#ukrainian immigration to canada

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The SDPC [Social Democractic Party of Canada] at the Lakehead appears not to have been content merely to contest elections. In 1912, having recently formed a union, the mostly immigrant workers of the Canadian Northern Coal and Ore Dock Company went on strike for better wages, hours, and working conditions. Bloodshed resulted when company officials, using local police and the militia, tried to suppress the striking coal handlers. The chief of police, two constables, and two Italian strikers were wounded. Fearing a general strike, the CNR quickly acquiesced to the demands of the coal handlers.

There was much in this incident that recalled earlier labour strife at the Lakehead. A new element, however, was the growing influence of radical socialists, who were thought to have sway over the coal handlers and to have been instrumental in their inclusion in the trade union movement. Prominent among the activists were “members of the Social Democratic Party of Canada,” including the party’s organizers for Port Arthur and Fort William, the Cobalt miners’ union leader James P. McGuire and the Reverend William Madison Hicks, as well as Herbert Barker, a volunteer organizer for the AFL. In April 1912, the three men led a number of English-speaking socialists in Fort William in establishing Ontario Local 51 of the SDPC. Initial members also included W.J. Carter; an architect named Richard Lockhead; Sid Wilson, a member of the British-based Amalgamated Carpenters; and Fred Moore, owner of the printing press that printed Urry’s The Wage Earner. Significantly, most of the members appear to have been Finnish or Ukrainian. Before the strike, members of the Fort William SDPC had spoken at meetings of the coal handlers and, in the case of Hicks, played an active role by leading a parade of workers in confronting Port Arthur mayor S.W. Ray on his way to read the Riot Act to the strikers. The meeting between the two men and the violence that ensued were coincidental, according to Morrison, as

the Social Democratic party posed no real or imagined menace to the citizens of Port Arthur … what alarmed the English-speaking community was the newly won influence of the socialists with the immigrant workers.

Supporters of the ILP [Independent Labour Party] of New Ontario such as Urry found themselves “at odds with radical socialism” as

not only had the socialists played a prominent part in the strike, though not the riot, but they were also attempting to organize Thunder Bay’s entire waterfront.

...

Calls for Hicks’s arrest began to appear in newspapers in both cities and the surrounding countryside. On 1 August 1912, officials arrested him for his role in a “tumultuous assembly … likely to promote a breach of the public peace.” Shortly after Hicks’s arrest and conviction (although he received a suspended sentence), SDPC organizers began an active campaign to take control, or at the very least undermine, the ILP-led Trades and Labour Councils. Following the strike, they sought to stage a general strike on the waterfront and, ideally, spread it throughout both Port Arthur and Fort William. As Jean Morrison writes, however, this was “a move disparaged by the British labour men for its disregard of the law which required negotiations and conciliation preceding strikes by transportation workers.” The attempt failed and widened the rift formed during the municipal, provincial, and federal elections of 1908 and 1911 and the labour unrest earlier in 1912.

...

The SDPC was also not left untouched. In preparation for the 1913 Fort William civic election, Urry and Hicks jointly developed in opposition to the SDPC a manifesto describing the class struggle in general and the issues facing the region’s workers in particular .... On the recommendation of the Elk Lake, Porcupine, and Cobalt locals that Hicks be expelled, the matter was referred to the Fort William membership. Despite facing the possibility that its charter would be revoked, Local 51 refused to expel Hicks and launched a vigorous defence on his behalf. The convincing agitator had a coterie of true believers, who “defended him to the last ditch refusing to believe that Hicks would do anything wrong.” He also had his critics, evidently including the 400-strong Fort William branch, which, it appears, sided with the Dominion Executive and expelled Hicks.

...

With Hicks departed one highly personalized version of a response to the ambiguous legacy of Lakehead socialism. Both the ILP and the SDPC grew rapidly during 1913. The labour councils in the twin cities began to discuss unity, in the form of construction of a joint Central Labour Temple. The Finnish branch of the SDPC in Port Arthur also called out for working-class and socialist unity. Moreover, as a more tangible indication of potential unification of the socialist and labour movements, SDPC organizer Herbert Barker was elected president of the Port Arthur Trades and Labour Council in April 1913. As so often proved to be the case, however, such incipient unity was challenged by the region’s sheer class volatility. The strike by street railway workers in May 1913 was a volcanic moment. As David Bercuson writes:

The walk-out provided a focal point for much of the hatred and bitterness that had developed between labour and its enemies in the twin cities for several years.

Rioting and violence were sparked by the CPR’s attempts to use strikebreakers. When strikers overturned a streetcar operated by strikebreakers, police arrested one of the participants and, when a crowd tried to get him out of jail, fired into the crowd, killing a bystander. Local newspapers tried to pin the violence on the socialists, who were allegedly responsible for agitating the crowd. The railway workers belonged to the Trades and Labour Councils in both cities and, in a show of solidarity, both councils called for a general sympathy strike. These calls went unheeded and most workers returned to work after four days of protest. In response, Urry, James Booker, McGuire, Bryan, and many members of the SDPC met at the Finnish Labour Temple. They criticized the local trades and labour councils “for not being radical enough to resist the ruling of an unscrupulous upper class.” They hoped the councils would become “more radical.” Not surprisingly, the obviously inflamed right-wing media in the twin cities characterized the meeting as one of “sedition, anarchy, socialism, violence and most everything else calculated to worry orderly society and responsible government.” It was not a critique of the Lakehead workers reserved for the mainstream press. Mayor John Oliver of Port Arthur summed up the situation well when he argued that the continued unrest in Port Arthur and Fort William was not wholly due to working conditions. Making specific mention of the strikes of 1909, 1912, and 1913, he suggested that the unrest had been the result of socialist agitators. Oliver wrote:

There is hardly a night in the week that inflammatory speeches have not been made by several agitators … something will have to be done to either remove them or check their actions.

