Canada has experienced several successive waves of immigration from Ukraine, part of which was orchestrated by a priest from Rimouski, who will also be one of the defenders of the country’s independence.
When Ukraine temporarily tasted independence at the end of the First World War, its new president, Yevhen Petrouchevytch, asked a parish priest from Rimouski, Father Joseph Jean, to become both his private secretary and his interpreter. . Father Jean had already worked with energy for the accession to independence of this country. The adventure of the new independent state, under pressure from Moscow, will come to an end. However, Father Jean will continue to work for the Ukrainians, in particular with the political exiles who have taken refuge in Vienna and with the League of Nations in Geneva, the ancestor of the UN. It was partly around Joseph Jean that a large wave of Ukrainian immigration was organized in Quebec, but also in Canada, while he continued to call for the country’s independence.
Before the 1914-1918 war, this French-Canadian religious had expressed his desire to leave his village of Saint-Fabien-sur-Mer. He had met Metropolitan André Sheptytsky, then had converted to the Ukrainian rite. In the summer of 1914, when Europe was torn apart, he was there. In the courtyard of his monastery, hundreds of summary executions are carried out. He himself narrowly escapes the firing squad.
It was the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Soviet revolution and the upheaval of alliances at the end of the war that enabled Ukrainian Galicia to proclaim its independence. In Canada, meanwhile, many Ukrainians who arrived before 1914, suspected of collusion with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, were interned and abused. Independent Ukraine finds itself crushed, while the Bolsheviks in Moscow gain the upper hand in the civil war.
Ukrainians in Abitibi
After tasting prison and fleeing to Vienna, François Jean returns to Quebec. Beginning in 1925, known as Josaphat Jean, he encouraged the immigration of 15,000 Ukrainian families to the settlement lands of Abitibi. Ukraine is emptying because Stalin got there. The people are afflicted with impossible living conditions, decimated by an ideologically planned famine.
The first plans for a Ukrainian settlement in Abitibi are based on the arrival of no less than 10,000 families. They would be placed in the shadow of a new monastery, in a new kingdom that awaits them. This immigrant village is called Sheptetsky, in honor of the metropolitan of the same name. It was raised near Lac Castagnier, not far from Amos.
Sheptetski initially accommodates 50 families. But this colonization effort, far from everything, turns to failure. Hundreds of Ukrainians nevertheless end up settling in the region. In Rouyn itself, a small Ukrainian church testifies, again and again, to their strong presence. The history of the working world is not without knowing that the Ukrainians will be numerous to go down in the galleries of the mines. Joseph Jean, for his part, will then take care of other Ukrainian immigration villages, on the Alberta side. He even set up a museum there, located in Mundare.
The Canadian government will, for a long time, encourage Ukrainian immigration in order to colonize certain parts of the country, in particular the western prairies. There are four main waves of Ukrainian immigration to Canada. Given the Russian invasion in February 2022, it will probably be necessary to add a fifth one shortly.
The first wave of immigration took place between 1890 and the First World War. Beginning in 1890, immigrants from this region landed. The first people identified arrive in Montreal. In 1913, Canada welcomed 400,000 immigrants, while its population was approximately eight million. All things considered, that would be the equivalent of more than one and a half million immigrants today, in just one year. Of these, it is difficult to know precisely which ones should be considered Ukrainians, as national definitions have since changed. In the registers, as immigrants, they are listed as Galicians, Ruthenians, Russians, Bukovinians, Uniates, Greek Catholics and under several other denominations. Most of them, in any case, settled in Western Canada: Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta.
Some 1,000 Ukrainians settled in Montreal in the working-class neighborhood of Pointe-Saint-Charles. Others are found around Saint-Laurent Boulevard. They serve as cheap labor there. To the east, in the Frontenac district, at the corner of Hochelaga and Iberville streets, a first Ukrainian parish was built just before the 1939 war. Several Poles also settled in the area. The fact remains that the bulk of immigration during this period is found on the side of Western Canada. To all was promised the wealth of mountains of light wheat easily gathered which existed in truth only in dreams.
A second wave of immigration took shape in the interwar period. Famine, orchestrated by Stalin, encourages flight to the New World. The new arrivals come up against, in the expression of their religious convictions, the hierarchical conceptions of the Roman Catholics. An Orthodox congregation was born in Montreal in the mid-1920s. In the 1930s, a good part of the 4,000 Ukrainians in the metropolis lived in the working-class neighborhoods to the east. Many of them meet around De Lorimier Avenue, near Ontario Street. During this time, Father Jean was with this community, but in Manitoba.
In 1945, at the end of the war, the Canadian army had 40,000 Ukrainians in its ranks. Just before Moscow lowers the iron curtain on the region for good, a third period of Ukrainian immigration begins. Back in Ukraine, then temporarily installed in England, Father Joseph Jean, a fierce anti-Communist, took care to organize a large part of the immigration to Canada.
It was 30,000 Ukrainians who landed in Canada in 1947. There are still today, around rue de l’Ukraine, in Montreal, important traces of this community organized at the time in the shade of steeples. bulbous of a vast church. Some Ukrainians also settled in Lachine, in a new parish reserved for them. In Rouyn, the Ukrainian community, present for years, erected a Byzantine church in the second half of the 1950s. Ukrainians settled in all regions of Quebec.
A new wave
Until the 1960s, many Ukrainians fleeing the Soviet regime found refuge in Canada. Most of these newcomers go through Montreal first. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the normalization of relations with the former Soviet empire from the 1990s, a fourth wave of Ukrainian immigration arrived in Canada. So much so that in 2016 there were more than 42,000 citizens of Ukrainian origin in Quebec, according to the Ministry of Immigration, Francisation and Integration.
The invasion of Ukraine by the Russian army risks leading to a new wave of immigration. Ottawa announced two special programs for Ukrainians on Thursday. While obtaining a visa will still be required, a “Canada-Ukraine emergency travel authorization” will allow them to find temporary refuge in the country. The sponsorship program, which allows those already in Canada to bring their family members, will be accelerated for Ukrainians, on a permanent basis.
According to the 2016 Canadian census, almost 4% of the Canadian population is of Ukrainian origin. Since the beginning of the invasion, more than a million Ukrainian citizens, mostly women and children, have fled the country.