority. European countries were divided into three groups: the Preferred Group, the Non-Preferred Group, and a group called the Special Permit Group. The Preferred Group was cobbled together from the countries of northern and western Europe, including Germany. Immigrants from these countries were exempted from nearly all restrictive provisions of the regulations except some general visa and fiscal formalities. The Non-Preferred Group included those from Austria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Romania and the Baltic states - areas of Europe with the heaviest Jewish populations. Emigrants from these countries were permitted into Canada only as long as they were going to settle the land and could show sufficient money to ensure they would not become a public charge.
The immigration officials, however, were not about to let Jewish immigration continue, even under the restrictive provisions of the Non-Preferred category. All Jews, irrespective of citizenship or place of birth (excepting those who were born British subjects or in the United States or who had immediate family in Canada), were lumped into a Special Permit Group with people from Italy, Greece, Bulgaria, Syria, and Turkey. Would-be immigrants in the Special Permit Group were effectively removed from the regular immigration process. Under the new regulations, Jews and southern Europeans could only be admitted to Canada after being issued with a special entry permit. Issuing this permit was not the task of immigration officials, nor was the permit issued according to fixed criteria. Rather, the permit was issued by cabinet as an act of political patronage. That meant that immigration of anyone in the Special Permit Group, having been taken out of the usual administrative process, was now shifted directly into the political arena. For Jewish immigrants to enter Canada, the issue was not whether they met specific criteria. The only issue was whether someone wheeled political influence on their behalf. A special permit, dispensed as an act of patronage, was a prize precious few Jews could hope to win.
The Special Permit Group included Jews and southern Europeans, but Jews were the most directly and immediately affected. Since the new Fascist government of Italy had moved to restrict emigration and the number of immigrants from other special permit countries was never great, the primary purpose of the Special Permit Group was to restrict the immigration of Jews. In effect, the Canadian government adjusted immigration regulations to ensure that Canadian entry for Jews was more difficult than for others holding the same citizenship. In distinguishing Jews from non-Jews of the same citizenship, Canada predated the Nuremberg laws by more than ten years.18
In the end, the 1923 immigration regulations turned the immigration law on its head. Rather than permitting immigration of everyone except specifically prohibited groups, the regulations now prohibited everyone except specifically permitted groups. Aside from those few Jews who were able to squeeze into the country under the restrictionist regulations as first-degree relatives of Canadian residents, Canada’s door slammed shut on Jews. By 1926, when the immigration changes came into full effect, the filing of applications by individual would-be Jewish immigrants was increasingly replaced by organized Jewish community lobbying for a withdrawal of the special permit regulations. It failed. “Between the upper and the nether millstone,” commented one Toronto rabbi, “the Jew as usual will be crushed.”19
For the next twenty-five years, through the Great Depression and the rise of Hitler, through World War II with its destruction of European Jewry, and into the post-war period as the Holocaust survivors looked overseas for new homes, the immigration of Jews into Canada was held to a minimum.20 This firm denial of Jewish entry into Canada, even to those seeking sanctuary from persecution, was a widely supported and politically conditioned response. It was conditioned by years of regarding immigration not only as a development policy, populating the national agricultural hinterland with ready labour, but also as a racially selective policy that judged immigrants of northern or western European stock to be biologically superior to eastern and southern Europeans. Jews lost out on both counts.