Interestingly, Frederick Urry and J.P. McGuire were specifically named for their alleged advocacy of a general strike. McGuire was further singled out for his reputed suggestion that it would be an easy thing to cut telephone, telegraph, and electric lines."

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 37-38, 40-42

[immaculatasknight]

What's wrong with this country?

[religioused]

For the recent immigrant to Canada who is not feeling welcome.

[inc-immigrationnewscanada]

Sask. Polytech in Regina provides free dental care for Ukrainian immigrants

Descrease article font size Increase article font size New Ukrainian immigrants were offered free dental care and wellness strategies at the Saskatchewan Polytechnic campus in Regina on Saturday with the help of over 160 students and volunteers. Each year, the campus chooses a different group of people in need for its health and wellness day. The day included presentations by nursing students…

[indelen]

Something about watching Fox News have a tarot reading as it's being annotated by experts on this matter on Tumblr really brings the insanity of the current political situation into sharp focus

[allthecanadianpolitics]

Once presenting itself as one of the world’s most welcoming countries to refugees and immigrants, Canada is launching a global online ad campaign cautioning asylum-seekers that making a claim is hard. The C$250,000 ($178,662) in advertisements will run through March in 11 languages, including Spanish, Urdu, Ukrainian, Hindi and Tamil, the immigration department told Reuters. They are part of a broader shift in tone by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unpopular government on immigration and an effort to clamp down on refugee claims. Migrants have been blamed for high housing prices, although some experts argue this is a simplistic explanation, and polls show a growing number of Canadians think the country admits too many newcomers.

Continue reading

Tagging: @newsfromstolenland

[mariacallous]

I do need to be clear about one thing before we start. “Vatnik” gets used interchangeably with “Russian” these days but it does actually have a definition. It was a pejorative term frequently used in the post-Soviet sphere to describe jingoistic followers of Russian propaganda.

In the contemporary usage this does genuinely describe a very large swath of Russian society. They may not be rabidly jingoistic but Russians are largely supportive of the invasion of Ukraine because it has personally impacted them minimally, I have previously discussed this at length in the context of Russian mobilization.

This is an imperial mindset. The war is “over there” and it’s not their problem and when the war does come home in the form of casualties or the occasional drone flyby, it’s an annoyance and an inconvenient reminder that those pesky little people have the audacity to resist and they could just become subjects and end all of their suffering and make this inconvenience go away.

This may seem very far away even with America’s new administration but Trump 2.0 wasted no time in engaging in delusions of imperial grandeur with his inaugural address referring to taking back the Panama Canal and explicitly using the phrase “manifest destiny.”

The administration has also discussed taking Greenland, military operations in Mexico (with the 82nd Airborne beginning preparations to deploy to the Southern border today) or annexing the entirety of Canada.1 As of recently, it has been reported that the Danish prime minister had a phone call with Donald Trump and Trump was very serious in his intention to take Greenland such that it has shaken many European leaders. Mexico, who has found itself in the crosshairs of the Trump administration over immigration and a completely fucking stupid idea that drug cartels can be dismantled by “doing a Sicario” refused to accept a US deportation flight earlier today. Canada, in response to rumblings of the Trump administration implementing tariffs2 with one of our closest trading partners, has signaled willingness to engage in retaliatory tariffs.

The last of those brings me to why I am absolutely losing it on my fellow countrymen.

The response of many Americans to the idea that Canada could retaliate with tariffs of their own is confused shock. As this thread on Bluesky from Sharon Kuruvilla demonstrates, the response of most Americans to the idea that someone might fight back is slack-jawed bewilderment that other people might want to see them suffer as we will make them.

I understand that this is Tiktok but this is genuinely how many Americans view other countries inconveniencing us by responding to our own actions. (Trade) War is something that happens over there, it doesn’t impact us beyond occasionally someone from your high school coming home in a casket draped with a flag, but for the people that we bring war to, it is unimaginable pain and suffering that Americans have never experienced firsthand.

Americans and Russians are really not so different in this aspect. We are both content to let the imperial wars we wage fade into background noise while we kill people over there. We did this with Iraq and Afghanistan. The Russians did it with Crimea and the War in Donbas and they’d like to keep doing it but tenacious Ukrainian defense that extracts a tremendous toll of blood and a strategic bombing campaign that makes it impossible.

A common retort from Americans is “I didn’t vote for him, why should I suffer?” and this is an abdication of collective responsibility.

We might be a lot like Russians but America is not Russia. We have free elections, we have freedom of speech, we have freedom of assembly. We do not have a state security service that targets dissidents as the Russians do. We also do not have a society that has been subject to the same kind of atomization that Russian society has. Acting like Russians in this context is a disgrace.

Many Americans like to posture about how they protested the Iraq War in 2003 and how that should absolve them of sin. But the question that should follow is “where were you in 2004? Or 2006? 2008? 2010?” This may be an unreasonable standard of collective responsibility but it is not an incorrect one and my fellow countrymen can’t even seem to make it to 2003.

Indifference to our export of violence and suffering while simultaneously being shocked and confused that someone would dare retaliate for having that foisted on them is vatnik behavior.

This is also before we discuss how many Americans have responded to Trump’s imperial delusions with jokes and discussions of how this will actually be a positive for American politics because they do not know anyone who has experienced the violence that invasion and occupation can unleash.

These people will also inevitably deflect from any criticism of this rhetoric with some form of the schrodinger’s douchebag argument in which they were simultaneously joking but also you’re a hysterical dweeb for thinking it will happen or that I was serious.

