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1914-1945: Overview / War Years / Interwar Years / World War II / Changing
Attitudes
War Years
Anti-German
Sentiment, 6 Jan.
1917.
The First World War
hardened anti-immigrant
sentiment and
contributed to a greater
sense of ethnocentrism.
The conflict also
encouraged an existing
world view common
among many
Canadians that relied
on ethnic stereotyping
to try to make sense of
one's social
environment. Adherents
of this viewpoint often
denounced Germany
and the German "race"
as materialistic,
bellicose, and
uncivilized by AngloCanadian standards.
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Inc., 2000.
The popular view of the First
World War as a battle between
races shaped a debate in
Canada about the preferred
"racial" composition of Canadian
society. Many British, American,
and natural-born Canadian
observers saw the war as a
defence of Anglo-Saxon
"civilization" against German and
Austrian aggression and
militarism. Though discredited
now, these racial understandings
brought about a sharp reexamination of Canada's
immigration policies because
they had encouraged the
immigration of hundreds of
thousands of continental
Europeans. Canadians found the
presence of enemy alien
immigrants in Canada (those
immigrants born in nations now
at war with Canada) still more
distressing.
The war's beginning prompted a
backlash against German and
Austrian immigrants, even if they
had long resided in Canada and
were now
Introduction
War Years
Canadian citizens. The 1914
War Measures Act gave the
federal government new powers
to arrest, detain, exclude, or
deport enemy aliens residing in
Canada. The legislation,
introduced by the Conservative
government of Prime Minister
Robert Borden, was one of many
measures directed against
immigrant groups during the war
years. Taken together, these
measures made immigrant
communities bitter towards the
Conservative party for many
years after the war ended. The
act itself prohibited specific
enemy aliens from possessing
firearms and forced them to
register with the federal
government and to carry ID
cards. It also undermined
cultural freedoms by prohibiting
the possession and publication
of materials in enemy alien
languages-it thereby stopped the
production of the numerous
German-language newspapers
in Canada.
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The War
Measures Act
(WMA), 1914.
Among other things,
the WMA gave the
federal government
special powers to
target immigrants
who were deemed
"enemy aliens" -that is, newcomers
who originated in
one of the countries
against which
Canada and Britain
were fighting:
Germany, AustriaHungary, Bulgaria,
or Turkey
© Chinook
Multimedia Inc.,
2000.
An economic slump that
had begun just before the
war and that lasted until
the war economy began to
raise national production
left immigrants in a
precarious legal position.
In the first year of the war,
industries and businesses
laid off considerable
numbers of enemy alien
employees. Many became
public charges dependent
upon the charitable aid
provided by local
municipalities. At the very
same time, the war made
their political standing
uncertain as the
government began to
monitor their behaviour
more carefully. Some
400,000 German, 100,000
Austro-Hungarian, 5,000
Turkish, and hundreds of
Bulgarian enemy aliens
then lived in Canada.
Previo
us
Page
National Archives of Canada
(PA-127064).
German Detainees at
Edgewood Internment
Camp, Edgewood, BC,
ca. 1916.
During the First World War,
the government detained
several thousand immigrants
who came from enemy
countries in internment
camps.
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Wartime
Elections Act,
1917.
This Act
enfranchised the
mothers, widows,
wives, sisters, and
daughters of men
fighting at the front
and disenfranchised
conscientious
objectors -individuals who were
opposed to military
service for religious
reasons -- and those
"enemy aliens" who
were naturalized
after 1902.
Many enemy aliens also
faced internment.
Canada interned some
8,000 to 9,000
immigrants, mostly
German and Austrian, in
twenty-four camps
across Canada during
the war. The largest
camps were in
Kapuskasing, Ontario
and Vernon, British
Columbia. By 1917, the
government had
released many of these
interned immigrants to
supply the demand for
labour created by the
war. About 2,500,
however, lived in camps
until the war's
conclusion.
The government's
internment program had
roots in the belief that
immigrants carried
sympathies with their
home nations, which
were now at war with
Canada. As the war
progressed, continental
Europeans also became
associated with radical
politics and
labour organizations that
were leading strikes in
the resource and
munitions industries. The
Union Government,
which Robert Borden
formed in 1917 in order to
introduce conscription,
passed the Wartime
Elections Act. It
disenfranchised all
people from enemy
countries, even those
who had come to Canada
as early as 1902, unless
they had sons,
grandsons, or brothers
serving in the army.
Deportation procedures
also increased.
Immigrants faced
deportation on grounds of
being public charges,
"pro-German," "anti-war,"
or undermining the war
effort by organizing
labour. The government,
and many Canadians,
blamed wartime strikes
on enemy-aliens and
suspicious immigrants.
