Pier Perspectives Blog

After the Second World War, Canada’s response to international refugee crises varied, driven by Cold War ideology, economic self-interest, humanitarian considerations, political necessity, and public opinion. The resettlement of Chilean, Indochinese, and Somali refugee movements was largely due to lobbying efforts by international organizations, domestic humanitarian groups and churches, pressure from the press, and political will on the part of the federal government.

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In the Canadian Immigration Hall at our Museum, the exhibition is divided into four important themes: journey, arrival, belonging and impact. My favorite place to take visitors is the impact section. Here, we tell the amazing story of the contributions that immigrants have made to Canada – from architecture to science, from dance to hockey. In this section, I always get to thinking about the changes to Canadian culture when new people arrive to our country. What are some of the changes that aren’t as physically obvious as the Young and Bloor line in Toronto, or the Canadian Pacific Railway?

In 1970, the federal Cabinet adopted an “Oppressed Minority” policy that permitted the resettlement of individuals who did not meet the UN definition of a convention refugee, because they had not fled their homeland. The policy was used in the fall of 1972 when over 80,000 Ugandan Asians were expelled by President Idi Amin and given 90 days to leave the country. The federal government successfully resettled over 7,000 Ugandan Asians in 1972-1973.

The temporary exhibition, Perfect Landings, gave an introduction to the important contributions of immigrants to the sport of figure skating in Canada. In addition to showing some case studies of the foundations created by immigrants for the sport in Canada, the exhibition also showed how some of the major themes in Canadian immigration history have an impact at the scale of individual lives.

I just hung up the phone with Patricia Roberts-Pichette and find myself writing in the hopes that someone out there can help us with a question. Patricia wrote to me back in 2011 while researching her book on the Middlemore home children. During our correspondence I mentioned that a visitor had let me scan what they called “a Middlemore shilling”. When Patricia learned this, she wrote, “All members of one Middlemore party each received a new shilling from the Lord Mayor of Birmingham but I would not expect anyone would have kept it.”