Migration

The presence of the Dutch in Canada in any significant numbers is a relatively recent occurrence. However, they have been in North America since the beginnings of European settlement. Like other Europeans in the seventeenth century, the Dutch sought to develop a commercial enterprise in the western hemisphere in direct competition with the well-established and profitable Spanish empire. Following up on the explorations of Henry Hudson in 1609, they established a post on the upper reaches of the Hudson River five years later (near present-day Albany, New York) in order to gain access to the rich fur trade of the interior. They were thus brought into alliance with the Iroquois and into conflict with French fur traders on the St Lawrence River. The venture was successful enough to bring about its incorporation into the Dutch West India Company’s colony of New Netherlands, which was further expanded with the founding of New Amsterdam (New York City) in 1625. Farming and the fur trade remained the economic underpinnings of this colony, until its seizure by England in 1664 ended any direct contact with the Netherlands. Some six thousand Dutch settlers were left to accommodate themselves to a new, English society.

The fur trade had brought about occasional contacts between the Dutch of the Hudson River valley and the French in what is now Canada. However, the Dutch were not particularly attracted to the area, even after the British conquest of New France, since they were well established in the Hudson and Delaware valleys. Not only were they successful economically, but they had been able to maintain their language and their cultural identity. Though the great majority remained in the United States after the American Revolution, some migrated to the British North American colonies seeking political asylum. Even before the end of the conflict, Dutch-American Loyalists had begun to make their way to the Maritimes and Quebec. The peace treaty that ended the war in 1783 left a small number of Dutch among the tens of thousands of Loyalists who settled in the British colonies. They were followed by other Dutch Americans seeking cheap land in the newly opened province of Upper Canada (Ontario).

The struggle to build a new existence in the Canadian wilderness tested the settlers’ mettle, but they were not strangers to North American life. Although some had retained the Dutch language, they also spoke English. No doubt they attempted to recreate their pre-Revolutionary way of life, but the majority accommodated themselves to the new homeland. Attempts to re-establish the Hervormde Kerk/Dutch Reformed Church in Upper Canada met with failure since the community was too small and dispersed and the colony’s diversity of religious offerings too competitive. The arrival in the early nineteenth century of non-Loyalist Dutch-American settlers who regarded Upper Canada as a natural extension of the western New York frontier did little to create a distinct community. Dispersion and the presence in the province of Mennonites and other Anabaptists of German origin who were identified as Pennsylvania Dutch militated against a clear delineation of a Dutch community. Such a designation would not in any case probably have been considered useful or welcome by those who were rapidly finding their place in the British colony.

As cheap unsettled land in Upper Canada was rapidly taken up, interest shifted to the frontier of the United States. Dutch farmers from New York migrated to the Great Lakes region and farther west. They would later be joined by the descendants of Dutch Americans who had settled in the British colonies. As well, some 250,000 Dutch peasants and artisans and their families arrived in the American mid-west, starting in the 1830s. Driven by the desire for economic betterment, the effects of population pressure, the potato blight, or schisms in the Dutch Reformed Church, many Dutch sought a new start on the American frontier.

At the middle of the nineteenth century, interest in both the United States and the Netherlands focused almost exclusively on the western states. Primary settlement had taken place along the shoreline of Lake Michigan and secondary settlement in Iowa, Minnesota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, and California. Dutch-American colonies in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Iowa had seeded themselves across the west. These communities presented a strong attraction to Dutch agriculturalists since they were well past the frontier stage. Not only farmers but shopkeepers, skilled artisans, clerks, and even professionals were welcomed. The Dutch language was maintained, churches flourished, and the social milieu resembled that of small towns in the Netherlands. Not until the 1880s and 1890s would emigrant waves be directed once more to Canada.

Emigration to the United States would continue to rise and fall according to conditions there and in the Netherlands. The outbreak of World War I, the growing restrictionist movement of the 1920s, and a virtual end to immigration during the Great Depression and World War II hindered any natural progression of the Dutch to the United States. American quotas restricted post-1945 movement, and by the time that they were removed in the 1960s, interest had waned because of improved economic conditions in a reconstructed Netherlands. Each of these developments would have an impact on emigration to Canada.

This country began to assume renewed importance to the Dutch and Dutch Americans alike as the availability of cheap or free land in the United States diminished in the 1890s. Only then did the Dutch cease to be merely occasional visitors and settlers in Canada and become an identifiable presence of its ethnic mosaic. By the end of the century, it was clear that opportunities in the Dutch-American settlements, at least in the agricultural field, were diminishing. Problems of mechanization, distribution, marketing, financing, and transportation had begun to plague American farmers. Rapid expansion, the opening up of marginal land, overcropping, and the imposition of tariffs threatened to put many out of business. At the same time as the agricultural frontier of the United States was closing, the Canadian government and the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) began to advertise the virtues of the “last best west.” For Dutch agriculturists, Canada now seemed a desirable alternative.