The Allied victory over the Nazis in 1945 did not end Canadian reluctance to permit the entry of Jews. Not even revelations of the catastrophe that had befallen European Jews softened Canadian anti-Jewish and anti-immigration sentiment. Indeed, post-war Canada, its restrictionist immigration regulations still intact, dismissed any suggestion that it offer new homes to those who had survived the Holocaust. Underscoring the anti-Jewish tone of this position were the results of a Gallup poll taken in late October l946, more than a year after the war’s end. The Gallup organization, testing the Canadian waters with respect to any possible reopening of Canadian immigration, sought to measure the Canadian public’s readiness to accept the stranger in their midst. The Gallup poll asked, “If Canada does allow more immigrants, are there any of these nationalities [on a supplied list] you would like to keep out?” Individuals were allowed to vent their hostility. Many picked more than one group. The Japanese, so recently defeated on the Pacific front and the subject of a massive wartime propaganda assault, ranked first on the list of undesirables by fully 60 per cent of all Canadians polled. Second on the list was not Canada’s most recent European enemy, the Germans, but the Jews. Almost half of those questioned, 49 per cent, checked off Jews as undesirable immigrants. Ukrainians and Poles, two other eastern European immigrant groups with a long history of Canadian immigration, fared far better than Jews - the hostility quotient against these groups was only 15 and 14 per cent respectively. Given this result, one would be right in concluding that for many Canadians the desirability of reopening immigration was inversely proportional to the degree to which Jews were kept out.21
In addition to widespread anti-immigrant fears, the Canadian government of the day had to cope with dire predictions about the future - predictions that, without the spur of wartime spending, post-war Canada would soon slip back into a 1930s-like depression. But these warnings were misplaced. The economy was propelled forward by strong post-war Canadian consumer demand, fuelled by capital reserves squirrelled away as forced savings during the war and a seemingly insatiable world demand for Canadian raw material and manufactured goods. The spending spree set off by the American-funded Marshall Plan effort to rebuild war-shattered western Europe provided yet more impetus to this economic boom. Rather than a shortage of jobs, there was soon an unprecedented peacetime shortage of labour. Acute labour shortages rapidly brought intense pressure from labour-intensive industries demanding a reopening of immigration. The small Jewish community in Canada added its voice to those in favour of renewed immigration, but its voice was hardly influential compared to that of industrial leaders pressing the case for economic self-interest and it was economic self-interest that won the day. As the immigration drum beat from big business grew louder, the government gradually relented. Immigration reopened.
Echoing pre-war immigration priorities, preference was first given to immigrants from Britain and western Europe, but demand for labour continued to outstrip supply. Where would more labourers come from? What about the pool of Displaced Persons (DPs), which included many Holocaust survivors, then languishing in European camps? Mindful of the larger Canadian public’s apparent antipathy to Jews, but anxious to get the DP labour ball rolling, the government worked in co-operation with major employers to implement a plan to import thousands of workers to fill waiting jobs in specific industrial sectors, while keeping Jewish entries to a minimum. It approved the importation of workers to fill waiting jobs in specific industrial sectors, but quietly advised Canadians administering the European selection process that Jews had no track record in those industries needing workers and that Jewish applicants were to be designated as unsuitable for admission. As immigrant labour schemes started to crank up, the government still kept the prospect of Jewish immigration at arm’s length.22
Only late in 1947, as the immigration of Displaced Persons into Canada was quickly building up a massive head of steam and the Canadian labour market showed no signs of cooling down, did the government begin to relent on its opposition to Jews. After much negotiation with the Canadian Jewish community, the government agreed to permit one thousand Jewish orphan children - survivors of the Holocaust - into Canada for placement with Canadian Jewish families.23 The government also moved to enlarge the circle of those eligible for reunification with family in Canada, a move that increased immigration of Jews who could be sponsored by Canadian family. What about those Jews with no family in Canada? At the behest of the largely Jewish-owned Canadian clothing industry, which pleaded a shortage of skilled labour, the government allowed the recruitment of several thousand Jewish clothing and fur workers in Europe. But the recruitment of Jewish workers was not unconditional. In this particular labour recruitment scheme - unlike any other approved labour scheme - federal authorities demanded that for every Jew recruited, a non-Jew must also be recruited. With so many other labour schemes open to non-Jews wanting to come to Canada, it was difficult for those administering the clothing workers scheme to find enough non-Jews to fill the 50:50 quota.24
