Canada is often thought of as a land of immigrants. We have the Canadian Multiculturalism Act and a multiculturalism day and monuments of all sorts of things. We’ve even got the largest Ukrainian easter egg in the world. Some of Canada’s earliest distinct foreign policy was the recruitment of immigrants.

Which is why, when I was checking a date on Louis St. Laurent’s Wikipedia page, I was surprised to see the following statement:

Over 125,000 immigrants arrived in Canada in 1948 alone, and that number would more than double to 282,000 in 1957. This was perhaps the first time that Canada welcomed non-Western European immigrants in huge numbers, as masses of Italians, Greeks, and Poles arrived.

It’s true that under Canada’s immigration policies between 1890 and 1945, British immigrants were preferred (although people born in Scotland were often listed and referred to as "Scottish" as opposed to just "British" and there were distinct Scottish communities), followed closely and at times superseded by Americans, with other Commonwealth citizens and French citizens roughly tying for third. But just because immigration policies preferred these immigrants didn’t mean it took only them. Far from it.

In 1896, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier appointed Clifford Sifton Minister of the Interior and Superintendent General of Indian Affairs. In his Minister of the Interior post, Sifton had one major job: colonize and settle the prairie provinces and turn them into “productive” agricultural land. While the Numbered Treaties had (from the government’s perspective) removed the obstacle of Indigenous people by placing them on reserves and cleared the plains for White settlement, the number of White settler-colonists remained low. This was unsurprising since it’s really difficult to farm in most of the prairies (especially in Palliser’s Triangle, an arid area that covers most of southern Saskatchewan and Alberta and is extremely prone to drought), and there was very little infrastructure to support settlements, particularly agricultural ones.

Sifton was undeterred, and enacted a vigorous policy of encouraging immigration from the USA and Europe. There were colonial offices that had brochures and there were printed poster advertisements in many overseas train stations. Land was practically given away; for $10 a family could receive a quarter section (about $360 today for a 160 acre farm). The policy was a success. When he resigned his position in 1905 due to an unrelated government issue, immigration had tripled.

Most of those first immigrants were from the British Isles or America, although Scandinavian immigration picked up after 1900. And certainly, racism was even more entrenched and hierarchical–all of the non-Western European “races” were stratified; the Eastern European “races” like Poles, Ukrainians, Slavs, Galicians, Russians, and depending on who you talked to in 1900ish, Germans, etc., were typically just above Asian/Black/Jewish/Indigenous groups. But as immigration continued to open up, both during and after Sifton’s tenure, Eastern Europeans came in the hundreds of thousands and were defended–a far cry from Wikipedia’s claim that only Western European immigrants were welcomed.

Between the 1901 and 1911 census, the population of Canada that had been born in Eastern Europe more than tripled, from about 60,000 to about 200,000. The 1911 census also pegged about 12% of the foreign born population as coming from Eastern Europe. Immigrants from Southern Europe, such as Italians, also started coming to Canada during this period. There was a slowdown for a decade, mostly because of the First World War and the financial crisis that followed, but in 1920 immigration picked up again.

Significantly.

One of the major drivers of immigration to the prairies in the early 1920s was the Russian Civil War. As violence and food shortages spread, to say nothing of forced conscription and other problems, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans came to the Canadian prairies. One of the largest Ukrainian diasporas in the world is in the Canadian prairies–hence the easter egg–and it was almost entirely founded during this period. Between 1921 and 1931, the population of Canadians born in Eastern Europe shot up to over 400,000; by 1931, almost 20% of the foreign-born population derived from there.

And Sifton? He emphatically defended Eastern European (and Italian and Spanish) immigrants. In an article in Maclean’s in 1922, Sifton wrote

WHEN I speak of quality I have in mind, I think, something that is quite different from what is in the mind of the average writer or speaker upon the question of Immigration. I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality. A Trades Union artisan who will not work more than eight hours a day and will not work that long if he can help it, will not work on a farm at all and has to be fed by the public when work is slack is, in my judgment, quantity and very bad quantity. I am indifferent as to whether or not he is British born. It matters not what his nationality is; such men are not wanted in Canada, and the more of them we get the more trouble we shall have.

And a little later:

In Norway [...] Hungary and Galicia there are hundreds of thousands of hardy peasants, men of the type above described, farmers for ten or fifteen generations, who are anxious to leave Europe and start life under better conditions in a new country. These men are workers. They have been bred for generations to work from daylight to dark. They have never done anything else and they never expect to do anything else. We have some hundreds of thousands of them in Canada now and they are among our most useful and productive people.

Clearly, immigration from “non-Western European” people didn’t start in the 1940s; it had been going for decades. And they were encouraged to come to Canada for part of that period. That’s to say nothing of American immigration, which was actively courted, and as far as I know the USA isn’t European. Yet one more example of Wikipedia being not quite right, and by that I mean, at least for this one section from the page on Louis St. Laurent, almost totally wrong.

EDIT: thanks for the gold!!! EDIT 2: some wording for clarity

A non-comprehensive source list:
https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1922/4/1/the-immigrants-canada-wants

Owram, Doug. Promise of Eden: the Canadian Expansionist Movement and the Idea of the West, 1856-1900. 1992.

Friesen, Gerald. The Canadian Prairies: a History. 1984.

Carter, Sarah. Imperial Plots: Women, Land, and the Spadework of British Colonialism on the Canadian Prairies. 2016.

Mc Gowan, Victoria. “Eastern People on Western Prairies: How Early Eastern European Immigrants Shaped Alberta’s Political Future” in: Vassányi, Miklós et al. Minorities in Canada: Intercultural Investigations. Budapest: L'Harmattan-KRE, 2020. pp. 35-50.