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1776: 3,000 Black Loyalists, among them freemen and slaves, fled the oppression of the American Revolution and came to Canada.
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1781: Butler’s Rangers, a military unit loyal to the Crown and based at Fort Niagara, settled some of the first Loyalist refugees from the United States in the Niagara peninsula, along the northern shores of Lake Erie and Lake Ontario. 1789: Lord Dorchester, Governor-in-Chief of British North America, gave official recognition to the “First Loyalists” – those loyal to the Crown who fled the oppression of the American Revolution to settle in Nova Scotia and Quebec
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1793: Upper Canada became the first province in the British Empire to abolish slavery. In turn, over the course of the 19th century, thousands of black slaves escaped from the United States and came to Canada with the aid of the Underground Railroad, a Christian anti-slavery network.
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1830: Polish refugees fled to Canada to escape Russian oppression. The year 1858 marked the first significant mass migration of Poles escaping Prussian occupation in northern Poland.
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1880-1914: Italians escaped the ravages of Italy’s unification as farmers were driven off their land as a result of the new Italian state reforms.
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1880-1914: Thousands of persecuted Jews, fleeing pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, sought refuge in Canada.
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1891: The migration of 170,000 Ukrainians began, mainly to flee oppression from areas under Austro-Hungarian rule, marking the first wave of Ukrainians seeking refuge in Canada.
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1920-1939: The second wave of Ukrainians fled from Communism, civil war and Soviet occupation.
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1945-1952: The third wave of Ukrainians fled Communist rule.
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1947-1952: 250,000 displaced persons (DPs) from Central and Eastern Europe came to Canada, victims of both National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism, and Soviet occupation.
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1950s: Canada admitted Palestinian Arabs, driven from their homeland by the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.
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1950s-1970s: A significant influx of Middle Eastern and North African Jews fled to Canada.
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1951: The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was created. 1956: 37,000 Hungarians escaped Soviet tyranny and found refuge in Canada.
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1960: Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whose grandfather was a German refugee of the Napoleonic Wars, introduced Canada’s first Bill of Rights.