I understand irony-poisoning is the new cool thing because showing that you care about your fellow humans is cringe but this is not something that should be joked about and it is especially not something that should be joked about given our current administration. I have seen Americans say (claiming this to be in jest) that “Canadians have no real culture” or “Canada wasn’t a sovereign country until the 80s” which may seem to be a stupid joke but this is also how you normalize the invasion, occupation, and forced assimilation of another nation.

“We are brotherly peoples, what’s really going to change for you?” is a genuinely repulsive statement because Russia’s genocide of Ukrainians is based on that exact idea. “We are the same (Russian), we will kill you if you disagree.”

If you spent any significant amount of time on Twitter since the Russian invasion, you’d probably have seen at least one instance of Americans of all political affiliations bemoaning Russian conscripts (who aren’t actually conscripts) being wasted by Ukrainian drones and calling anyone engaging in schadenfreude a disgusting freak.

This is imperial sympathy. A manifestation of Americans subconsciously realizing how much they have in common with Russians.

Americans instinctually sympathize with Russian invaders more than they do with Ukrainian defenders because foreign imperial wars are what American military policy in the 21st century is known for. Americans don’t remember a time when they had to fight to defend their friends and family from an invader who wished to slaughter them and take their homes. Even when we fought just wars, they were wars overseas. Americans sympathize with the Russian mobik making the sign of the cross before a grenade is dropped on him after a failed attempt to storm a treeline because they can more easily imagine a shell hole like that being their final resting place and the guy defending his home being death manifest.

Maybe we are just a bunch of fucking Russians and we haven’t realized it yet.

1

I would strongly recommend against dismissing this as the most powerful man in the world engaging in “we do a little trolling.” James discusses this dynamic in his own piece.

2

Trump quite literally believes that tariffs are a thing you do that makes other countries give you free money so other presidents are stupid for not doing it. Most Americans probably agree.

[archivist-crow]

The Chilliwack Poltergeist - Chilliwack, British Columbia, Canada - 1951

An outbreak of poltergeist phenomena that occurred in the 1950s in Chilliwack, British Columbia, probably due to the human agency of a teenaged girl. The girl's aunt believed that racial prejudices were the cause. The residents of Chilliwack called whatever was causing the disturbances "The Thing."

Anna Duryba

Anna Duryba was a Ukrainian immigrant who moved to Chilliwack from Saskatchewan in 1933. She worked as a domestic, saving her money until she could buy a 10-acre chicken ranch a mile out of town. She lived there in a four-room cottage. In October 1951, her 14-year-old niece, Kathleen, came to live with her. Several months later, poltergeist disturbances began. Objects flew about and damaged windows, and loud, violent hammering sounded throughout the cottage, as though someone were using a jackhammer. The noises seemed to emanate from the northeast corner of the house. No damage was ever visible, despite the terrible pounding sound.

Anna thought a local trickster was the cause, but soon felt that someone was deliberately trying to drive her off her property: Durybas brother, Alex, who lived nearby, believed that someone local who did not like Ukrainians was trying to force his sister out. On at least one occasion, a sheriff's deputy was called to investigate.

The deputy, A. J. Edwards, agreed with Alex, whereupon Alex armed himself with a shotgun and stationed himself at his sister's cottage. When the disturbances commenced, Alex fired off shots and shouted threats. Neighbors armed with shotguns stood watch as well.

The disturbances not only continued, but got worse. The hammering and banging occurred up to 30 times a night, even when the house was floodlit and under observance by neighbors, and also during the day. The noise raced about the cottage. Anna would run outside and try to catch the perpetrator, always to no avail.

Even more maddening, "The Thing" seemed to react to people. Once when the hammering began, Anna ran to a window and yelled, "Go ahead, do it again, you silly fool." The hammering moved to beneath the window. No one was outside. When Alex challenged "The Thing," it answered by shaking the cottage and windows.

Locals offered explanations. Maybe the noises were being caused by exceptionally dry ground beneath the cottage. Another explanation proposed was that an electrical problem of some sort was to blame.

Anna refused to leave. But niece Kathleen, whose health was poor and who suffered from "nerves," was showing strain. The Reverend W. T. Clarke recognized that Kathleen might be the focal point and persuaded Anna to send her away to Vancouver for a while. During the 10 days the girl was gone, the poltergeist disturbances stopped. They resumed upon her return.

Others wanted to investigate the link between the girl and the phenomena, but Anna and Alex refused to cooperate—or even to deal with anyone on the matter anymore. Their explanation was that everything was mysteriously caused by racial prejudice.

One person who was able to witness the disturbances before the Durybas ceased communicating was psychical researcher R. S. Lambert. He wrote that he heard the sounds on four occasions: rapid, violent rapping on the outer wall near a window, between 8 P.M. and midnight. The noises sounded like a pneumatic hammer and lasted for one to two minutes at a time. Anna and Kathleen were present on three of those occasions; Kathleen was asleep in her bedroom on the fourth. However, Lambert agreed with the Durybas that a hostile person was trying to drive Anna and Kathleen out.

Abridged text from The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, Third Edition by Rosemary Ellen Guiley (Checkmark Books - 2007)

[burningchandelier]

My mom got a DNA test done and it didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.

Ukrainian Ashkenazi. The Wiseman Family.

We know where we come from.

We went as far North as we could when there was nowhere safe for us in Eastern Europe. We made a home for ourselves in Lerwick, Scotland. Scotland, the only country in Europe that has never expelled Jews, kept us safe for a while, but a poor family could only live at the end of the world in the Arctic Circle for so long. There were too many fishermen and not enough people to buy fish.

Between wars, we went South again, to Germany. We didn’t stay.

I am grateful every day that my great-great grandfather could see that there was trouble coming for his family. He sent his four children and wife to Canada and followed the next year. So many of us did not.

We found a place in Toronto where we watched what happened to our loved ones in Europe. We forgot Hebrew. It was easier that way.

