[1] First published in 1983 by Lester & Orpen Dennys, and reissued in 2012 by University of Toronto Press, the book documents the history of the Canadian response to Jewish refugees from 1933, with the rise of the Nazi government in Germany, until 1948.

They say that Blair's policy had the full support of Mackenzie King, who was prime minister 1935–48, Vincent Massey, the high commissioner to Britain,[3] and both Anglophone and Francophone elites in general.

[7] In 2018, in an unrelated address, Trudeau pledged to make a formal apology for the Canadian government's turning away of the St. Louis "due to our discriminatory 'none is too many' immigration policy of the time.

Reviewer William French wrote that Abella and Troper did "a superb job of unearthing this sorry chapter in [Canadian] history ... By exhaustively pursuing primary sources, they have documented the details ... with chilling precision.

Co-author Irving Abella wrote that he and Troper had not anticipated that the book would have much impact beyond addressing and exposing a "disturbing piece of [Canadian] history", but that "it has become an ethical yardstick against which contemporaneous government policies are gauged", and that it was instrumental in enabling Vietnamese boat people to seek safety in the country in the late 1970s.