CANADA’S ARMENIAN population has immigrated from many parts of the world. In the 1890s, a handful of Armenian merchant families from Constantinople (Istanbul) and a pioneer group of factory recruits came to Canada from the Ottoman Empire, primarily from Keghi and other districts in eastern Turkey. By 1915 approximately 2,000 Armenians had settled in Canada, essentially in southern Ontario. Small groups of Armenians also settled in Montreal. Migrants from the Caucasus region of the Russian empire also established temporary staging areas in the prairie provinces before moving on to California.

Classification of the Armenians as Asiatics by the Canadian government in 1909 served to slow the pace of the group’s arrival for the next five decades. From 1919 until World War II, Canada admitted only about 1,500, all survivors of the genocide of 1915-1923 that saw 1.5 million Armenians fall prey to massacre, disease, starvation, and exposure.

Among these 1,500 newcomers were 109 unaccompanied young boys, brought in by the Armenian Relief Association of Canada, who settled at Georgetown, Ontario. Called the “Georgetown Boys,” they eventually were dispersed as farm labourers in southwestern Ontario.

After major changes were made to Canada’s immigration programs during the 1960s, thousands of Armenians entered the country. Admitted under the manufacturing, mechanical, professional, or clerical immigration classifications, they came largely from Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, and Iran, and a smaller number from Europe. Most recently, Armenians have been emigrating to Canada from the former Soviet Union.

The 1996 Canadian census records the presence of 37,500 Armenians in Canada, the sum total of individuals making single-or multiple-group responses. Community spokespersons and scholars argue that this group has not been properly enumerated and believe there are actually 50,000-70,000 Armenians in Canada since landed immigrants are traditionally recorded in Canada by former citizenship and not by nationality or historic roots.

Before 1914, Armenians were recruited to come to Canada as unskilled labourers in the expanding foundries and growing industrial base of southern Ontario. From the first decade of the twentieth century until the 1940s, Brantford, Galt, Guelph, Hamilton, and St. Catharines in Ontario were the largest and most active Armenian communities in Canada.

It is only in the last forty years that Toronto and Montreal have developed into major centres of Armenian settlement. Initially, Toronto was home to a small coterie of successful rug merchant families who lived in the city’s affluent north end, some factory hands in the West Toronto Junction, and a growing number of refugees and nascent entrepreneurs in downtown and eastern Toronto. After World War II, newly arrived Armenians settled throughout the metropolitan area, establishing new and interesting community neighbourhoods in North York and Scarborough. They also fanned out to the satellite cities of Markham, Mississauga, and Thornhill.

Park Avenue was the early place of residence and commercial centre for the Armenians of Montreal. After 1960, members of the community made their way northward and began to inhabit Ville Saint-Laurent and Nouveau Bordeaux. By the late 1980s, Armenians had settled in new districts in the greater Montreal area including Cartierville and Laval, and along the Park Avenue Extension.

Today the Province of Quebec vies with Ontario as the province with the largest Armenian presence in Canada. Metropolitan Montreal ranks with Toronto as the two largest Armenian settlements.

The early Armenian settlers in southern Ontario helped to ensure its industrial takeoff. They performed the heavy, dangerous, and noxious work in the iron foundries. Armenians worked as shake-out men, stokers, core-makers, pattern makers, and moulders at General Motors in St. Catharines, at International Harvester in Hamilton, or at the Brantford foundries of Pratt and Letchworth, Massey-Harris, Cockshutt Plow, Buck Stove, Waterous Engine Works, and Verity Plow. During the interwar years, Armenians also obtained work at the foundries in Galt and Guelph, Ontario.

Many soon found an opportunity to take up a trade or operate their own business. They chose to enter barbering, tailoring, shoe repairing or farming, or to run boardinghouses or coffeehouses. Armenians also established restaurants, hairdressing salons, ice-cream parlours, grocery stores, and confectionery shops.

The immigrant community’s early entrepreneurial focus was the oriental carpet industry. Families such as the Courians, Babayans, Alexanians, Ounjians, Pasdermajians, Bedoukians, and Adourians imported and sold rugs. Others washed or repaired rugs. Many eventually used the community’s dominant position and high standing in the carpet industry as a springboard into the rug merchant ranks.

