From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Estonians/Karl Aun
Until the late 1940s the Estonian presence in Canada was limited to a few colonies and individuals. Before the end of the last century, there were some Estonian fishermen in Prince Rupert, British Columbia. In 1899 a schoolteacher, Hendrik Kingsepp, and his family arrived in what was to become Alberta and started farming on a land grant near Sylvan Lake. By 1903 there were sixteen Estonian farms in the area. Within ten years Estonian settlements developed in Barons, Eckville, Foremost, Stettler, and Walsh, facilitated by homestead land grants. Estonians totalled about 500 in Alberta in 1916; outside the province they numbered close to 1,000.
Between the world wars fewer than 700 Estonians emigrated to Canada. Rear Admiral Johan Pitka, an Estonian war hero, along with his family and a few other Estonians, founded a short-lived community near Fort St Francis, in British Columbia. Several place names – Linda Lake, Pitka Creek, and Pitka Point – are all that remain of his six-year (1924–30) experiment in Canada.
Four-fifths of all Estonian immigrants in Canada arrived shortly after World War II. Between 1947 and 1960, 14,310 Estonians immigrated, 11,370 of them between 1948 and 1951. (Of the 18,500 Estonians in Canada in 1961, only about 4,200 were earlier immigrants or Canadian born.) Eighty thousand political refugees left Estonia in 1944 for Sweden and Germany and from there re-emigrated to other countries, including Canada. More than 9,000 moved to Canada from West Germany, about 4,000 from Sweden, and about 1,000 from other countries.
These immigrants represented a cohesive ethnic group. Their professional training and experience and their values, attitudes, and behavioural patterns determined the structures of their organizations, the scope of their ethnic activities, and their adjustment and contribution to Canadian society. Most post-war Estonian immigrants were single men or women. As a rule, families were small, with one or two children; most adults were well educated. They included many from Estonia’s elite, people who in normal times never would have left their homeland. The vast majority had throughout the war sympathized with the Western Allies and their values of democracy and freedom, having experienced totalitarianism of both the left and the right. Most hoped to return to Estonia after settlement of the Soviet-American struggle and the freeing of Estonia. Hence they called themselves refugees or exiles.
Most were allowed into Canada as contractual labourers, but they later moved to Toronto, Montreal, Hamilton, and Vancouver. From Sweden, Estonians immigrated directly to Montreal or Toronto. Estonian communities formed in urban Canada; the largest, in Toronto, contained about half of all Estonians in Canada. Montreal’s had 3,000, and Vancouver’s 1,500. In the 1991 census only 21,255 people considered themselves wholly (12,940) or partially (8,315) of Estonian ethnicity.
