Immigration to Canada

During the 1880s Canada became concerned that the vast area between Ontario and British Columbia was largely unpopulated. There was real fear that the rapid expansion of settlers into the American West would spread northward, and by default, lay claim to The Northwest Territories. A railroad was started to cross the entire land east to west. Survey crews measured out blocks of townships, sections and quarter-sections for homesteads in a patchwork, stretching the 1500 km from Winnipeg to Edmonton. But advertising for the desired British homesteaders was unrewarded.

In the 1890s, the new Prime Minister, Sir Wilfred Laurier, appointed a Winnipeger, Clifford Sifton, as Minister of the Interior. Sifton very aggressively pursued the policy of settling Canada's West. In addition to advertising for immigrants in Western Europe, he also solicited in American newspapers, including those printed in Ukrainian. The greatest response to his open invitation was from Eastern Europeans. Dr. Josef Oleskow, an agronomist from Lviv in western Ukraine, deserves a good deal of credit for this. Oleskow became concerned that peasants were emigrating to Brazil to sure disaster. In 1895 he travelled through the Canadian Prairies. Back in Galicia he held meetings and published pamphlets to urge Ukrainians to emigrate to Canada. These efforts were of monumental importance, as described in Kaye, V.J. Early Ukrainian Settlement in Canada, 1895-1900. (University of Toronto Press, 1964).

Furthermore, agents of steamship lines, seeking easy profits from immigrant fares, travelled to the over-populated province of Galicia in the Austrian Empire, promising limitless free land in Canada.

The trickle became a flood. In the 24 years, from 1890 to the onset of WWI, some 400,000 ethnic Ukrainains came to Canada. They came mostly from a 150 by 300 kilometer area encompassing Lviv, Ternopil, Chernivtsi and Ivano-Frankivsk.

When Ukrainians began coming, Canada also sponsored advertisements to entice those in USA to emigrate. Five members of the Talpash family left Pennsylvania. In 1896 John and his young family took a train to Canmore, in the Northwest Territories (Alberta), and in 1898, Benedyk, Julia, Stephania, and Anton all left together for homesteads in Manitoba.