In 1965, the Canadian sociologist, John Porter, published The Vertical Mosaic to acknowledge the concept of the mosaic popularized by John Murray Gibbon in 1938 and to modify it. [1] Gibbon’s book, Canadian Mosaic: The Making of a Northern Nation, described the background and contributions of ethnic groups composing Canada, implying that the pieces of the mosaic were equal. [2] In contrast, Porter demonstrated the existence of hierarchies within Canadian society. With regard to ethnicity, he showed the superior position of the English and French “charter peoples” over New Canadians. [3]
Porter’s findings could scarcely have surprised Winnipeg Poles and the other national groups that added colour and substance to the mosaic. The City of Winnipeg had elected a few “ethnic” aldermen before the Second World War, but the groups that came to Canada after the 1880s made little impact on provincial and national political, economic, and intellectual life until the late 1960s. The rough edges of prejudice and overt discrimination had worn away by that time and equality was not far off, but Poles and other East European immigrants had to travel a long road to achieve it. [4]
In 1909, J. S. Woodsworth’s book on immigration, Strangers Within our Gates, proclaimed that, “Poles and police courts seem to be invariably connected in this country, and it is difficult for us to think of the people of this nationality other than in that vague class of undesirable citizens.” A. R. Ford, Woodsworth’s guest author for the Polish section, went on to explain that negative qualities stemmed from difficult circumstances rather than innate bad character or inferior genes, but he still thought that Polish immigrants to Canada were “far from the best class”: poor, uneducated, and “usually Catholics of a fanatical type.” In time, Ford assured his readers, Poles would become “industrious and thrifty farmers” in Canada as they had been in Europe. [5]
Ford and Woodsworth viewed Poles more favourably than many Anglo-Canadians did. The best-selling author, Ralph Connor (Charles Gordon) published a novel, The Foreigner, also in 1909, portraying Winnipeg’s North End in purely negative terms. His few identifiably Polish characters are drunken, violent, and dirty. [6] Connor at least thought that Poles could eventually reach Anglo-Canadian standards, especially farmers, but many Anglo-Canadians doubted even that. W. D. Scott, Superintendent of Immigration, believed that Poles and other recent immigrants from Austro-Hungarian Galicia actually chose to “live in crowded, insanitary and usually filthy quarters, [and] exist . . . upon food and under conditions which a self-respecting Canadian would refuse to tolerate.” Furthermore, they “enter … into unfair competition with the wage-earners of Canada and constitute a source of danger to the national life.” [7] Conservative MP, Thomas Sproule, went further, claiming that New Canadians “were imbued with instincts and natures which have not in themselves any tendency to elevate humanity but rather to lower it in every particular.” [8]
The first Poles came to Manitoba with the Selkirk Settlers in 1817, but numbers remained small until mass migration began around 1890. In 1901, 1,674 Poles lived in Manitoba but the number increased sharply by 1911 to 22,321, and reached a high point of 40,243 in 1931. [9] About one-third lived in the City of Winnipeg, comprising 5.9% of the population. Canadian policy viewed Polish immigration, along with the immigration of other east Europeans, with mixed feelings. Since too few of the favoured immigrants, Britishers, Scandinavians, Germans, and Americans, came to populate the empty Prairies, Canada turned to the “stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat.” Big business, especially the railways, lobbied to maximize immigration and the Canadian Government responded by accepting central and eastern Europeans with few restrictions. Its reluctance can be seen in the interwar classification of these New Canadians as “non-preferred.” [10] Negative stereotypes persisted and, as an Anglo-Canadian reporter observed, “ours was a society with a well-defined pecking order of prejudice” in which “anyone with a Ukrainian or Polish name had almost no chance of employment except rough manual labour.” [11]