My great-grandmother kept secrets:

Her first daughter, born out of wedlock, was raised by her parents as one of their own.

Her second daughter was told that her father was dead, rather than divorced away (it was a different time— divorce was shameful, death was inevitable).

Her job was mysterious. Officially, she worked for the state department as a pay roll clerk. I don’t know why any pay roll clerks would have traveled to Russia during the Cold War, but she did many times.

The secret she kept the longest was her heritage. As far as anyone knew, she was a severe Scottish immigrant and fiercely proud of it. Only my mother, her favorite, had suspicions.

When Granny Annie Wiseman died, she left everything to her favorite granddaughter. The money, the house, and everything inside it. Every memory of who we are.

Years later, my mother fell in love with a Jewish man. They raised me together. I had the privileges and the pains of knowing who I was. I carry our family burdens and I honor them.

Someday, I will name my daughter after the woman I never met who passed our heritage to me through the simple and brave act of survival. Her assimilation kept us alive. Her secrets got me here. She left the breadcrumbs that let us find our way home.

We know where we come from.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"The activities of A.T. Hill during these years provide an example of how many socialists at the Lakehead reacted to the changing circumstances in Canada. Like many, Hill had re-evaluated his ideological position following the end of the Winnipeg General Strike and during the tumultuous years when the One Big Union (OBU) and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) had fought for hegemony in the region. By early 1920, he no longer believed that either the syndicalism offered by the IWW or the variation espoused by the OBU would result in the social change he desired. Travelling to Superior, Wisconsin, where he had worked in the past as a harvester and lumber worker, he enrolled in the American Finnish Socialist Federation’s school. There he and fellow future prominent Finnish Canadian Communists fell under the influence of Emeli Parras, editor of Työmies and secretary of a local unit of the American Communist Party. Parras’s courses spurred Hill to join William Z. Foster and Charles Ruthenberg’s United Communist Party. Shortly after, he became one of its many members who flooded the Canadian borderlands speaking to workers about Leninism and the Communist movement. At first, Communist efforts focused on former IWW strongholds and those towns and regions where growing dissatisfaction with the OBU was greatest. Hill began agitating in Fort Frances, Ontario. Gradually, building on his earlier reputation as an organizer throughout the Lakehead area, he became a leading radical throughout the region. Often pitting himself against William Arnberg, a former organizer for the OBU and now a Wobbly agitator, he argued that the Soviet state, as constructed by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, was a necessary precondition for the transformation of capitalism into socialism. Social Democratic Party of Canada (SDPC) activists such as Richard Loughead (also referred to as Lockhead), William Checkley, and Harry Bryan followed Hill in seeing the Communist Party as a way to preserve and develop the radicalism they had developed before 1918.

...

The Worker's Party of Canada [the first name of the Communist Party of Canada] consisted of groups of five to ten members, which, on reaching ten, formed a branch. Two or more branches formed a local that belonged to a subdistrict within a larger geographically designated district. Theoretically, each group possessed an elected “Organizer,” and these in turn formed the “Branch Executive Committee.” This committee elected a “Branch Organizer,” who in turn led the formation of a “Local Executive Committee.” The committee’s representative, a “Local Organizer,” joined with others to form a Sub-District Committee that, along with any “Language Section District Committees,” acted on the District Committee that sent a representative to the Central Executive Committee of the party.

Unfortunately, this structure rarely worked as planned. The highly centralized structure envisaged by Communists came up against the deeply rooted realities of ethnic and regional politics. Adequate organizers were often difficult to find and the more successful ones tended to be moved to those regions deemed most important. Factionalism also emerged almost immediately. Rooted in the differences that had existed among the organizations before the founding convention, it would form a consistent thread through the 1920s and early 1930s, often manifesting itself in the ethnic differences that existed within the new party.

...

The CPC leadership focused on consolidating its position within the Canadian left and establishing party unity. This was no small task, considering the disparate elements brought together under its umbrella. By 1922, most of the Socialist Party of Canada’s membership had joined the new Workers’ Party of Canada. Disillusioned members of the OBU, the SDPC, and the IWW joined from all parts of the country. Very early on, the various ethnically based language organizations that had once been associated with the SDPC and the OBU became the backbone of the WPC. Owing to their strength, language sections with a certain level of autonomy were established to stave off the divisions that had plagued the SPC and the OBU in earlier times. One of the earliest language sections to be formed, and the one with the greatest influence at the Lakehead, was Finnish.

Hill’s election to the nine-person provisional executive in December assured both the legal and illegal parties of affiliation with the FOC. He figured prominently in the formation of the first Finnish Socialist Section of the WPC, was integral to the Finnish Organization of Canada’s [FOC] decision to affiliate directly with the WPC in 1922, and assisted in its reorganization on a club basis. In the months following the formation of the WPC, Hill and other well-known socialists, such as Alf Hautamäki, began making periodic trips to Northwestern Ontario, extolling the virtues of the Comintern and scouting locations for potential branches.

