Topic: Religious Persecution

  • Settling the West: Immigration to the Prairies from 1867 to 1914

    Western Canada received millions of immigrant settlers from 1867 to 1914, creating key industries such as agriculture, mining, and oil, and causing the Prairies to grow rapidly. Accessible transportation, free homesteads, safety, and work in Canada contributed to this immigration boom, as well as overpopulation, underemployment, discrimination, and environmental conditions in the immigrants’ home countries. This period of population growth later shaped Canada’s society, economy, and culture.

  • “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.

  • “The existing Immigration regulations will not offer any solution”: MS St. Louis in Canadian Context

    In 1939, MS St. Louis carried Jewish German passengers fleeing the Nazi State to Cuba, where most were de-nied entry. The Canadian government under Prime Minister William Lyon MacKenzie King chose not to admit the passengers in Canada, and they returned to Europe. The Canadian government’s exclusion of the pas-sengers of MS St. Louis was rationalized based on sharp immigration restrictions during the Great Depression, but was rooted in the persistent climate of anti-Semitic exclusion. The event has been marked as such a dire failure that it has spurred more compassionate approaches to humanitarian admission since.

  • Mennonites and Canadian Accommodation

    Mennonite communal settlement in Canada’s Prairie West was made possible in part by an 1873 agreement with the Canadian government that guaranteed “an entire exemption from any military service” among other points. Two world wars, changes in education policy, and tensions between religious observance and civic duties dissolved federal accommodations for the Mennonites. The points of difference accepted in the agreement became grounds for policies excluding very conservative Mennonites in the 1950s and 1960s.