The 1950’s witnessed important changes in the socioeconomic status of several of Canada’s minority groups, although inequalities and racism continued to exist.

Canada was a multiethnic and multicultural society during the 1950’s. The status of minority communities during that decade is better understood with a brief overview of the historical context for Canada’s dual national heritage and increasingly multicultural makeup.

English speakers from the British Isles occupied the position of Canada’s dominant culture. The large French Canadian minority, Canada’s other so-called founding culture, followed in importance, influence, and numbers. Canada’s indigenous groups, the Inuit and Amerindians, who occupied the land for many millennia prior to European contact, later would use the term “First Nations” to define themselves. Other minorities who were also part of the ethnic scene during the 1950’s were non-Anglo Europeans, African Canadians, and Asians.

Dual European Heritage

Canada was not founded on a single cultural and linguistic heritage. Although Great Britain conquered French Canada during the early 1760’s, and English speakers eventually outnumbered francophones, by the early nineteenth century, British rule failed to assimilate the large French minority concentrated primarily in Quebec. French Canadians, motivated by la survivance (cultural survival), clung to their language, Roman Catholic faith, customs, and special institutions. A high birthrate—sometimes called “the revenge of the cradle”—kept the percentage of French Canadians high in spite of continuing immigration from the British Isles. Anglo political leaders were eventually forced to accept the “French fact.” When Canada gained self-rule from Britain in 1867 and organized a confederation of five provinces, Quebec agreed to join only after it was granted sole control over its educational system and cultural affairs. Throughout the years that followed, Quebec jealously guarded and asserted its separate identity.

During the 1950’s, French Canadians accounted for more than 30 percent of Canada’s population and resided primarily in the central and eastern regions. In Quebec, Canada’s second-largest province, they constituted 82 percent of the inhabitants. The biggest concentration of French speakers outside of Quebec were the Acadians in nearby New Brunswick with 38.3 percent of that province’s total population. Ontario’s portion of francophones was 10.4 percent. Scattered throughout the western provinces and northern territories were small pockets of French Canadians. Isolated in a sea of English speakers, their ethnicity, including their primary use of French, was on the wane.

Government-promoted Immigration

The ethnic makeup of the population did not change much through most of the nineteenth century as Canada attracted relatively few immigrants. Wanting to develop the sparsely western prairie regions, Canadian government officials assiduously promoted immigration toward the end of this century. From this time until World War I, Canada received a steady flow of immigrants that transformed the country. Although the newcomers included English speakers from the British Isles and the United States, the most significant influx was from central, southern, and eastern Europe. Germans and Slavs (mainly Ukrainians) were the most numerous of the non-Anglo European groups. Jews also arrived in fairly significant numbers and settled mainly in large urban centers. In time, Anglo Canadians became a minority in the Prairie provinces. Here the so-called New Canadians, many of whom were peasants, settled both in rural areas and in urban centers such as Winnipeg, Manitoba , where they formed tight-knit communities in the neighborhoods of that city’s north end. The same pattern occurred in large cities to the east such as Toronto and Montreal. By 1951, after several generations, these groups had largely lost the use of their native languages and become English speakers.

A strong Asian presence was evident on the West Coast, mainly in the Vancouver area, where Chinese and some Japanese immigrants came in the nineteenth century as laborers. Other “visible minorities” included the Inuit, residing in the Arctic, and the indigenous First Nations, located largely on reserves in remote nonurban environments north of settled arable areas. Another minority, Canadians of African descent, were mostly descendants of slaves who accompanied the Loyalist migration to Nova Scotia after the Revolutionary War and persons smuggled through the pre-Civil War Underground Railroad system from the United States into urban areas of southeastern Ontario.

Postwar Immigration

After World War II, Canada experienced another immigration surge. Although this wave was not as large as the great influx around the turn of the twentieth century, it did exert an impact on the nation’s ethnic composition. Data from the federal censuses of 1951 and 1961 reveal the trends unfolding during the decade. Canadians with a British Isles origin remained the largest segment of the population but declined from 47.9 percent of the total in 1951 to 43.8 percent in 1961. French Canadians generally maintained their position with figures of 30.8 percent in 1951 and 30.4 percent in 1961. Residents with ethnic ties to other parts of Europe increased from 18.3 percent in 1951 to 22.6 percent in 1961. Within this group, Germans formed the highest percentage of immigrants, followed by Ukrainians, Scandinavians, Dutch, Poles, and Jews.

Among noticeable patterns as the decade progressed was a dramatic jump in numbers of persons coming from southern and eastern Europe, such as Italians, Portuguese, Greeks, and to some extent, Ukrainians and Yugoslavs. These newcomers settled in major metropolitan centers such as Toronto and Montreal and enriched the fabric of life there. Toronto, once a bastion of staid puritanism and Anglo culture, was transforming into a more lively, interesting, and dynamic cosmopolitan center. Although still relatively few in number, Asians were on the increase in the period between the two censuses. Indians and Inuit were only 1.2 percent in 1951, but the Inuit held their numbers, and the First Nations outstripped national population growth throughout the decade.