For all the barriers and restrictions, a trickle of Jewish DPs gradually began arriving in Canada. As the general flow of immigrants from Europe - regular immigrants, Displaced Person labourers, family members of those who were already in Canada - grew to more than 100,000, the slowly increasing number of Jews among them was hardly noticed. What is more, in 1948 the newly independent State of Israel gave promise of absorbing the bulk of remaining Jewish Displaced Persons. In this new era of urban and industrial economic growth and renewed immigration, the government knew its immigration policy needed to be updated. But if many agreed that the old immigration legislation, replete with the 1923 regulations, needed to go, it was still widely held that immigration must remain a tool at the disposal of Canadian economic planners. At the same time, immigration must not be allowed to alter the ethnic and racial balance of Canadian society. In 1947 Prime Minister Mackenzie King spoke for most Canadians when he observed that “the people of Canada do not wish to make a fundamental alteration in the character of their population through mass immigration.” What is more, while immigration from Europe might increase, discrimination and ethnic selectivity would remain, particularly for non-Europeans. “Canada is perfectly within her rights in selecting the persons whom we regard as desirable future citizens. It is not a fundamental human right’ of any alien to enter Canada. It is a privilege. It is a matter of domestic policy.”25
After much debate, in 1952 a new Immigration Act took a major step forward in eliminating most of the racial, ethnic, or religious discriminatory regulations against immigrants from Europe, although not from other parts of the world.26 But European immigrants were still expected to know their place. As Canada’s door reopened, it was to a new kind of immigrant. Unlike the rural mass immigration of an earlier era, in overwhelming numbers this new immigration was guided into urban industrial, service, and even professional employment. What a change for Jews. In the new economy, urban-bound Jewish immigrants would no longer stick out as violators of government policy. The Jew fit right in.
With Canada’s door now generally open, at least to European immigration, the number of Jews entering Canada began to rise. In the decades of the 1950s and 1960s, the first wave of Holocaust survivors were later joined by others who came to Canada as immigrants from Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, and lands of second refuge, including Israel and countries in Latin America. In the end, an estimated 40,000 survivors eventually resettled in Canada, second in number only to Israel and the United States.27
And what became of the bedrock of vitriolic and politically acidic racism that so dominated Canadian attitudes toward immigrants only a few years earlier? What of that mainstream certitude that, as if it was some kind of sacred trust, Canadian cities must stand guard over British civility in North America? How was it that in less than one generation, the Canadian mindset, especially in urban Canada, shifted from a defence of Anglo-conformity to the current celebration of the mosaic?
Put simply, the past was cut loose, made dysfunctional both by the onslaught of urban-bound immigrants and the mediating force of a government increasingly caught up with a new civic agenda. The result was something of a revolution of mind. It can be seen in the enlarged circle of human-rights legislation that came to define the decades after the war. A package of human-rights protections was long the goal of a coalition of organized labour, liberal churches, the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), and older Canadian ethnic communities that had embraced the Canadian war effort, enlisted in the military in disproportionate numbers, and, in the aftermath of war, refused to accept second-class status for themselves or their children. The coalition was also buoyed by widespread revulsion at the racial excesses of Nazism, an academic-led assault on the scientific foundations of racism, a gradual withering away of Anglo-centricity rendered an anachronism by the collapse of the British imperial dream, and, of major importance, a need to clear away encumbrances to the smooth social and economic integration of the immigrants who were then moving in large numbers into Canadian cities.
