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1914-1945: Overview / War Years / Interwar Years / World War II / Changing Attitudes
War Years
Meanwhile, public support for British institutions and Anglo-Canadian culture led Prairie provincial governments to revoke provisions giving separate language schools to such immigrant groups as the Mennonites. The belief that unassimilable immigrants were labour agitators and promoters of radical politics became more fixed with the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Many eastern Europeans and Russians were sympathetic to the Red Russian victory and had long supported radical, leftist, politics in Europe. Finnish, Ukrainian, Jewish, and Russian immigrants, in fact, often did support radical political movements in their homelands. When conditions worsened for Canadian labour as a result of wartime inflation and strict
rationing, they supported strike action. The radical political sympathies of many immigrants would later lead them to support radical political movements in Canada, such as the United Farmers of Alberta, Social Credit, and the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF).
As historian Howard Palmer has pointed out, however, the radical politics embraced by some immigrants did not constitute the "Red Menace" imagined by many Canadians. Most immigrant groups were internally divided on political questions, and communist party leaders were often English, rather than Russian, Italian, or Ukrainian.
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Immigrant Radicals, 1919. Although many non-British immigrants sympathized with, and even supported, radical leftist political movements, British immigrants often were the leaders of such groups. Nevertheless, native-born Canadians tended to stigmatize "foreigners" (largely immigrants from continental Europe) as the motive force behind bolshevism and other radical movements. |
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