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Chapter
4 (continued)
The spiralling cost of living, widespread unemployment, and disillusionment with "the system" gave rise to a wave of labour unrest that rolled across the country in 1918 and 1919, intensifying fears of an international Bolshevik conspiracy. Nothing did more to inflame anti-foreign sentiment and heighten fears of revolution than the Winnipeg General Strike of May 1919. This general strike, which was triggered by the refusal of employers to recognize the Metal Trades Council as the bargaining agent for its affiliated unions, succeeded in paralysing the city of Winnipeg and splitting it into two distinct camps. Caught up in the hysteria of the time, leading members of the city's establishment denounced the strike as a revolutionary conspiracy led by a small group of "alien scum." In making this charge, they completely ignored the fact that nearly all the strike's leaders were British-born and British-educated, and not central European Bolsheviks.
Ultimately, the decisive intervention of the federal government brought about an end to the conflict. Persuaded that enemy aliens had instigated the strike, the government succeeded in 1919 in amending the Immigration Act, to allow for their easy deportation. It then had ten strike leaders arrested and instituted deportation proceedings against the four who were foreign-born. When a protest parade on 21 June turned ugly, Royal North West Mounted Police charged the crowd, leaving one person dead and many others wounded. "Bloody Saturday," as it came to be called, led to the arrest and deportation of 34 foreigners and effectively broke the Winnipeg General Strike. But it would leave a long-lasting legacy of bitterness and unrest across Canada. The revised Immigration Act and the Orders in Council issued under its authority signalled a dramatic shift in Canadian immigration policy. Prior to the First World War, immigration officials had chosen immigrants largely on the basis of the contribution that they could make to the Canadian economy, whereas now they attached more importance to a prospective immigrant's cultural and ideological complexion. As a result, newcomers from the white Commonwealth countries, the United States, and to a lesser extent the so-called preferred countries (that is, northwestern Europe) were welcomed, while the celebrated "stalwart peasants" of the Sifton era were not, unless, of course, their labour was in demand. In June 1919, the federal government, reflecting the prevailing anti-foreign sentiment and influenced by the economic realities of the day, used the revised Immigration Act to bar entry to specified classes of immigrants. Among those to be denied entry to Canada were Doukhobors, Mennonites, and Hutterites, as well as all persons who then were, or during the war had been, enemy aliens. In 1918, groups of Hutterites, driven north from the United States by anti-foreign sentiment, had established ten colonies in the Calgary and Lethbridge areas of Alberta and six in Manitoba west of Winnipeg. More hoped to follow, but in 1919 they, along with members of the other pacifist sects, were barred from settling in Canada. They continued to be unwelcome until June 1922, when the regulation was rescinded by the newly elected Liberal government of Mackenzie King.
Taking advantage of the government's now more tolerant view of unorthodox religious sects, some 20,000 Russian Mennonites put down roots in Canada between 1923 and 1929. Like their predecessors, these Russian Mennonites were exempt from military service, but unlike earlier Mennonite newcomers, they were not allowed to settle in blocs.
In 1923, the government finally abolished the head tax that since 1885 had been imposed on Chinese immigrants, only to replace it with a new Chinese Immigration Act whose exclusionary provisions were so broad that Chinese immigration was virtually banned. The new law went into effect on 1 July 1923, forever after dubbed "Humiliation Day" by Canadian Chinese. From that date until it was repealed in 1947, the Act succeeded in virtually suspending Chinese immigration to Canada. When the economy became more buoyant in 1923, the federal government once again set out to court British immigrants. As they had in the past, immigration officials targeted Britons prepared to farm. To lure them to this country, Ottawa initiated several colonization schemes that provided transportation assistance and other inducements. Despite such measures, however, British immigration in the 1920s never reached pre-war levels, over the decade averaging approximately 54,000 persons a year compared with approximately 99,000 annually in the ten years preceding the First World War. Moreover, only a small number of those who immigrated from Britain in the 1920s went into agriculture. Although immigration to Canada between 1919 and 1925 was largely restricted to newcomers from Canada's traditional source countries, there were two notable exceptions. One involved the Russian Mennonites, discussed above; the other, Jews. Even though the Department of Immigration and Colonization was generally hostile to the idea of admitting Jews, placing various impediments in their way, approximately 40,000 Jews did succeed in entering this country during the interwar period, most being admitted by special permit. Among these Jews were 200 war orphans who were brought to Canada in 1920 largely through the efforts of the well-known Ottawa merchant A.J. Freiman and his wife, Lillian, who used their influence to raise $150,000 for this purpose. In 1923, the Canadian government agreed to admit 5,000 Jewish refugees who had fled from Russia to Romania between 1918 and 1920 and had subsequently been ordered to leave their adopted country; of this number, some 3,040 refugees actually arrived in Canada. When the Jewish community petitioned the government to substitute Jewish refugees displaced in other parts of Europe for the remaining allotment of 2,000, the government turned down their request, claiming that many of these people could not be considered genuine refugees because they had left Russia with the consent of the authorities.
In 1919, the framers of Canadian immigration policy believed that, to meet the country's economic needs, sufficient numbers of white English-speaking agriculturalists and industrial workers could be obtained either in Canada or from the United States and Great Britain. In arriving at this conclusion, however, they failed to take into account the sweeping changes in American immigration legislation that had sharply reduced the number of immigrants from continental Europe allowed to enter the United States. Nor did they take into account the absence of quotas on the entry to the United States of native-born Canadians and the inevitable outcome of such a policy--an increase in the numbers of Canadian agricultural and industrial workers flowing southward and a corresponding decrease in the Canadian labour pool. When the exodus of Canadian workers assumed alarming proportions, Canadian industrialists and farmers joined transportation and mining interests in lobbying the federal government for a more liberal immigration policy. Clifford Sifton set the tone for the new immigration campaign when he declared in 1922 that 500,000 "stalwart peasants" were required in Western Canada. These people, he urged, should be brought immediately from "Central Europe, particularly from Hungary and Galicia." In response to this pressure, the Mackenzie King government gradually removed most of the barriers erected against large-scale European immigration, starting in 1923 with the repeal of the regulation that restricted the entry of immigrants from Germany and its wartime allies. The real breakthrough came two years later when Ottawa signed an agreement with the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Canadian National Railways, allowing them to recruit cheap foreign workers under the guise of bona fide European agriculturalists. This paved the way for Canada to receive immigrants from countries previously designated "non-preferred" by immigration authorities, countries such as Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Russia, Yugoslavia, Germany, Austria, and Romania.
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