The settlement of the Dutch in Canada in the last one hundred years has been directly related to a search for economic betterment. Unlike Britain, Ireland, or Germany, the Netherlands did not experience a mass movement of people seeking to escape natural or economic calamity, and as a result, emigration has been largely an individual or familial, rather than a group, effort. The Dutch are generally regarded as reluctant emigrants, preferring to stay in their homeland rather than venture abroad. Emigration has often been an act of last resort. However, changing economic conditions in agriculture, competition for land and jobs, population pressures, and growing industrialization and urbanization, combined with the prospect of land and good wages, turned the eyes of the Dutch to Canada in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Newspaper articles in the Dutch press and letters from friends and relatives who were making new lives for themselves in North America encouraged this interest. Economic betterment and adventure were both motivations.

As interest in emigration began to grow, many Dutch citizens looked to their government to provide some direction, but it remained disinterested. The state exerted no control over the departure of its citizens except with regard to their transportation. It sought to regulate neither recruiters, railway agents, and emigration societies nor the propaganda used to stimulate the exodus. The government believed that false information and underhanded tactics were self-limiting and that the abuses would lead to a decline in interest and the offenders would simply go out of business. As well, some officials viewed emigration as a national scandal and were therefore opposed to any official involvement.

Other elements in Dutch society, however, supported it as a viable alternative to unemployment. Not only could it provide a societal safety valve, but it could also allow the unemployed and underemployed to achieve economic mobility. Organizations such as the Christelijk Emigratie Vereniging (Christian Emigration Society) began as early as 1892 to sponsor the emigration of rural and urban unemployed to the Canadian west. Agricultural societies, unemployment commissions, businessmen, and others feared the negative effect of uncontrolled emigration schemes and the deceitfulness of certain agents and transportation companies. In 1913 they combined to form the Haarlem Emigratie Vereniging (Netherlands Emigration League, or NEL), whose two primary aims were to gather accurate information on immigration lands and to curtail practices detrimental to the emigrants. The ministry of agriculture granted the league a small annual subsidy and encouraged its work with the rural unemployed. The outbreak of World War I would end any significant movement of the Dutch overseas and curtail the activities of these societies.

During the first sixty years of Dutch migration to Canada, the social characteristics of the immigrants were in large measure determined by the Canadian government. In the 1890s Canadian politicians and public alike viewed the west as the cornerstone of future development. The economic, political, and social promise of the country would depend upon development of the prairies. The west was therefore to be peopled by hardy agricultural immigrants who could turn the area into a productive landscape. Dutch agriculturalists were highly favoured for such a task since they had a reputation for hard work, cleanliness, and sobriety, were familiar with democratic institutions, and were of western European stock. Thus they not only fulfilled the work criteria but were socially acceptable and eminently assimilable. Starting in the 1890s, Dutch Americans, immigrants in transit through the United States, and those coming directly from the Netherlands began to take up free homesteading land in the west. Like countless others who were flooding into Canada in this period, they were responding to a vision of economic betterment based on their own labour. During the years 1890–1914 it is estimated that some twenty thousand Dutch migrated to Canada. The CPR was particularly active in this recruitment, selling ship and train tickets and also land.

The outbreak of World War I and Canada’s involvement in it temporarily ended immigration from the Netherlands. Dutch military reservists in this country returned home, and others either joined the Canadian armed forces or sat out the war as neutral aliens. The end of the war in 1918 did not signal the immediate resumption of pre-war immigration patterns. Wartime trends to urbanization and industrialization continued in the post-war period, and Canadian farmers, farm labourers, and demobilized soldiers began to move into the cities. Economic recession soon spelled an end to hopes for a vibrant post-war economy, however, and the expected demand for thousands of foreign agricultural workers did not materialize.

In the Netherlands the constraints of the war years and fear of economic adjustment forced the Dutch emigration societies to examine opportunities for immigrants to North America. The United States, fearing inundation by eastern and southern European immigrants, had begun to erect a “national origins” system of restrictive immigration that favoured the British Isles and western Europe. The Dutch were granted a generous, but in their view inadequate, annual quota of 3,136. American restrictions redirected interest towards Canada. This country, still firmly committed to the growth of its agricultural sector and preferring rural western Europeans, welcomed those Dutch who were not accommodated in the American quota. For many of them, it was a second choice, but opportunities in both rural and urban Canada were a welcome alternative. Some hoped that Canadian citizenship would eventually permit them to emigrate to the United States.