In the early years, many Armenian refugee women worked in domestic service, often under contract for a two-year period. Armenian women later joined the industrial workforce during World War II, finding employment in canneries, textile mills, and tailoring establishments. Their children, in turn, during the 1950s and 1960s undertook a variety of commercial activities or entered the professions of medicine, nursing, and teaching.

The well-educated and highly skilled post-1950 immigrant arrivals expanded the world of Armenian enterprise, establishing auto sales and service, jewellery and watchmaking, printing, and photography businesses, food service and catering-related enterprises, as well as leather goods and precision tool manufacturing companies. They also entered the professional fields of pharmacy, law, accounting, and computer technology.

The Armenian pioneers, and more especially their children, have made a number of distinguished contributions to Canadian society. Prominent Armenian Canadians in the fields of science and education include physicist Armen Manoogian; Ara Mooradian, formerly senior vice-president of Atomic Energy of Canada; his sister, Dr. Anahid Mooradian-Kiernan, the first Armenian woman medical doctor in Canada; Edward Safarian, professor of economics and former Dean of Graduate Studies, University of Toronto; Alexander B. Davies, internationally recognized as a pioneer of naturopathic medicine; Dr. J. Basmajian; and engineer John Adjeleian who designed the retractable roof of Toronto’s popular SkyDome.

Armenian Canadians Yousuf Karsh and his brother Malak of Ottawa established impossibly high standards in the fields of black and white portrait and colour landscape photography. Yousuf Karsh, whose career spanned six decades and whose legacy is a Canadian national treasure, was named by the publishers of International Who’sWho as one of the most influential people of the twentieth century. Artin Cavoukian’s portraits, on the otherhand, brought international acclaim to this Armenian-born Canadian as the world’s foremost colour portrait photographer of his time. Other members of the prominent Cavoukian family are notable performer, Raffi, a children’ s songwriter and popular performing artist and his sister, Anne, the Commissioner of the Information and Privacy Commission of Ontario. Onnig Cavoukian is the third generation to carry on the tradition of the world-renowned Cavouk Portraits. Richard Ouzounian made his mark in theatre and radio while the director Atom Egoyan and actress Arsinee Khanjian helped the Canadian film industry scale new heights.

Armenian Canadians have begun to distinguish themselves for their work in race relations on a number of multicultural organizations. In 1993, Sarkis Assadourian became the first Canadian of Armenian descent elected to the House of Commons.

While contributing to Canadian society, Armenians have also been determined to preserve their heritage and assert the existence of a glorious national tradition. By the 1920s, Armenian Canadians had organized regional, cultural, political, and religious associations. Branches of the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or Tashnag party, the Armenian Social Democratic party, or Hnchag party, and the Armenian Democratic Liberal Party, or the Ramgavar party, were also established.

The Armenian General Benevolent Union (AGBU), with its headquarters in the U.S., was established in Canada in 1923. With chapters in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, the AGBU and its community centres have helped shape Armenian charitable, educational, and cultural life not only in Canada but throughout the world, including the Republic of Armenia and the Republic of Mountainous Karabagh. Another group, the Armenian Relief Society, founded in Canada in 1910, is primarily a women’ s charitable and educational association.

Religious loyalties to the Armenian Apostolic church, to the Armenian Catholic rite, and to a number of Armenian Evangelical churches have also contributed to the variety of Armenian-Canadian life. Armenian organizational life of today has evolved to include a number of professional and business associations: the Armenian Bar Association, the Armenian Engineers and Scientists of America, the Armenian Medical Association of Ontario and of Quebec, the Canadian Armenian Dental Association, and the Canadian Armenian Business Council.

In order to provide for their religious, political, educational, athletic, and cultural needs, Armenians, particularly in Toronto and Montreal, have built large and beautiful complexes which incorporate their church, community centre, and elementary and secondary Armenian language full-day and supplementary schools. With much hard work, Canada’s Armenian immigrants have succeeded in building a new life for themselves and their children as well as cultivating a sense of belonging to Canada.