Canadian human-rights activists demanded tough legal protections against racial, religious, or ethnic discrimination. If few believed social attitudes could change overnight, all agreed that the law with regard to human rights could. And the law did change. In the first decade after the war, Canadian provinces, Saskatchewan leading the way, enacted fair employment and accommodation legislation barring discrimination on account of race, religion, or country of origin. Courts, responding to the spirit of the times, used their powers to expand society’s human-rights thrust. In the international forum, Canada signed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, giving symbolic voice to the new Canadian human-rights imperative.28
This embrace of legal guarantees of human rights for all Canadians mirrored a new spirit in Canadian thinking. It even remade language. Immigrants were no longer foreigners. They were New Canadians. And, for that matter, they were no longer in Canada by sufferance. They were there by right, and now by right of law. It was also only a matter of time before the domestic human-rights upheaval influenced Canadian immigration legislation and administration. Over a period of twenty years, ethnic and racial immigration barriers were chipped away. The last remaining racially discriminatory provision - restrictions on Asian family reunification - was expunged during Canada’s Centennial Year, 1967. That same year Canada also adopted a new point system for the selection of independent immigrants. The point system calibrated the desirability of each independent applicant against a set of attributes including education, language skills, and employability. In addition to education and employment experience, points were assigned for character, market demand for skills, English and French language proficiency, age, proposed Canadian destination, and prearranged employment. While the interviewing immigration officer still influenced approvals, the iron law of mathematics rather than the vagaries of subjective assessment now counted most and discrimination in selection was further banished from Canadian immigration procedures. Four years later, in 1971, for the first time in Canadian history, the majority of all immigrants entering Canada were of non-European origin. The face of Canada, particularly of urban Canada, was changing.29
For Jews the impact of all these changes proved dramatic. In immigration, as in all other areas of Canadian law, discrimination against Jews was a thing of the past. During the past several decades, Jewish immigration into Canada has continued and, if not always with the community urgency that dominated the years from the turn of the century through the post-World War II period, it has always been of critical importance to those involved. And there were extraordinary inflows as well. In the aftermath of the unsuccessful Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Canada admitted approximately 37,000 Hungarian refugees, among whom was a substantial number of Jews, many of them Holocaust survivors. The majority came to Toronto where the Jewish Immigrant Aid Service worked in conjunction with federal and provincial governments and social agencies to smooth the settlement process for these new arrivals.30 While Hungarians came in large numbers to Toronto, thousands of Arabic or French-speaking Sephardic Jews, many of whom came to Canada after the collapse of French domination in North Africa, predominated in Montreal. These North African Jewish arrivals, so different in tradition, culture, organizational structure, language and historical memory from the mainly European-origin Jews who then dominated the Montreal Jewish community, at first found integration into the larger Jewish community difficult. With time, economic success, and a steady migration of younger English-speaking Jews out of Montreal in the wake of separatist electoral successes in Quebec, the former North African Jewish immigrants have assumed a more prominent role in Montreal’s Jewish community.31
During the past several decades, Canada and Canadian Jewish communities have seen a continuing inflow of Jews from around the world. During the tumultuous Vietnam War era, the ranks of American draft resistors who found haven in Canada included Jews. There was also an inflow of Jews from Israel - some Israeli-born and some former immigrants to Israel who subsequently resettled abroad. Still other Jews came to Canada to escape political or racial turmoil in places like Romania, the Middle East, South Africa, Ethiopia, and Latin America.
Of special note is the immigration of Jews from the former Soviet Union. Through the 1970s and 1980s, Canadian Jews joined Jews throughout the West in supporting the struggle of refuseniks, Jews denied the right to leave the former Soviet Union. In the cold war atmosphere of the day, the Canadian government was in sympathy with the protesters’ cause and in the small but nonetheless significant victories won against Soviet repression. Canada opened its doors to many of those who were able to leave. The collapse of the Soviet Union and Communist control in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the 1990s precipitated a major outflow of Jews, most going to Israel or the United States, but some coming to Canada as well. Long denied religious or communal freedom, often intermarried and equating Jewish identity with discrimination, many of these former Soviet Jews demonstrated little by way of Jewish cultural and religious background and proved sometimes uneasy at embracing too public a Jewish identity. The integration of these Jews into the larger Jewish community has represented a challenge.32 Whether from the former Soviet Union or from South Africa, from Latin America or the Middle East, these more recent immigrants are now setting down roots in Canada. As they accept Canadian citizenship they, like all Jews who arrived in Canada before them, continue to add to the vitality and diversity of both the Canadian Jewish experience and the multicultural contours of Canada.