If you walk through almost any Canadian town today, you’ll pass names on the war memorial, the hardware store, the hockey rink — Irish names, Italian names, Ukrainian names, Chinese names — and not think twice. They read as simply Canadian. That’s the quiet miracle of this country, and it’s worth pausing on, because it didn’t always feel that way. Every one of those names belonged, at some point, to a group that an earlier generation of Canadians was certain did not belong.
This isn’t said to scold anyone. The unease people feel about big changes is real and old and human. But there’s a comfort buried in the history, if we’re willing to look: we have run this exact experiment before, many times, and the fearful prediction has lost every single time.
The same fear, over and over
It is striking how little the language of the worry changes. They won’t fit in. They carry disease, or crime, or strange politics. They’ll take the jobs. They’re loyal to somewhere else. Each generation believes it is saying something new about a uniquely dangerous group. Each generation is, almost word for word, repeating the last one.
The reassuring part is what came next. Not assimilation into sameness, but the slow, ordinary discovery that the feared newcomers wanted what everyone wants — work, safety, a future for their kids — and that they became, within a generation or two, simply neighbours.
The Irish: “coffin ships” and closed doors
Go back to 1847. Roughly 97,492 Irish fled famine for British North America in a single year — one of the largest waves of migration in our history. They came on vessels so deadly they were called “coffin ships”; about one in five died at sea or soon after landing, and thousands more were buried at the Grosse-Île quarantine station (Pier 21).
The survivors were not greeted warmly. As typhus spread into the cities, “competition for employment led to resentment from local labourers,” and Catholic-Protestant tensions sometimes boiled into riots (Pier 21). The Irish were the dangerous, diseased, untrustworthy newcomers of their day. Today nearly 4.6 million Canadians claim Irish heritage — the fourth-largest origin in the country.
The Ukrainians: barbed wire for “enemy aliens”
A generation later, it was Eastern Europeans. During the First World War, Canada interned 8,579 people branded “enemy aliens” — the majority of them Ukrainian immigrants — in 24 camps, and forced roughly 80,000 more to carry identity papers and report to the police. They were put to forced labour on projects like Banff National Park, paid a fraction of a normal wage (Canadian War Museum).
No serious threat ever materialized. The whole episode was driven by wartime fear, not evidence. Ukrainian Canadians went on to help build the Prairies and now number well over a million — about as woven into the national fabric as a community can be.
The Chinese: a tax on existing
Perhaps the starkest case is the law that targeted people purely by race. Starting in 1885, Chinese immigrants had to pay a head tax to enter Canada — first $50, then $100, then a punishing $500, roughly two years’ wages. About 81,000 paid it, pouring millions into government coffers. In 1923, Ottawa stopped charging and simply slammed the door, passing what became known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned almost all Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1947 (Canadian Museum for Human Rights).
The result was a generation of separated families — “bachelor societies” where men outnumbered women nearly 28 to 1. We later recognized this as one of the plainer injustices in our history.
The Italians, and the ship we turned away
The pattern didn’t stop with the distant past. After Italy entered the Second World War in June 1940, Canada declared some 31,000 Italian Canadians “enemy aliens,” fingerprinted and tracked them, and interned about 600 men in camps for up to five years — most never charged with anything (Pier 21). Italian Canadians are now one of the country’s largest and most beloved communities.
And there is the case we should sit with most soberly. On this very date in 1939, the MS St. Louis, carrying Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazis, was turned away from Canada along with other countries. Of the passengers sent back to Europe, 254 were later murdered in the Holocaust (Pier 21). It is the most haunting reminder of what the fearful answer costs when we get it wrong.
Every group we now call simply “Canadian” was once somebody’s proof that the country was being lost. They weren’t. We weren’t. We were just growing.
What history is trying to tell us
None of this is meant to shame anyone for feeling uneasy. The point runs the other way: if you feel that unease, you are standing in a very long line of decent, worried Canadians — and that line has a perfect record of being wrong about the people it feared.
The grandchildren of the “coffin ship” Irish, the interned Ukrainians, the taxed-out Chinese, the suspected Italians — they’re coaching your kid’s team and running the shop on the corner. The wave that feels foreign today is, in all likelihood, the unremarkable neighbour of tomorrow. We don’t have to guess how this turns out. We’ve watched it happen, again and again, and it has always ended the same way: with them becoming us.