Migration

Irish immigrants made up a substantial minority in the small populations of Britain’s northern colonies as early as the 1760s, and outside the Halifax area and Cape Breton, Nova Scotia these early arrivals were mostly Protestant. Some Loyalists of Irish birth or descent came north after the American Revolution and a scattering were among the merchants and pioneering farmers who trickled in directly from the British Isles in the late eighteenth century. However, the great majority arrived between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the wake of the great famine of the late 1840s. From 1825 to 1850 the Irish accounted for two-thirds of the overseas immigration into British North America. By Confederation in 1867, they were the largest ethnic group in the new dominion after the French, accounting for 24 percent of the population. In Nova Scotia the Irish were in third place after the Scots and English, but they led in New Brunswick and Ontario. There, more than a third of the population claimed paternal Irish ancestry. They made up 10 percent of the population of Quebec as well, where they accounted for nearly half the non-French population, outnumbering the Scots and English together.

Half of all the Irish who immigrated to Canada arrived during the 1830s and 1840s, numbering about 625,000, and fully two-thirds of them, some 900,000, came before Confederation. Fewer than 10 percent of the English, by contrast, arrived before 1867. In Atlantic Canada outside southern New Brunswick and Halifax, the Irish influx had diminished to insignificant levels well before the famine years of the late 1840s, and the vast majority of Irish who arrived during that decade settled on the still-expanding Ontario frontier. The Irish-born population of Quebec peaked by 1851, and from 1861 onward the numbers in Ontario and New Brunswick began to decline as well. In Ontario the influx of Irish declined just as English immigrants began flooding into the province’s industrializing cities, but in the more rural Maritimes the provincial ethnic balance shifted much less dramatically. The famine of the 1840s thus effectively marked the end rather than, as in the United States and Australia, the beginning of intensive Irish immigration.

The reasons for the decline of Canada as a major destination for Irish emigration relate primarily to the country’s state of economic development, access to opportunity elsewhere, and the patterns established in earlier years. The tremendous wave of Irish emigration that inundated the United States after 1850 drew heavily upon the impoverished labouring class of largely Catholic Connaught, in the west of Ireland, a region with close links to famine emigrants settled in the United States but with fewer predecessors in Canada. The Catholics of Canada’s Atlantic region had come mostly from the south coast rather than the west, and well before the famine years. That the bulk of central Canada’s existing Irish population was Protestant deterred Catholics from going there, and many in parts of Ireland lacking a tradition of immigration to British North America believed that one had to be Protestant to receive land in Canada. Attempts to promote Canada in Connaught in the 1880s foundered upon such misinformation and upon vocal opposition by Irish nationalists and Cana-

Source: D. Wilson, The Irish in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association, 1989), 5–6, using data provided by D.H. Akenson.Note: Column 2 before 1870 is based on port of departure, as adjusted by W.F. Adams (see bibliography) to account for under-recording and departures from non-Irish ports. The calculation of column 4 is based upon unrevised data since Adams revised only the Irish figures.

dian journalists, the latter arguing that poor Irish would be a burden to the rest of the community.

As well, the 1850s saw the effective end of the agricultural frontier in central Canada, a phenomenon experienced in the Maritimes before the Irish famine, and industrialization in Canada’s cities, still in its infancy in this period, was to draw mostly upon the surplus rural population and upon an influx of English immigrants. Though the railway opened Manitoba to agricultural settlers in the late 1870s, few immigrants from abroad got beyond Ontario before the boom of the late 1890s and so most westerners of Irish descent claim mid-nineteenth-century Ontarians as ancestors. It was much easier for a poor immigrant to take a factory job in the east than to travel halfway across the continent and try to acquire a farm. Protestants in Ulster and in the much-reduced Protestant enclaves in southern Ireland preferred to pursue industrial opportunities in northern England and Scotland, just a short journey from Ulster. They also went to New Zealand, where the government encouraged and assisted the settlement of Protestants. The major destination for all Irish emigrants, however, was the northeastern United States, which had begun industrializing in the 1820s.

In Canada as a whole the number of Irish-born continued to decline both relative to the total immigrant population and in absolute terms. As immigrants began arriving in greater numbers from England and later from beyond the British Isles, the Irish share of total

<?dbhtml table-width="96%" ?>

Sources: Census of Canada; D. Wilson, The Irish in Canada (Ottawa: Canadian Historical Association), 5–6.

* = Republic of Ireland only; 1981 and 1991 calculated by Statistics Canada from 20% sample

** Actual immigration of Irish to Canada during preceding decade; data ends 1978

11856 21870 31841 41848 51844

immigration fell from 65 percent of arrivals before 1850 to between 1 and 8 percent in the decades after Confederation. Though some 400,000 Irish have arrived since Confederation, they have constituted a trickle in the growing immigrant tide.

Nationally, the numbers of new immigrants rebounded somewhat during the 1920s as Irish immigration doubled over that of the previous decade, reaching a total of 88,500, and the net number of Irish-born in the country increased by 14,243 for a 15 percent net gain, the first appreciable increase since the 1850s. The English population in Canada grew by only 5 percent during the same period, yet during the decade before they had increased by 35 percent (175,989) while Irish immigration had stagnated. The unusually heavy influx of Irish during the 1920s is probably attributable to the large-scale departure of Protestants from a newly independent Ireland that spent part of the decade wracked by civil war. Ontario claimed half of this net increase and Quebec 13 percent, with arrivals merely making up for deaths and departures in the Maritimes and Manitoba. At least some of the net increase of 5,515 in the three western provinces was the result of Irish migration from central Canada rather than of direct emigration from Ireland.

By 1951 there were only 80,795 Irish-born in Canada, with natives of Northern Ireland exceeding immigrants from the republic by a more than two-to-one margin. There was a net increase of nearly 12,000 Irish during the immigration boom of the 1950s, but this accounted for merely 4 percent of the 1.6 million immigrants who entered Canada during the decade. In the 1950s, 87 percent of the net Irish increase was recorded in Ontario and the rise of 1,596 in Alberta and British Columbia was countered by a net decrease in Manitoba and Saskatchewan of almost the same number. None of these statistics distinguish between Protestants and Catholics, but Ulster predominance has come to an end in recent years. In 1970, 2,000 people arrived from the republic and about 1,500 from Northern Ireland; in 1988 the figures were 1,300 and 300 respectively. In 1991 only 147 Irish immigrated to Canada. Irish Protestant immigrants during the 1970s and 1980s were prompted to leave by severe unemployment at home and by a wish to escape the “Troubles” in Northern Ireland. Some parents sacrificed good jobs for the sake of their children, as had many of their nineteenth-century predecessors.

Most Canadians who can claim Irish ancestry today descend from the early-nineteenth-century settlers who dominated the immigration stream in that period rather than from the more recent arrivals; their descendants remain one of the largest ethnic categories even if they are no longer an identifiable ethnic group.