POLES have long played a role in Canadian history. Dominik Barcz, who arrived in Lower Canada around 1750, served on the Legislative Council and later published two newspapers. The partition of Poland among Russia, Prussia, and Austria in 1795 would contribute to the continual growth of this New World settlement. The wish to flee political or religious oppressions and a poor economy also sparked the emigration of Poles to Canada.

The sons of Polish immigrant arrivals would fight with distinction on the battlefield in the War of 1812 and the Rebellions of 1837. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Alexandre Eduard Kierzkowski would serve on the Legislative Council from 1858, in the Legislative Assembly from 1861, and in the House of Commons from 1867. Mr. and Mrs. E. Brokovski ameliorated life in Winnipeg by helping to establish the Dramatic and Literary Association in 1876 and by sponsoring the Philharmonic Society.

Sir Casimir Gzowski, an exile of the 1830s who reached Ontario in the early 1840s, was knighted for services to his Queen both as a military and a civil engineer. Gzowski was responsible for seven bridges (including one connecting Fort Erie, Ontario, with Buffalo, New York), ports, canals, railways, Yonge Street between Toronto and Simcoe, the Niagara Parkway, and numerous other engineering projects. He also served as President of the Dominion Rifle Association, Colonel in the Militia, Administrator and Deputy Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario and an Honorary aide-de-camp to Queen Victoria. His great-grandson – broadcaster, editor, and writer Peter Gzowski – became one of Canada’s best-loved media personalities.

Within two decades of Gzowski’s arrival, a group of Poles – Kashub peasants from Prussian-occupied Poland attracted by land and railway developers’ advertisements – arrived in Renfrew County on Ontario’s lumbering and farming frontier. They were émigrés with a fierce desire to maintain their regional Polish culture that, in the decades before they migrated, had been undermined by German administration. At Wilno, Ontario, in 1876, the Kashubs founded what has become the oldest continuous Polish parish in Canada. They persisted in their faith, their dialect, and group life over a number of generations.

By the turn of the century, there were Poles in Toronto, Hamilton, Sudbury, and many smaller cities of the Niagara Peninsula and the Ontario North. There were over 1,000 Poles in Winnipeg before 1895, and smaller groups in Montreal, Vancouver, and Sydney, Nova Scotia.

Prompted by the vigorous policies of Clifford Sifton, Minister of the Interior in Wilfrid Laurier’s government, some 115,00 Polish settlers came to Canada between 1896 and l918 to settle the newly opened prairies. The First World War temporarily disrupted the flow of Poles to Canada, but, in 1919, after the Polish republic had been established, a growing number of newcomers chose to make their way to Ontario, with Toronto graduallyreplacing Winnipeg as the centre of Polish life in Canada.

While the Depression slowed the movement of Poles into Canada, the outbreak of the Second World War further inhibited Polish immigration. Between 1939 and 1944 almost 1,000 Polish engineers, technicians, and other skilled refugees came to Canada and contributed to the war effort. In 1946 and 1947, ex-soldiers, who had served with the Allies, entered Canada on the strength of one-year contracts to work on beet farms, in factories and hospitals, and as domestics and railway builders.

Most of the postwar migrants were political refugees from a Communist regime. Many were well-educated and qualified physicians, lawyers, teachers, engineers, and other professionals who chose urban life in Ontario and Montreal. Between 1957 and 1980, over 40,000 Poles came to Canada as part of an effort to re-unify dividedfamilies. Many others who came as visitors, performers, or athletes claimed refugee status. Finally, from 1981 until 1989, Canada opened its doors once again to allow a great wave of Solidnosc (Solidarity) political émigrés and economic migrants seeking better social and economic opportunities.

The 1996 census counted 786,735 people of Polish origin in Canada with Ontario having 370,455, the bulk of the community. These well-educated and better-trained individuals rejuvenated community organizational life and introduced new measures of voluntary action.

Newly arrived physicians, dentists, and other medical practitioners were required by Canadian licensing bodies to undertake examinations, internships and other forms of probationary work. Skilled tradespeople also endured trial periods and examinations. Mathematicians, scientists, and engineers benefited from the universal language of their disciplines, but lawyers, civil servants, and other white-collar workers had less chance to continue in their occupations. Some drove taxis, became short-order cooks or hospital aides, or worked at anything available.

Before 1920, the Polish entrepreneurial class in Canada had established corner groceries, bakeries, barber shops, and the shops of shoemakers and blacksmiths. By 1935, these small entrepreneurs were joined by a handful of physicians, dentists, and lawyers as well as the millionaire owner of the Sisco Mine in Amos, Quebec, and a highly successful building contractor in Hamilton, Ontario. Together with the more successful farmers, these constituted the economic elite of the ethnocommunity. Skilled workers, tradespeople, civil servants, professionals, administrators, and other white-collar occupations were under-represented until the postwar period.

Polish patriotism informed the lives of the immigrants. By the turn of the century, Polish communities began to demand a priest of their own, to organize mutual aid societies for the well-being of their co-nationals and to create patriotic societies to support the cause of their suppressed nation. Because banks were reluctant to advance funds to immigrants with meagre jobs and because loan companies charged exorbitant interest rates, parishes and secular bodies across Canada created credit unions. The first, St. Stanislaus Credit Union, was organized in Toronto in 1945. By 1993, it was the largest parish-affiliated credit union in Canada, with ten branches, over 30,000 members, and assets of $200 million.

Before the establishment of the Polish Republic after World War One, Poles drew leaders from their own ranks, but especially from among the Roman Catholic clergy: Oblates, Redemptorists, Resurrectionists, and the Felician nuns.

The willingness to support a parish or language school, drama group, community print and broadcast media reflected the immigrants’ commitment to the maintenance of Polish folkways, language, and values. Polish pride swelled after the election of Pope John Paul II, the choice of Czeslaw Milosz in 1980 for the Nobel Prize for literature, and the selection of Lech Walesa in 1983 for the Nobel Peace Prize.

The few Poles who helped govern Upper and Lower Canada or the Dominion of Canada after 1867 had no successors until Dr. Stanley Haidasz of Toronto was elected as a Member of Parliament in l957. Haidasz later became Minister of State (Multiculturalism) in the Trudeau government of 1972 and the first Polish member of the Senate in 1978. Other Liberal M.P.s, past and present, include Jesse Flis of Toronto and Stan (Kazimcerczak) Keys of Hamilton. Progressive Conservative Pat Sobeski represented Cambridge, Ontario; Don Mazankowski, M.P. for Vegreville, Alberta, served in the cabinets of both the Rt. Hon. Joe Clark and the Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney and held positions as Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister.

A number of Poles have served in municipal and provincial governments. Toronto and a number of other cities and towns have had Polish-Canadian aldermen. Ontario and the western provinces have had Polish MLAs and ministers, most notably Gary Filmon, former Premier of Manitoba.