“This is Ticklish Business”: Undesirable Religious Groups and Canadian Immigration after the Second World War

Between the 1870s and the 1960s, Canadian immigration authorities struggled with including or excluding immigrants belonging to conservative Christian religious groups based on perceptions of their desirability or undesirability. Canada’s effort to exclude these religious groups had two peaks: exclusionary efforts targeting Peace Churches during and after the First World War, and the Department of Citizenship and Immigration’s attempts to exclude “old order” and other conservative Christian denominations from Canada during the 1950s and 1960s.