Hautamäki is an intriguing character who, in many respects, is symptomatic of the Finnish socialist experience. Nothing is known of his life before he appeared in Ontario lumber camps in the early 1920s as an organizer for the fledgling Lumber Workers Industrial Union of the One Big Union. Like many Finns, he appears to have migrated from Finland in search of work, but with a strong belief in socialism, particularly the version emanating from revolutionary Russia. Following the OBU split in 1920 and the formation of the CPC in 1921, Hautamäki joined as an organizer. He quickly rose to prominence as a leading member of the FOC and editor of the Toronto-based Finnish Communist newspaper Metsätyöläinen (the Lumber Worker). He became head of the CPC’s powerful lumber workers’ union, and the leading Communist figure at the Lakehead. Within the twin cities and in the surrounding countryside, he was just as well known for his worker-poetry and plays that focused on topics such as lumber camp life, love, strikes, and alcoholism. His plays were frequently performed in Finnish halls from Sudbury to the Manitoba border. Hautamäki’s story ended just as mysteriously as it began. He disappeared from the record in the mid-1930s, like so many migrant Finnish workers during the period. In keeping with his personality, the meetings that Hautamäki organized with Finnish socialists at the Lakehead in the early 1920s were open and frank. They included members from the Finnish Support Circle of the OBU, with which many of the Communists had joint memberships. In February 1921, through a morphing of the Finnish Support Circle and the Finnish Association, a branch of the FOC was formally re-established and immediately affiliated with the WPC. Although the FOC would join “in its entirety as the Workers’ Party Finnish Section in February 1922,” many Finns preferred in 1921 to affiliate only with the Trade Union Educational League, a “non-partisan trade union auxiliary, interested only in the ‘renovation’ of a declining trade union movement.” The Ukrainian Labour-Farmer Temple Association (ULFTA) also eventually affiliated with the WPC, and constituted the second largest ethnic section, after the Finns. Formed in late 1917 by Matthew Popovich and other Ukrainian socialists as the Ukrainian Social Democratic Party, by 1919 the Winnipeg-based organization had established a number of branches in Northern Ontario and western Canada. Its strength remained, however, in the Rocky Mountain mining region and in the cities of Winnipeg and Edmonton. The spread of the ULFTA had been hampered during the final years of the First World War when the Canadian government declared it an “illegal Bolshevik Organization.” When it re-emerged in the early 1920s, it did so slowly and cautiously, often choosing to infiltrate existing organizations. Such was the case at the Lakehead. During the late 1910s and early 1920s, Ukrainian socialists chose to work through the Winnipeg-based Workers’ Benevolent Association (WBA). Just months after the establishment of the WBA in Winnipeg, a branch appeared in West Fort William. A second branch followed in April 1923 and a third, in Port Arthur, by April 1926. As indicated by Popovich’s role as its president, a connection between the WBA and the ULFTA existed from the start. Not surprisingly, shortly after the ULFTA’s affiliation with the WPC, the WPC used the WBA as a beachhead within the Ukrainian community. Ukrainians associated with the ULFTA at the Lakehead would reflect the national composition of the CPC and form the second-largest regional group, after the Finns."

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 92-96.

[mysillytdsideblog]

Total ROTI headcanons

race & identities

mike

Ethnicity: italian-mexican

Nationality: canadian

second gen immigrant from mexico to manitoba, canada

speaks spanish, italian, and english

plural they/them collective pronouns

no set identity bc of being a system, ive made a post about the alters identities

Scott

Race: White

first gen immigrant from southern US to canada

speaks english

cis straight

Anne Maria

Ethnicity: Mexican

Nationality: American-Canadian

Moved from Jersey to Canada

Speaks english

she/her

cis straight

Zoey

Ethnicity: Japanese

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english

she/her

cis straight

Dakota

Race: White

Nationality: Canadian

Speaks english

she/her

cis straight

Dakota

Ethnicity: Russian

Nationality: Canadian

lives in Quebec

speaks english, french, and russian

They/She

Pangender Pansexual

Lightning

Ethnicity: Morrocan

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english

he/him

cis straight

B

Race: Black

Nationality: American-Canadian

Moved from Brooklyn to Canada

speaks english and french

he/him

transmasc unlabled

Brick

Ethnicity: Korean-Chinese

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english and chinese mandarin

he/him

cis gay

Sam

Race/Ethnicity: White-Ashkanazi Jew

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english, hebrew, arabic, and some japanese and chinese

he/him

cis straight

Cameron

Race: Black

Nationality: Canadian

speaks a little bit of a lot of things but only fluent in english

he/him

cis idk what

Jo

Ethnicity: Polish-Ukrainian-German-Greek

Third Gen Ukrainian immigrant to canada

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english

she/her

?? lesbian

Staci

Race: White

Nationality: Canadian

speaks english

she/her

cis straight

[historia-vitae-magistras]

You may have already made a post about this so sorry if so, but what are your headcanons regarding how Matt and Katya met? And how they kept touch over the years?

Love your content btw!!

Thank you! And actually, somehow, no one has asked me that on any of the blogs! I had to think and coalesce some thoughts. This got long so I am going to split it into two parts but their meeting!

The Trans-Canada railway was completed in the 1880s and finally opened up what was called the ‘last best west.’ Between the Canadian Rockies in the far west and the western edge of the woodlands that define eastern Canada in Manitoba, the prairies stretch out in what looks to a child of the eastern woodlands like a vast treeless void. Grasslands and steppes are incredibly ecologically important, but I am ethnically a clinker-built canoe lover, and they scare the shit out of me. Judging by settlement patterns, most French Canadians agreed. As the American West closed, some Americans were willing to join Canadians and take land ripped from indigenous peoples too. Alberta was a result. Concerned about American settlement, in 1896, the Dominion of Canada’s federal government coordinated with the foreign office of the British Empire to look for more settlers. At the same time, in what was then the Austro-Hungarian empire, Galicia was likely the poorest place in continental Europe, with the only other comparable example being famine-era Ireland. The other Ukrainian-speaking areas of the Austro-Hungarian empire (75-80 of that territory was held by the Russian Empire) weren’t much better off. Each government found a solution in the other. Britain, representing Anglo-dominated Canada, and the Austrians shook hands, and the flow began. The US saw the largest share of Eastern European immigration in this period, but the majority who sailed to Canada were Ukrainians. And even before immigration, the region's international ties were based on Canadian financial interests. So, what does this mean for Katya and Matt?

