History of immigration to Canada
In 1901, the Dominion Government changed its policy so that census-taking occurred every five years subsequently to document the effects of the advertising campaign that was initiated by Clifford Sifton.
[2] In 1828, during the Great Migration of Canada, Britain passed the Act to Regulate the Carrying of Passengers in Merchant Vessels, the country's first legislative recognition of its responsibility over the safety and well-being of immigrants leaving the British Isles.
Canadian citizens are in general no longer subject to involuntary loss of citizenship barring revocation on the grounds of immigration fraud or criminality.
The presence of Basque cod fishermen and whalers a few years after Columbus has also been cited, with at least nine fishing outposts having been established on Labrador and Newfoundland.
Under Pierre Dugua, Sieur de Mons, the first French settlement was made in 1604 in the region of New France known as Acadie on Isle Sainte-Croix, which now belongs to Maine, in the Bay of Fundy.
Britain also had a presence in Newfoundland and, with the advent of the settlements, claimed the south of Nova Scotia as well as the areas around the Hudson Bay.
While the coastal communities were based upon the cod fishery, the economy of the interior revolved around beaver fur, which was popular in Europe.
The voyageurs ranged throughout what is now Quebec, Ontario, and Manitoba and traded guns, gunpowder, textiles, and other European manufacturing goods with the natives for furs.
In the 18th to 19th century, the only immigration that Western Canada or Rupert's Land had was early French Canadian North West Company fur traders from eastern Canada and the Scots, English Adventurers, and Explorers representing the Hudson's Bay Company who arrived via Hudson Bay.
)[10] Ethnic or religious groups seeking asylum or independence no longer travelled to Russia or the United States, where lands were taken or homestead acts were cancelled.
The government's immigration policy was a huge success since the North-West Territories grew to a population of 56,446 in 1881, almost doubled to 98,967 in 1891, and exponentially jumped to 211,649 by 1901.
Nearly all had been in California for many years, including the early Canadians and Maritimers who made the journey north to the new Gold Colony, as British Columbia was often called.
One group of about 60, called the Overlanders of '62, made the journey from Canada via Rupert's Land during the Cariboo Gold Rush but was the exception to the rule.
An earlier attempt to move some of the settlers of the Selkirk Colony ended in disaster at Dalles des Morts, near present-day Revelstoke.
Early immigration to British Columbia was from all nations, largely via California, and included Germans, Scandinavians, Maritimers, Australians, Poles, Italians, French, Belgians, and others, as well as Chinese and Americans, who were the largest groups to arrive in the years around the time of the founding of the Mainland Colony in 1858.
Chinese labour was brought in by the Dunsmuir coal interests and used to break the back of strikers at Cumberland in the Comox Valley, which then became one of British Columbia's largest Chinatowns, as white workers who lived there were displaced by armed force.
"[citation needed] In practice, that applied only to ships that began their voyage in India, as the great distance usually necessitated a stopover in Japan or Hawaii.
Gurdit Singh was apparently aware of regulations when he chartered the Komagata Maru in January 1914,[14] but he continued with his purported goal of challenging these exclusion laws in order to have a better life.
The Komagata Maru, a Japanese steamship that sailed from Hong Kong to Shanghai, China; Yokohama, Japan; and then to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, in 1914, carried 376 passengers from Punjab, India.
That was one of several incidents in the early 20th century involving exclusion laws in Canada and the United States designed to keep out immigrants of Asian origin.
[15] German colonists, like the Scandinavians, were among the earliest to arrive from California and established themselves beyond mining in areas such as ranching and construction and specialized trades.
The Doukhobors were assisted in their immigration by Count Leo Tolstoy, who admired them for their collectivist lifestyle, beliefs, ardent pacifism, and freedom from materialism.
[17] Europe was overall becoming richer through the Industrial Revolution, but steep population growth made the relative number of jobs low, and overcrowded conditions forced many to look to North America for economic success.
[18] Attempts to form permanent settlement colonies west of the Great Lakes were beset by difficulty and isolation until the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway and the second of the two Riel Rebellions.
Despite the railway making the region more accessible, there were fears that a tide of settlers from the United States might overrun the British territory.
In 1896, Interior Minister Clifford Sifton launched a program of settlement with offices and advertising in the United Kingdom and Continental Europe.
Pier 21, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, was an influential port for European immigration and received 471,940 Italians between 1928 until it ceased operations in 1971.
The Church of England took up the role of introducing British values to farmers newly arrived on the prairies, but in practice, the migrants mostly clung to their traditional religious affiliations.
In terms of economic opportunity, Canada was most attractive to farmers headed to the Prairies, who typically came from Eastern and Central Europe.