Interest in the Netherlands, combined with an active campaign on the part of the Canadian government and the railway companies and their agents, produced a significant emigration movement. Between 1918 and 1930 over fifteen thousand Dutch immigrants arrived in Canada. However, the continuing impact of the war, a lack of cheap land, and changing conditions in the new country made economic betterment much less likely than in the past. Most immigrants in this period did not substantially improve their economic status, and some even saw it worsen. A decade that had seemed to hold so much promise for the immigrants left many expectations unfulfilled.

In the Netherlands a reactivated Netherlands Emigration League had responded to the growing interest in emigration. In 1923 it was joined in the field by the Central Emigration Foundation Holland (CEFH), which granted transportation loans to deserving emigrants and attempted to provide them with limited aftercare in Canada. Both organizations proved relatively ineffective in their missions, and the vast majority of immigrants were dealt with by railway and transportation interests or emigration societies representing the Catholic and Protestant communities. The government, while providing financial assistance to both the NEL and the CEFH, still maintained a disinterested view towards the movement.

Emigration ceased to have any real importance after the collapse of the Western economic system in 1929. Canada responded to the crisis by closing its doors to all but the most well-funded immigrants. Fewer than three thousand Dutch immigrants arrived in the following decade. In the Netherlands a declining number of emigrants and the lack of overseas opportunities forced amalgamation of the NEL and the CEFH as the Netherlands Emigration Foundation (NEF). The new organization attempted to maintain an active, if diminished, role in planning and aftercare, but the German invasion of the Netherlands in 1940 ended its overseas role. Dutch immigration to Canada virtually came to an end, with the exception of a small number of refugees. Among those who found asylum in this country were members of the Dutch royal family. At the end of the war, Canada was attempting to reintegrate its military forces into civilian life and normalize its economy. As a result, it was not prepared to receive any significant number of immigrants until 1947.

In the two decades after 1945, hundreds of thousands of emigrants would leave the Netherlands in the hope of securing a better future for themselves and their families. Conditions in that country in the immediate post– World War II period generated a deep pessimism about its future among the public and a growing desire to emigrate. This pessimism was reflected in government surveys. Over 200,000 hectares of land had been inundated by salt water, a condition that would retard crop production for years; 33,000 young people from the agricultural sector were not able to find employment in their area of training; 4 percent of all housing had been destroyed; factories had been bombed; machinery had been looted by retreating German forces; spare parts were unobtainable; and Germany, one of Holland’s most important pre-war markets, now lay in ruins. In addition, the country’s population had risen to over 9,000,000, and there were no new jobs.

Little wonder that at least a third of the Dutch seriously considered emigrating. Fleeing economic devastation and the loss of the Dutch empire in Indonesia, large numbers sought a new beginning in Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. However, with the United States virtually closed because of the quota system and South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand much farther away, the Dutch government began to focus on Canada as a principal recipient of planned emigration. Temporary arrangements were concluded, and 1947 saw the arrival of the first of the new immigrant stream. Abandoning its hands-off policy in 1949, the Dutch government attempted to stimulate emigration by subsidizing travel costs, reorganizing the system and consolidating it under one government ministry, and seeking permanent agreements with receiving countries regarding the numbers to be admitted. Eventually a flexible arrangement was reached between the Dutch and Canadian governments that permitted the immigration of Dutch nationals according to the demands of the Canadian labour market. The immigrants who arrived between 1947 and 1949 were primarily agriculturalists, but it was understood that as needs developed in the Canadian economy, other occupations would be given greater priority.

In the 1920s Canadian government policy had shifted away from its focus on the west since much of the good land there had been settled. Agricultural employment in the rest of the country had come to dominate the thinking of immigration officials. In the immediate post– World War II period, Canadians once again looked to the Netherlands to replace a declining rural population. An ageing agricultural workforce and soldiers who did not want to return to the farms that had employed them before the war threatened the health of Canadian agriculture. The government did not shift away from this policy until 1950, when, in response to a diversifying economy, it started to expand the categories of admissible immigrants to include those with skills in industry, construction, and services.