The scene I imagine is that while the powerful wheel and deal, two products of empire crossed paths. One of these meetings may have taken place during a summer folk festival. Girls wove wreaths of flowers into their hair and floated others down the river. Songs were sung, vodka and wine flowed, and dancers joined hands. While the Austrians and the British bargained, a young man not so far removed from his peasant roots and his own saint’s day celebrated with fire and river wandered into the edge of a valley clearing at the end of the longest day of the northern year. As a maple or spruce was decorated, the sun sank, and the last light of day fell like fire light onto a Carpathian river valley. Bonfires were lit. Against a world on fire, a child of the woodlands looked upon the silhouette of his future, crowned with birchwood silver woven into her braids. Katya sensed him, a being like herself from across the world and turned. She looked at him a long moment, with eyes belonging to a world since passed set in the face that would one day be the image that sprang into Matthew’s mind when he needed to summon a memory of home that would not cleave him in two. She bid him to approach and, with one gesture, changed their fates.

Later, he would find out she spoke the court French of his earliest years, but this night, there is only Katya’s outstretched hand and burning blue eyes reflecting fire and Matt’s fingers lacing into hers to spin in the dance of all the other young men and women. There is no discussion of soil and wheat, nor opportunity and affection. There is only alcohol, laughter, music, fire and spinning, his mouth full of her language, unknown but already familiar. There is only a lightening of her eyes as she enjoys herself, her head flung back in laughter as he chokes on pear horilka stronger and sweeter than any whiskey he’s ever made. Her wreath topples out of her hair, and she bursts into laughter as he snatches it up and runs, calling over his shoulder, and she hikes up her skirts and follows, hand outstretched, only to grasp onto him and run, stride long and confident as they leap together to make it over the bonfire.

Still, together, hands clasped, his right her and left and left touching the laurel wreath, the last symbol she indulges from her Varangian roots. Eye contact, a significance, a weight that will one day balance the heaviness of history. She will press his heart into the shape of hers with that weight. He will give it back in every way he can, the ballast of whatever love she’ll let him give. But for now, in the last light of day, there is only a young man and a young woman hand in hand, circling a fire under a night sky. Here, they are under a star-streaked Milky Way that gives way to a mead moon rising over the mountains. Someday, save them; that moon will be the only witness to this night when mortality leaves alive only a man, a woman, and their most human memory.

[theworldofwars]

KAPUSKASING INTERNMENT CAMP 1914 - 1922 When the First World War began, Canada established internment camps to detain persons viewed as security risks. Prejudice and wartime paranoia led to the needless internment of several thousand recent immigrants. The majority were Ukrainians whose homeland was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. One of the largest camps was built across the river from here at a remote railway siding. Despite harsh conditions, some 1,300 internees constructed buildings and cleared hundreds of acres of spruce forest for a government experimental farm. In 1917 most were paroled to help relieve wartime labour shortages. Thereafter the camp held prisoners of war and political radicals, including leaders of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike.

[mariacallous]

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has captured so many headlines in the last week with his proposals to invade Greenland and take over Canada and the Panama Canal that one can be forgiven for overlooking the issue he is most likely to focus on in his first week in office: immigration. He has called undocumented workers “savage gangs” who are “poisoning the blood” of the country and has promised to deport millions of them despite warnings from economists about the high costs.

Will Trump actually do as he says? What market forces could check him? On the latest episode of FP Live, I spoke with Edward Alden, a Foreign Policy columnist, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, and the co-author of the new book When the World Closed Its Doors: The COVID-19 Tragedy and the Future of Borders. Subscribers can watch the full interview on the video box atop this page. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.

Ravi Agrawal: What have Trump and his team actually said they will do on immigration?

Edward Alden: They have promised what they call “the largest mass deportation in American history.” They promised to expand detention facilities dramatically, to reach into neighborhoods and companies. They’ve roughly targeted a million deportations a year, which is more than twice as many as any president over the last couple of decades. So rhetorically, at least, they are promising something very big.

RA: And the Biden administration just extended temporary humanitarian protections for about 1 million immigrants from places like Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan for about 18 months.

EA: If the courts behave the way they have in the past, these people will be protected in the United States through the expiration. But that’s 18 months in most cases, so you’re still in the middle of Trump’s second term. The most vulnerable people at the moment were the nearly a million people brought in from Cuba, from Haiti, from Nicaragua, and from Venezuela under what’s known as “parole.” This was a major initiative over the last couple of years of the Biden administration. Actually, there are Ukrainians and Afghans who are in the United States under a similar status. The U.S. government knows where these people are. That status was essentially granted through executive authority by President [Joe] Biden but could be eliminated by executive authority under President Trump. So, that’s a really vulnerable set of individuals. And common in all those countries is a fair degree of internal chaos and economies facing enormous challenges. So, if you’re sending those numbers of people back home, that’s going to be disruptive in those places. It raises the question, of course, of whether they’ll even be accepted. Venezuela and Cuba, in particular, have a long history of not cooperating with U.S. deportation policies. So there could be significant unrest in the region if the Trump team goes about this the way they’re threatening.

RA: What are the costs? What are the economic impacts that such a move would have?

EA: Just the sheer costs for the government, we’re talking about billions and billions of additional dollars. We’re spending $50 billion plus on immigration enforcement. That’s going to have to go way up. You’re going to need expanded detention facilities. The limit right now is about 40,000 at any given time. And people facing deportation have a right to petition their cases to our immigration courts, which are an arm of the Department of Justice. Those courts are hopelessly backlogged so you’re going to need to see an expansion of judges. You’re going to need to see an expansion of detention space. You may need to see many more Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. There’s talk about deploying the National Guard to assist these efforts. That has enormous costs. Just the sheer logistical costs of this are very large.

