From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Danes/Christopher S. Hale
Modern Danish immigration to Canada occurred in three phases – 1860–1914, 1919–30, and 1945–70s. However, the first Dane known to have set foot in what is now Canada was the explorer Jens Munk, sent in 1619 by King Christian IV to find the Northwest Passage to the Far East. Munk scouted Hudson Strait and Hudson Bay but was forced to winter near the mouth of the Churchill River, where sixty-two of his crew died. The next summer Munk and two other survivors sailed back to Scandinavia.
During the nineteenth century Denmark’s population grew rapidly, as did much of Europe’s, spurred by improvements in medical care and declining infant mortality. The rural economy was unable to sustain this growth, and many people migrated into the cities or left the country. Germany’s takeover of Schlewig-Holstein in 1864 led many among Nord Slesvig’s predominantly Danish-speaking population to leave for Denmark or to go abroad. Advertising by steamship lines and later by railways also influenced decisions to emigrate.
Though some people emigrated from Denmark in the 1840s, a substantial exodus began only in the late 1860s. A number went to South America, Australia, and New Zealand, but the vast majority travelled to the United States, where Danish immigration peaked in 1882. At this time there were probably very few Danes in Canada.
While people emigrated from virtually all areas of Denmark up to 1914, the largest numbers originated from the southeastern islands of Bornholm, Falster, Langeland, and Lolland and from the regions of Himmerland and Vendsyssel in the northern part of the Jylland (Jutland) peninsula, and the fewest from central Jutland and northern Sjælland. Emigration from cities was considerable, exceeding that from the countryside between 1900 and 1914. More men emigrated than women or families; there were many farmers, most of them landless, and journeymen, tradesmen, domestics, and industrial and white-collar workers.
As suitable homestead land became scarce in the United States, many people who had acquired poor land looked to other places, including Canada. The Dominion Lands Act of 1872 opened up lands for homesteading, and completion of the transcontinental railway in 1885 brought an influx of people into the west. Railways, particularly the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), owned much of the land, especially on the prairies, and encouraged immigration – as did a rise in the price of wheat. However, it was not until after 1900 that a substantial northward exodus of Danes began from the United States. These immigrants are usually listed as Americans and so are difficult to quantify; as well, some people coming from Denmark stayed in Canada only a short time before moving south.
After World War I economic depression in Denmark forced many people to leave, primarily again for the United States, until it restricted immigration in the early 1920s. Some circles in Canada thought large numbers of easily assimilable immigrants desirable, particularly from English-speaking countries and northern Europe. The dominion government and the railways encouraged this trend; railways and other businesses would profit from increased grain and passenger transport, and farmers would more readily find harvest workers. Most of the immigrants were farmers or would-be farmers, and they came from almost every area of Denmark. Many were bachelors or married men who would later send for their families.
Denmark established the Oplysningsbureauet for Erhvervene (Information Bureau for the Trades) to provide information about countries of special interest to emigrants. The CPR set up an office in Copenhagen headed by M.B. Sorensen of its Department of Colonization and Development, and this office produced advertisements picturing prosperous Canadian farms.
At the invitation of Ottawa and the CPR, the Danish government sent a delegation headed by the editor Christian Reventlow and the agricultural expert Marius Gormsen to Canada for two months in 1923. Its report stressed hard work and the selection of areas with mixed farming, ideally in southern Ontario or Alberta; settlement in colonies would be likely to antagonize the rest of the population and retard assimilation, it concluded.
In 1925 the writer and “immigration expert” Olaf Linck spent six months journeying from coast to coast. In Kanada det store Fremtidsland (Canada the Great Land of the Future, 1926) he advised prospective émigrés to choose location and occupation carefully and work hard; he concluded that emigration decreased competition at home, and he recommended choosing Canada.
The editor of the Hjørring newspaper Vendsyssel Tidende, C. Mikkelsen, visited Canada and published Canada som Fremtidsland (Canada as Land of the Future, 1927), a very favourable report. He thought that immigrants should be young, healthy, and willing to work; further, their homeland was overpopulated.
Aksel Sandemose’s 1927 trip to Canada was, like Mikkelsen’s, financed by the CPR; he visited Danish settlements in the west and Danes in Winnipeg and Calgary. In a series of articles appearing in Danish newspapers and journals, he concluded that romanticism too strongly influenced people’s decision to settle there, that immigration literature was misleading, and that life on the prairies would be hardest on married women, who would be very lonely and have difficulty learning English because of their isolation. Those who did go should stay first in a Danish prairie colony, he advised, to make adjustment easier. Sandemose later wrote three novels about western Canada, discussed below.
Between 1919 and 1931, 18,645 Danes immigrated to Canada – including nearly 4,000 in 1927–28. Following the stock market crash in 1929 immigration fell sharply, and by the summer of 1930 Canada was effectively closed to new arrivals. Quite a few Danes who had arrived in the 1920s returned home in the 1930s.
The years following World War II were hard in Denmark, devastated by German occupation, and many Danes emigrated – for better conditions, in search of adventure, or to avoid high taxes. They came from various regions and from cities. There were many blue-collar workers, in particular craftsmen, and a few farmers. Apprenticeship in Denmark, which involved four years of education and training, was highly regarded in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, which lacked such skills. Canada was encouraging immigration again, and it attracted single people and married couples, some with children. Since 1945 approximately 42,000 Danes have arrived in Canada, including at least 7,700 in 1957.
The 1991 census lists 40,640 people with single-response and 94,880 with multiple-response Danish background, for a total of 135,520. Of these, 21,555 immigrated from Denmark, 22,560 claim Danish as one of their mother tongues, and almost 2,400 use Danish at home. British Columbia had 39,975 Danes (both single and multiple response); Alberta, 38,320; and Ontario, 32,365.
