Overview

The peopling of Canada, an ongoing process spread over thousands of years, has yielded the unique amalgam of peoples that is Canada today. The country contains strands that are deeply indigenous, as well as much that is immigrant and recent. It reflects a particular convergence of the European and non-European at a time when the power of the former far outweighed that of the latter. Transplanted European societies were put in place, but they were not precise replications: non-European peoples were at hand and the newcomers themselves were somewhat remade in the process of working out their lives in different settings. Cultural change was the common lot, although some groups changed much more than others.

Canada and its neighbour, the United States, were very differently composed after their pre-historic beginnings more than fifteen millennia ago. Different aboriginal cultures evolved in situ. The early modern migrations to what is now Canada were largely French and to the future United States largely English, with a considerable admixture of Africans. After the creation, in 1783, of the United States and of much of its present northern border, American expansion turned west. Canada was only briefly attractive: late in the eighteenth century, to Loyalists and land seekers, and early in the twentieth century, when land was still available in Saskatchewan and Alberta after the American frontier had closed. Otherwise, only a few Americans trickled into Canada.

Until recently, immigration came, rather, from across the Atlantic: in the first half of the nineteenth century the British North American colonies attracted more British immigrants than did the United States, and in the second half of the century larger economic opportunities in the United States drew almost all of a European stream that was increasingly continental. Canada caught an edge of this migration in the two decades before World War I and, more hesitantly, in the 1920s. When immigration resumed after World War II, immigration policies and immigrants were different again. Although Canadian migration to the United States has been considerable at times – particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century when British North America ran out of agricultural land – most of these emigrants were scattered across the northern third of the vast, heterogeneous pool of American settlement. The result is that even adjacent populations along either side of a common border tend to be quite different, the products of migration streams that, for the most part, were parallel but separate.

Until almost the twentieth century there was little east-west migration within Canada. People settled in patches of land bounded usually by some combination of rock, water, and the border with the United States. When a patch filled, many of the young would have to leave, but because other British North American patches were distant and already settled, often by quite different people, it was usually easier and, for some, culturally safer, to go to the United States. Until the CPR reached Winnipeg in the early 1880s, Canada did not have a western settlement frontier. The weakness of internal migration had decisive consequences: the regions exporting people remained culturally and ethnically homogenous, mixing took place in the United States, and Canada remained a collage of different regional societies associated with different founding ethnicities and cultures. In the twentieth century this pattern has been only somewhat modified by migrations of eastern Canadians, particularly Ontarians, to western Canada, and by the general drift to the principal cities – which were to Canadian migrations in the twentieth century what the United States had been in the nineteenth.

Throughout these migrations people tended to seek out others of their kind, the more so in proportion to their sense of themselves as cultural outsiders. Sometimes they migrated in sizeable groups, but more often in chains fuelled by information about the location and circumstances of others from their village or region. Often migrations were facilitated by ethnic organizations, sometimes by labour contractors. Some immigrants came to work and return, but most accepted that the long voyage to Canada was decisive. They would not return home. They had come, most of them, because life was hard and they hoped to find economic opportunity. Few sought cultural change; most immigrants tried to hold on to older ways, often in the face of hostile cultural pressure. Over the years, the extent of cultural attachment became a common bone of generational contention.

Many, of course, ran squarely into assimilationist or racist pressures. After 1760, Canada was effectively part of the British Empire, most of the economic and political élite were British, English was the language of power, and, outside Quebec, British cultural values (in various regional forms) were pervasive. The predominant society, soon British and Protestant, had a limited tolerance for difference. The Catholic Irish were long disparaged, as were immigrants from continental and eastern Europe; disparagement became sharply racist and exclusionist when directed towards blacks or Asians who, for many years and as much as possible, were to be kept out. Churches, schools, and governments were agents of assimilation, as were countless cultural pressures, some subtle, some not, directed towards those whose English was poor and whose culture was different. Native people, who could not be kept out, were to be remade and civilized.

And yet, it was also clear that no immigrant people could live quite as they had before. As contexts changed, so did cultures. For a time immigrants could hold on to a good deal; memories were full and many ideas from one setting could be fitted to another. By and large, ideas associated with the commercial economy were most likely to change. Immigrants adapted quickly, for example, to dry-farming practices or to unfamiliar techniques of fishing or logging, because such were the ways of the economic opportunity that had drawn them in the first place. On the other hand, the domestic economy was shielded from such pressures and was culturally far more conservative: older ways tended to survive in gardens, household appointments, and food. But, as time went on, influences of new settings impinged more and more. Detailed cultural memories faded, dialects and languages were lost, and former identities became more generalized and abstract. Some stories and songs, national days, ethnic religious and political affiliations, traditional foods, and ceremonies on special occasions survived, as ethnicity gained in symbolic content while losing cultural detail.

For some, determined to integrate as quickly as possible, the rate of cultural discard was rapid; others, determined to conserve, fossilized particular ethnic ways. Either strategy led to cultural change, a process that, in general terms, was as old and pervasive as the settlement of Canada. Distinctive rural cultures, not quite like any in France, emerged along the lower St Lawrence and around the Bay of Fundy in the seventeenth century; almost three centuries later, educated English immigrants, moving within the empire and the security of language and connections, found after a time in Canada that they were no longer quite English. The whole society was in cultural motion, the motion increasingly of modernity but also of relocation and of the meeting of the European and the non-European.

Out of all this, late-twentieth-century Canada has emerged. A place of many peoples, now somewhat mixed but also separated by the deeply regional nature of Canadian settlement, the ethnic distinctiveness of the major cities, and a vigorous reasserted native otherness. It is anything but a premeditated creation. Canada happened and is still happening.