And then, it has significant consequences for the industries that employ these people and in legal immigration, as well. There’s a real internal fight in Trump world right now between those like Elon Musk, who very much like the H-1B program that brings in skilled migrants, and those like Steve Bannon, who would like to shut it down. There are issues in the water here that are likely to affect technology companies in California, universities, hospitals, and other places where these highly skilled immigrants are employed. I don’t think we should imagine that we’re just talking about the sectors that hire unauthorized workers. The implications of this are potentially much broader.

RA: And there are studies by the Peterson Institute and others that point to real loss of GDP.

EA: They’ve suggested [more than] 2 percent if the full scale of this is carried out.

RA: It’s worth then asking what kind of market signals might deter the incoming Trump administration.

EA: To a considerable extent, the markets are really the only constraint on this. Congress is urging the president on. The courts have proven pretty lenient, though initiatives will face obstacles in the lower courts.

There’s a tension here. The Trump team wants to go big and send a very strong message from day one that there’s a new sheriff in town, so anybody who’s here in an undocumented capacity should be scared. The hope with that is to scare people enough to generate what’s sometimes called self-deportation, so rather than waiting, they make arrangements to go back to their home country. And so there’s some incentive for the Trump team to go really hard in the beginning. There are some of the same incentives to go out of the box very hard on trade.

The possibility for a strong negative market reaction is there. And that, I think, will clearly trouble the administration. Donald Trump pays close attention to what the markets do. There’s every reason to believe that the impact of going hard on trade and immigration from day one is likely to be strongly negative. In the markets, there was a real Trump bump right after the election and now there’s some sober second thoughts, particularly about the inflationary implications of both removing migrants and tariffs.

RA: On the one hand, a lot of big companies are looking forward to deregulation and tax cuts under Trump. But on the other hand, there is a worker problem. Historically, businesses have lobbied for better immigration policies, especially in the case of agriculture. How are you seeing that trade-off play out now?

EA: I’m going to editorialize more than I normally do. I’ve been dismayed watching what’s happened to business on this issue. What we’ve seen over the last decade is business just abandon comprehensive immigration reform. They’ve made their peace with the Trump right. With the exception of a few sectors, like agriculture, immigration has never been a tier-one issue. Taxes are probably top, and deregulation is second. And so companies appear willing to have made their peace with the Trump agenda because they see all these other benefits. I think that’s pretty shortsighted. Again, I think if you put the immigration agenda together with the trade agenda, there’s the potential for some pretty significant harm to business.

RA: If the Trump team were listening to this conversation, they would say that deportations will open up employment and housing opportunities to American workers. How do you assess those claims?

EA: You can find specific cases. In the construction industry, it would be hard to argue that undocumented migrants have not taken some construction jobs. Construction, when I was younger, was a better paid job on the whole. And I think immigrants have, no question, taken some of those jobs. And there are other anecdotal cases, [such as] a famous story in Florida about Disney forcing existing employees to train Indian replacements coming in on H-1B or L1 visas.

But if you look at the economic research on this, the results are very clear. Immigrants create more jobs than they take away, partly because of the demand that comes to the U.S. economy and partly because of the synergies with the U.S. workforce. Some of the undocumented are working very low-wage, menial jobs that are hard to get Americans to do at any wage. Others are filling in gaps in the high-tech industries. Elon Musk has a point: We’re not going to be leading in artificial intelligence if we don’t continue to bring in the sharpest immigrants in the tech sector.

We’re also, of course, in an economy where unemployment is only 4 percent, 4.1 percent. These ebb and flow, but there’s generally a labor shortage in the market. There’s some good research that shows that the reasons the United States has had such a strong economy over the last couple of years and the decreasing inflation rates is in part because we saw so much immigration.

RA: There’s a global picture of anti-immigrant sentiment; it is not unique to the United States. But there’s also a perspective in recent history such that it’s worth assessing the Biden administration’s role in bringing us to a point where it is normalized to speak about immigration in this way. Can you assess what the Biden administration got wrong?

EA: I’ve been studying the polls for decades now. It would be wrong to speak of generalized anti-immigrant hostility in the United States. That’s not the case. But what people dislike is the loss of control. If there’s any defining feature of modern globalization and technology, it’s disruption. Jobs are changing. Conditions are changing. What voters want is a little more predictability and order. And the immigration system, particularly on the border with Mexico, has seemed very out of control for a long time. Trump, in his first term, never brought the border under control. But rhetorically, he made the case that he was the strong leader who was going to control the border. Biden and the folks around him initially were more concerned with the many human rights violations associated with the Trump policies, particularly the separation of parents from children. And so, when they came into office, they immediately began to soften those tactics to try to put in place a more humane regime. Coupling that with the easing of COVID-19 restrictions, you saw this huge surge of people. Actually, if we’re being comprehensive, there’s a third factor, which is disruption in the region: political chaos in Venezuela and Haiti, as well. So there was this huge surge, and the administration allowed the perception to sink in that the border was really out of control.

Two years ago, the administration began to get its act together. Today, it’s hard to make an asylum claim if you’re crossing illegally. If you make that claim when you cross the border illegally, you’ll be sent back. That’s the stick. But the carrots are that the administration admits people on temporary parole, either directly or through the legal ports of entry. The numbers on encounters returned to the lows of early in the Trump administration. But Biden never got credit for that. It was too late.

RA: In many of his recent interviews, Trump has said that he has a mandate to deport illegal immigrants and really to transform immigration. What is your understanding of what the American people actually want?

EA: Pew has been polling on immigration issues for years. There’s some combination of people being very worried about the lack of control, pro-law enforcement, but also generally pro-immigrant, so there’s this tension.

And the Trump folks, like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, have their own ideological agenda. But you’re right. They believe they’ve been given a mandate to restore law and order by deporting everyone who doesn’t have status in the United States.