The vast majority of Dutch immigrants who came to Canada prior to World War II had been farmers or farm labourers between the ages of twenty and forty with a fifth- or sixth-grade education. Before 1914, families had predominated as compared to the 1920s, when newcomers were overwhelmingly single males. That decade also saw an increase in white-collar and unskilled immigrants, but the numbers were small in comparison to the farm category. The initial post–World War II emigrants (1947–52) continued the tradition of agricultural emigration. Families made up the largest numbers, and orthodox dissenters from the Dutch Reformed Church (generally referred to as Neo-Calvinists) predominated. Roman Catholics, never a large part of emigration from the Netherlands prior to 1947, began to increase in numbers after 1952. Farmers and agricultural labourers accounted for the majority until 1950. The statistics of that year indicated that only 34 percent of Dutch immigrants were classified as farm workers, and from then on agriculturalists began to be replaced by skilled industrial workers, technicians, and professionals. The shift away from agriculturalists in the early 1950s meant that immigrants were venturing into the larger towns and cities and the character of the Dutch immigrant community began to alter and adapt to the changing demands of Canadian society.

Of prime concern to both the Dutch and Canadian governments in this period was the question of how the movement was to be regulated. Recruitment and organization in the Netherlands was left to the pre-war emigration societies. Limited selection and screening was done under the aegis of these organizations, with the government emigration service (initially the NEF, later the Netherlands Emigration Service) keeping an eye on suitability. Canadian responsibility was limited to interviewing screened applicants and giving them a medical examination to see that they met health standards. The NEF/NES was then responsible for transporting the immigrants to Canada.

On their arrival in this country, they were handed over to Dutch-Canadian organizations for placement. The Canadian government required every single immigrant or family head to have a job before embarkation. Finding employment for the immigrants fell mainly to the various Dutch-Canadian organizations, church representatives, and the Dutch agricultural attaché in Ottawa. Canada was interested in receiving Dutch immigrants but only if the problems were minimal and the benefits obvious. In the two decades after World War II, some 152,000 immigrants made their way to all parts of Canada. The return of economic prosperity to the Netherlands in the 1960s ended large-scale emigration, and with the exception of a few years in the middle of that decade, immigration since the war has not exceeded 2,000 Netherlanders per year.

Some 200,000 Dutch and Dutch-American immigrants have entered Canada as settlers during the last one hundred years. This statistic is based on the best figures available from Dutch, Canadian, and American sources, but represents only an educated guess. Prior to 1914, Dutch Americans and immigrants from the Netherlands who entered from the United States were not distinguished from other American arrivals. As well, there is no accurate way to determine how many Dutch immigrants later left Canada or where they went. The statistics kept by the Canadian government before 1918 are inconsistent and unhelpful. Lack of consistency in gathering data and varying ethnic designations, such as “Belgian-Dutch,” have created confusion that unfortunately is not compensated for by the equally unreliable Dutch statistics.

As well, census figures often do not help to clarify the exact number of immigrants or identify those who remain in the Dutch-Canadian community. For a considerable period of time, ethnicity was determined not by birth place or parents’ birth place but by the nationality of one’s ancestors. The problem that such a vague characterization of ethnicity can present is demonstrated by the census of 1921, which indicates that the Dutch-Canadian population had doubled in the previous decade, from 55,961 to 117,505. The explanation of this impossible growth lies in the fact that Mennonites, who had registered their ancestry as German in 1911, gave it as Dutch ten years later to avoid the stigma of German nationality after World War I.

The majority of people who claim Dutch origin do so only on the basis of their ancestry. The Mennonites are merely the most obvious of such “genetic” Dutch Canadians, who seldom have any real contact with or interest in their ethnic group and therefore confuse any attempt to determine the size of a socially or culturally distinct community. The 1991 Canadian census simply underlines the problematical nature of such an exercise. It indicated that Dutch Canadians (single- and multiple-responses) were to be found in all the provinces and territories, but the largest concentrations were in Ontario (426,300), British Columbia (184,420), and Alberta (151,980). The Census Metropolitan Areas of Toronto (86,710), Vancouver (70,040), and Edmonton (43,610) had the largest numbers of “Dutch” inhabitants. The census also indicated that, although only 133,265 Canadians claimed Dutch as their only first language and 358,180 gave Dutch as their only ethnic origin, some 603,415 said that it was one of their origins. In other words, 961,595 Canadians reported that one or more of their ancestors was Dutch. What the figures seem to reveal is that, although Dutch-language speakers are declining in numbers, “genetic” Dutch Canadians, including the children and grandchildren of Dutch speakers, have been taking their place in an increasingly pluralistic society. Designating oneself as Dutch for census purposes is now becoming a matter of personal choice and not an action based on birth place or first language. As Dutch Canadians become more assimilated, are distanced further in time from the immigrant generation, and continue to intermarry with other Canadians, such a designation possesses little real meaning in relation to an identifiable ethnic community.