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Multimedia Inc.,
2000.
War Years
Meanwhile, public
support for British
institutions and AngloCanadian culture led
rationing, they supported strike
action. The radical political
sympathies of many immigrants
would later lead them to support
http://www.canadianhistory.ca/iv/1914-1945/intro3.html
Immigrant
Radicals, 1919.
Although many nonBritish immigrants
sympathized with,
and even supported,
radical leftist political
movements, British
immigrants often
were the leaders of
such groups.
Nevertheless,
native-born
Canadians tended to
stigmatize
"foreigners" (largely
immigrants from
continental Europe)
as the motive force
behind bolshevism
and other radical
movements.
© Chinook
Multimedia Inc.,
2000.
The stereotyping of
continental
Europeans as
political radicals,
however, became
still more
widespread after the
peace was signed
as demobilized
troops began
returning to Canada.
Labour conditions
worsened and
organized strikes
Prairie provincial
governments to revoke
provisions giving
separate language
schools to such
immigrant groups as the
Mennonites. The belief
that unassimilable
immigrants were labour
agitators and promoters
of radical politics became
more fixed with the
Bolshevik Revolution in
1918. Many eastern
Europeans and Russians
were sympathetic to the
Red Russian victory and
had long supported
radical, leftist, politics in
Europe. Finnish,
Ukrainian, Jewish, and
Russian immigrants, in
fact, often did support
radical political
movements in their
homelands. When
conditions worsened for
Canadian labour as a
result of wartime inflation
and strict
radical political movements in
Canada, such as the United Farmers
of Alberta, Social Credit, and the
Cooperative Commonwealth
Federation (CCF).
As historian Howard Palmer has
pointed out, however, the radical
politics embraced by some
immigrants did not constitute the
"Red Menace" imagined by many
Canadians. Most immigrant groups
were internally divided on political
questions, and communist party
leaders were often English, rather
than Russian, Italian, or Ukrainian.
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National Archives of Canada
(PA-163001).
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loomed, especially
when
unemployment
figures began to
rise. Labour papers
estimated that 10.2
per cent of
organized labour
was unemployed in
1919. By 1921, the
figure had risen to
16.3 per cent. When
inflation and working
conditions prompted
the massive
Winnipeg General
Strike in 1919,
authorities
perceived the city's
large and diverse
ethnic communities
as Bolshevik
sympathizers,
responsible for the
strike action.
© Chinook
Multimedia Inc.,
2000.
Crowd Gathered during
the Winnipeg General
Strike, Winnipeg, MB,
21 June 1919.
According to many
Canadians, immigrants
initiated the Winnipeg General
Strike and the significant
upheaval that it caused. The
perception was that the strike
was at least partly a
consequence of the labour
and political radicalism that
emerged in Canada during the
post-First World War period.
Immigrants were major
contributors to this process of
radicalization.
Interwar Years
Previo
us
Page
Introduction
An immediate result of
the war experience was a
new Immigration Act,
passed in 1919. It
inter-war years moved to the United
States or left rural settings for
industrializing cities. Interwar
economic problems and widespread
http://www.canadianhistory.ca/iv/1914-1945/intro3.html
Immigration Act,
1919.
The Immigration Act
of 1919 determined
the kinds of
immigrants that
Canada would allow
to come to its shores
and those to whom it
would deny entry.
The legislation
established
"prohibited or
undesirable classes"
of immigrants,
groups that the
government would
no longer accept into
the country. The Act
was significant
because of its
restrictive nature and
because it defined
immigration policy for
the interwar period.
established policy
direction for the next
twenty-five years.
Henceforth, Canadians
would discriminate
between immigrant
groups coming from
"most" and "non"
preferred countries.
Immigration policies
discouraged the arrival of
immigrants from
numerous different
political and cultural
backgrounds. More
heavy restrictions on
their entry and the wider
application of deportation
procedures against
specific cultural and
political groups became
common at Canadian
ports and border
crossings.
Many of the new policies
arose in a context of
political and economic
uncertainty. More
Canadians in the
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2000.
unemployment, the spiraling costs
of local social welfare programs,
and the rise of radical political
movements-especially in the West
among large immigrant
communities-placed new stresses
on natural-born Canadians,
naturalized citizens, and recent
immigrants alike. When ongoing
financial problems forced Canadian
business and resource industries to
enlist more cheap immigrant labour
by the mid-1920s, bringing about
Canada's second wave of
immigration in 1925, new
backlashes arose against
"hyphenated Canadianism."