Migration

In 1991, 8.6 million people, or one in three Canadians, described themselves to census enumerators as wholly (4 million) or partially (4.6 million) of English ethnicity. It is unclear what this self-ascription tells us, since many Canadians with deep roots in the country have no factual knowledge of their ancestry, and there is, as noted, much confusion about whether the English are all English-language speakers or only the “ancestrally” or ethnically English.

The most “English” province in 1991 was Newfoundland, where 82 percent of the population claimed to be either wholly or partially of English ancestry. In the remaining Atlantic provinces about half the residents claimed English antecedents, though many of them were in fact descendants of eighteenth-century New Englanders rather than of immigrants directly from England. In British Columbia, which has attracted a disproportionate number of English this century, 43 percent of the population claimed English ancestry; in Ontario and the Yukon, just less than 40 percent of the population was of English origin; and in the prairies, the proportion was about a third. Canada’s most “English” cities (adding together both single and multiple-origin responses) were all in Atlantic Canada: St John’s, 77 percent English; Saint John, 61; and Halifax, 57. Victoria, a popular destination for recent English immigrants, followed at 57 percent. The next four cities, ranging from 53 to 42 percent, are industrial centres in southwestern Ontario that have drawn sizeable populations of English workers: London, Oshawa, St Catharines/ Niagara, and Hamilton. Toronto was home, of course, to the largest number by far, with 1,084,625 claiming at least partial English ancestry, but at 28 percent it was – and is – the least English of Canada’s twenty-five largest Census Metropolitan Areas outside Quebec. (See Tables 1 and 2.)

Forty-three percent of pre-1950 English immigration took place in the fifteen years before World War I and another 20 percent between then and the onset of the Great Depression. Unlike the Irish, half of whose immigration to Canada took place during the 1830s and 1840s, and fully two-thirds of it before Confederation, probably less than 10 percent of the English came during the pre-Confederation period. The English numbers in that era were far smaller than the numbers of Irish, too, amounting to roughly 300,000 as against 850,000. Between 1900 and 1930, however, 1.6 million English arrived, and by contrast only 175,000 Irish.

Like most such generalizations, these national statistics reflect a bias towards the populous central and western provinces. The population of Atlantic Canada has attracted far fewer immigrants this century, and so much of the story of the settlement of the English there is a nineteenth-century one, though English immigration to Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island has recovered slightly since World War II. In Nova Scotia, never a particularly English province, the number of English immigrants rose during the two decades of Maritime industrialization at the turn of the century, faltered somewhat during the difficult 1920s and 1930s, and then regained its turn-of-the-century strength in the decades after the war. In largely Irish New Brunswick, there was some English influx during the three decades before the Great Depression but not much of a noticeable net increase thereafter. In Ontario the great increases took place in the 1840s and 1850s and during the economic boom at the turn of the century, with a healthy net increase as well after World War II. On the prairies there was substantial English settlement during the 1890s and early 1900s, followed by a turning away towards the east and the Pacific coast. In British Columbia the initial wave more or less maintained its numbers and rose again after World War II. Victoria, with its temperate climate and high proportion of self-aware English, has become Canada’s most stereotypically English city.