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Inglorious Past

The Canadian Record in Immigration
"Canada's record in deporting immigrants was by far the worst in the entire British Commonwealth."
This blunt indictment was issued by Irving Abella, President of the Canadian Historical Association and Professor of Canadian Jewish History at York University, in his foreword to Barbara Roberts' book (see below). What is even more poignant is that the easiest immigrants to deport were those from the British Isles. After WWI, many veterans were deported because they needed medical attention due to injuries suffered in the service. Such benefits were available but there was a catch: British subjects who sought such assistance were liable to deportation as a drain on the public purse.

Abella also says:

"...until recently, immigration policy was largely in the hands of a small number of bureaucrats. Throughout most of our history this tiny group, almost by default, orchestrated our immigration policies. Their role, as they saw it, was not to find ways to bring people to Canada, but rather to devise restrictions to keep them out. They were our country's gatekeepers, yet they were determined to open the gates as little and as narrowly as possible."
"...small group of government officials, who strove so desperately to fend off 'offensive' peoples... not only did they succeed in keeping our doors closed, they also managed to find a way to get rid of some of those who managed to break through their carefully erected restrictive barriers. "
"...the murky activities of government officials who used deportation to dispose of a wide variety of unwanted immigrants. For thirty-five years immigration officials--on their own, usually without consulting Parliament or their ministers -- not only decided who could come to Canada, but also got rid of those already here whom they did not want. This handful of bureaucrats were de facto judges and juries on all immigration matters. Their decisions, as Roberts makes clear, were not only arbitrary, they were often illegal. For years, immigration authorities broke the law with impunity in order to protect Canada from those they deemed 'undesirable.'"

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Barbara Roberts, Whence they came: deportation from Canada 1900 - 1935
(University of Ottawa Press, 1988) p. 153:
"The man who usually made crucial Immigration decisions (then instructed the Minister, as well as his own subordinates) was the type who allowed his head to rule his heart. Frederick Blair had joined the Department by the turn of the century; in 1905 he became an Immigration officer and moved up rapidly. After a spell as Secretary, he became Acting Deputy Minister, and in 1936, Director (equivalent to Deputy Minister in rank). He was a wonderful bureaucrat, which was particularly easy because he had determined most of the rules under which he operated.
"He was anti-Semitic, anti-radical, anti-East Indian, anti-Eastern European, and anti-Southern European - a typical churchgoing English-Canadian civil servant, exemplifying much of the worst of Canadian society of the time. It was Blair who played a major part in refusing entry to and deporting Polish jews around 1920, and who held the line (even in the face of occasional rebellions by his Minister) against European jewish refugees in the late 1930s, even after he began to realize that they were going to be killed in Europe. Blair was perfectly capable of knowingly deporting communists to prisons or worse."

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Further reading: John Boyko, Last Steps to Freedom: the Evolution of Racism in Canada, 2nd ed., rev. (Winnipeg : J. Gordon Shillingford Pub., 1998)
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For more details on what was going on in the past:

Various ethnicities
The Komagata Maru affair, 1914, in which a shipload of British subjects from India were refused permission to land in Vancouver.
The S.S. St. Louis affair, 1939, in which a shipload of Jewish refugees from Europe were turned away from several countries. Canada's policy on Jews could be summarized by the famous remark: "None is too many."

 

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