historical immigration patterns

  • highlanders

    Scots Highlanders, refugees of the Highland Clearances during the modernization of Scotland, settled in Canada.
  • Immigration to New France

    Throughout the 17th and much of the 18th century, European colonial administrations, charged with overseeing what would become Canada, did not consider settlement a priority. French or British governments initially seemed unprepared to expend vast quantities of money or energy necessary to encourage settlement. Nor was migration to the New World popular in France or Britain.
  • Immigration to canada

    3,000 Black Loyalists, among them freemen and slaves, fled the oppression of the American Revolution and came to Canada
  • loyalists

    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.
  • transportation

    Sir Guy Carleton, Governor of the British Province of Quebec, and later to become Lord Dorchester, safely transported 35,000 Loyalist refugees from New York to Nova Scotia. Some settled in Quebec, and others in Kingston and Adolphustown in Ontario.
  • first loyalists

    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.
  • anti-slavery

    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.
  • polish

    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.
  • jews

    Thousands of persecuted Jews, fleeing pogroms in the Pale of Settlement, sought refuge in Canada
  • italions

    Italians escaped the ravages of Italy’s unification as farmers were driven off their land as a result of the new Italian state reforms.
  • ukranian migration

    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.
  • second ukramian migration

    The second wave of Ukrainians fled from Communism, civil war and Soviet occupation.
  • third ukramian migration

    The third wave of Ukrainians fled Communist rule.
  • dp(displaced persons)

    250,000 displaced persons (DPs) from Central and Eastern Europe came to Canada, victims of both National Socialism (Nazism) and Communism, and Soviet occupation.
  • admitted

    Canada admitted Palestinian Arabs, driven from their homeland by the Israeli-Arab war of 1948.
  • influx

    A significant influx of Middle Eastern and North African Jews fled to Canada.
  • refugees

    The United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees was created.
  • hungarians

    37,000 Hungarians escaped Soviet tyranny and found refuge in Canada
  • bill of rights

    Prime Minister John Diefenbaker, whose grandfather was a German refugee of the Napoleonic Wars, introduced Canada’s first Bill of Rights.
  • chinese flee

    Chinese refugees fled the Communist violence of the Cultural Revolution.
  • flee soviet

    11,000 Czech refugees fled the Soviet and Warsaw Pact Communist invasion.
  • protocol

    Canada signed the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, and its Protocol, agreeing not to return a person to their country of origin if that person had grounds to fear persecution.
  • salvordor

    7,000 Chilean and other Latin American refugees were allowed to stay in Canada after the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende’s government in 1973.
  • Period: to

    deprived

    Deprived of political and religious freedom, 20,000 Soviet Jews settled in Canada.
  • labertion war

    After decades of being denied adequate political representation in the central Pakistani government, thousands of Bengali Muslims came to Canada at the outbreak of the Bangladesh Liberation War.
  • significant reform

    Significant reforms were made to the asylum determination system under the Balanced Refugee Reform Act (BRRA) and the Protecting Canada's Immigration System Act (PCISA), including implementing the Refugee Appeal Division at the Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada.
  • syrian refugees

    Close to 6,600 Bhutanese refugees arrived in Canada. Canada completes a seven-year commitment and welcomes more than 23,000 Iraqi refugees. Canada commits to and begins resettling 25,000 Syrian refugees.
  • new commers

    Canada resettled a historical number of refugees, welcoming over 46,000 newcomers and completing its commitment to resettle 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of February.
  • refugee admissions

    Canada announces historical increases in multiyear resettled refugee admissions targets, as well as new commitments for resettling refugees from Africa and the Middle-East.
  • serviver

    Canada resettled more than 1,300 survivors of Daesh in 2017 and 2018.