Socioeconomic and Political Inequalities

Following 1945, the phrase “two founding nations” increasingly came into use, partly as a conciliatory gesture to French Canadians. If this acknowledgment of the important role of francophones in the nation’s history also implied equality in terms of affluence and power, the facts did not support it. On one hand, Quebec was experiencing a process of steady modernization, urbanization, and economic change that contradicted old stereotypes of the province as a backward, rural, peasant society under the thumb of the clergy. Nonetheless, the Quebeçois still faced inequalities. Statistical studies showed that in spite of the ongoing economic change, French Canadians were under-represented in the higher-earning occupations in proportion to their numbers while English Canadians, who made up a mere 14 percent of the province’s total residents, were over-represented in such occupations. French Canadians were gradually moving into more modern jobs but not into the positions that controlled those jobs. Moreover, figures showed that with the passage of time, this comparative disadvantage of French Canadians was actually widening. In 1951, French Canadians were even more under-represented in professional and financial jobs than they were in 1931 and in 1961, they were at a greater occupational disadvantage than in 1941.

Montreal, the largest Canadian city at that time, had long been a bastion of the Anglo financial elite, and their institutions were very prominent there. Native French speakers, who totaled 64 percent of the city’s population in 1951, frequently could not find sales clerks in English-owned department stores such as Hudson Bay or Eaton’s who would assist them in French.

On the political scene, Quebec’s government under Maurice Duplessis and his Union Nationale party made use of traditional French Canadian conservative nationalism. Duplessis was an outspoken critic of strong central governmental powers and championed provincial rights as a means to defend Quebec’s unique cultural heritage, language, and institutions.

The socioeconomic positions of other minorities, such as the New Canadians of Europe, were improving. For example, Ukrainians gradually moved away from agriculture, although many (35.3 percent) in 1951 were still in this sector. The number of laborers and unskilled workers had dropped by more than half since 1931, and by the 1950’s, more were working in manufacturing and construction. In Winnipeg, where the non-British population of the city was around 60 percent by the end of the 1950’s, New Canadians were moving into prestigious occupations such as law and medicine, once the almost exclusive reserves of Anglo Saxons. At the same time, they were gradually relocating out of the ethnic ghettos in the north end. Winnipeg’s tradition of discriminating against foreigners was also abating. The political monopoly of the British elite was also broken in 1956, with the election of the city’s first non-Anglo-Saxon mayor, Stephan Juba, a Ukrainian who won reelection to many terms.

Responding to Racism

Some groups continued to experience racism and blatant discrimination in spite of the assumption of many Canadians that their country was free from prejudice. This was especially true of the so-called visible minorities, such as the indigenous First Nations, African Canadians, and Asian Canadians. Most Canadian provinces enacted legislation prohibiting racial and religious discrimination in employment and housing. However, old racist practices and attitudes were slow to change. African Canadians often found that persistent, strong organizational efforts were necessary to fight for enforcement of their legal rights. Japanese Canadians—many of whom had been victimized during World War II through forced relocation, deprivation of civil rights, and enormous economic loses from sales of their property without consent—finally had their right to vote restored in 1949. However, a Canadian federal judge who considered the matter of compensating members of this group for property losses made a ruling in 1950 that amounted to the inconsequential sum of fifty-two dollars per person.

Canada’s indigenous peoples, subjected since the late nineteenth century to a policy of cultural genocide and deprivation of self-rule under the federal government’s Indian Act of 1876 , received some relief when the act underwent a revision in 1951. Boarding schools to which Indian children were herded by force to “unlearn” their culture were closed and the indigenous communities were given some control over their own affairs. Paternalism in federal dealings with the First Nations did not cease, however, and the First Nations people continued to struggle with poverty , disease, and other social problems. Nevertheless, the indigenous bands slowly were beginning to organize in defense of their interests. For example, a regional organization, the Federation of Saskatchewan Indians, appeared at the end of the 1950’s.

Impact

During the 1950’s, some significant developments and changes in regard to minorities were beginning to appear in Canada. These new trends would find expression in the years ahead in fuller and more potent manners. Changing patterns in ethnic composition of the population as a result of shifting immigration patterns foreshadowed the arrival in much greater numbers over the next twenty years of southern and eastern Europeans, people from Commonwealth nations in Asia and the Caribbean, and various other developing countries. The nascent organizational activities among the First Nations and black Canadians evident during this decade took off during the militant 1960’s. Finally, Quebec’s defensive nationalism and rising challenge to Canadian federalism was a prelude to the upsurge of radical militancy in that province during the 1960’s and the coming to power of a separatist movement during the 1970’s.

Further Reading