I don’t think that’s what the American people want. I think a lot of the outrage is over particular cases of heinous criminal acts committed by undocumented immigrants. There’s a broad consensus that we need to do a better job of building cooperation between local police and federal enforcement officials so that when out-of-status people are arrested for serious crimes, immigration agents are brought immediately. We need to do more to work with countries that are refusing to take these deportees back because sometimes people remain in the United States after being ordered deported because their countries won’t accept them. There’s strong support for that. But workplace raids are highly visible and cause a lot of outrage. If ICE agents go door to door looking for undocumented migrants, that’s going to cause a lot of backlash. So I don’t think they have a mandate for the more extreme versions of what the administration is talking about. And if they try, they will get a lot of pushback, not just from business but from the public more broadly.

RA: You mentioned a couple of names. Personnel is policy, after all. So, Stephen Miller. He was in the news last year at that infamous campaign event at Madison Square Garden, where he said that “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Tell us a bit more about what he has in mind for immigration policy.

EA: I think Miller strongly believes this stuff. He has been championing the anti-immigrant agenda for well over a decade now. And Miller’s a smart guy. He has schooled himself in the intricacies of immigration law, which is immensely complex. And in [Trump’s] first term, he was very successful at getting the Department of Homeland Security to change regulations, using executive orders that made it a lot harder to migrate to the United States. This time around, he doesn’t just want to do that. He wants to lead this mass deportation operation. He wants to tighten the border again. They’re talking about reimposing Title 42, a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention law used during COVID-19 that allows you to keep people out of the country if there’s a danger of a communicable disease. So they’re looking at tuberculosis or respiratory syncytial virus trying to find some justification.

You asked about economic effects. Miller firmly believes that immigrants are unwanted competition for American workers. And without immigrants, both in lower and higher skilled fields, employers will have to adapt, and they will hire more American workers. So he’s a real, true believer in this stuff. And he’s going to be the deputy chief of staff in charge of policy in the White House, so in a real position to pull a lot of the strings.

RA: And then there’s Tom Homan, who’s been named border czar. He’s a former cop, notably the ICE head responsible for family separations in the first Trump administration. What are you expecting from him?

EA: He is the logistics guy. Policy is one thing, but Homan is the one who’s got to figure out how to do it right. You’ve got limited resources in the Department of Homeland Security. You’ve got practical constraints in terms of detention space and in terms of the immigration courts. You’ve got to deal with public opinion. Homan has been doing this stuff for 30 years. He’s experienced. He knows how the agency works. He knows what different levers he has to pull. So he’s likely to be pretty effective at this.

Again, none of this adds up in any clear and simple way to a million deportations a year. But if any combination can succeed in doing that, it’s Stephen Miller and Tom Homan.

RA: Your book, When the World Closed Its Doors, is a fantastic read. But one chilling idea that you explore in the book is that COVID-19 became a proof of concept that governments can completely control their borders for extended periods, and the public actually supports it.

EA: I’ve been working on this stuff since 9/11, which really created a revolution in border management. The shock of the 9/11 hijackers getting into the United States so easily made American officials very aware of the holes in the border control system. A lot of that was spread to the rest of the world. Technology has made a huge difference, with biometrics and scanning systems. We are better equipped to carry out border enforcement than we were 20, 25 years ago. And COVID-19 was that kind of proof of concept.

We argue in the book that the success in border closure and travel restrictions made it easier and more likely that governments will use these tools in the future, not just for an obvious global threat like COVID, but for other threats like drugs, terrorism, or unauthorized migration. And this was largely popular among the public. Getting back to my earlier point, people crave a better sense of control and greater order. When governments say, “We can restrict our borders and protect you from threats coming from outside,” that turned out to be a tremendously popular message during COVID—even in otherwise liberal, internationalist countries like New Zealand and Canada. So COVID-19 legitimized these border measures more than ever before.

RA: We’ve focused so far on the United States. But what about the places that deportees might have to go back to? Of course, America can’t just send migrants back without those countries accepting them. How does that work?

EA: On the question of getting countries to accept their deportees, it becomes a diplomatic issue. For instance, the Chinese have been recalcitrant for a long time. The Biden team worked out some arrangements in 2024 for China to take more of its deportees back. I suspect they’ll shut that down because given the threats from the Trump administration, why not hold that as a bargaining chip? Venezuela is a hard one. We can’t really sanction Venezuela more than we already have. Under the Biden administration, there were, at times, deals worked out with the Mexicans so that Venezuelans could be deported back to Mexico, and Mexico would deal with them. I expect a lot of pressure from the Trump administration. But it can be quite disruptive.

I’m most concerned about the human rights dimension. I’m not going to pretend for a moment that the United States has been a paragon of human rights around the world. We’ve done some terrible things, but we have been a consistent voice arguing that human rights need to be respected. But if you look at the first Trump term, from the separation of parents from children and the Remain in Mexico program, there were a lot of human rights violations. They’re going to be way worse this time. That just gives a green light to every authoritarian regime that nobody cares about human rights anymore—“if the United States, which has been the big vocal advocate, doesn’t practice it anymore, why should we?” And for other countries that would be happy to do similar things to get rid of their unpopular migrants, this is going to be their green light.

[koolkat9]

How many nations do you think are multilingual (or at least bilingual)? I like to think a handful can speak one or two other languages fluently, based on their surroundings and population demographics.

Probably most. After all, you have to be able to communicate with allies and loved ones. Plus, like in the US a lot of kids seem to have to take Spanish classes so i always saw Al as being able to speak spanish almost fluently. In the case of Canada we have two offical languages. Then there is the idea of immigration and we see the nations of these immigrants living with the nation so many of the their people immigrated to wouldn't be surprised if someone like Al asked Roma or Liet to teach him some of their native language. Or Matt asking Kateryna to teach him Ukrainian. So again, most if not all are multilingual to some degree.

[if-you-fan-a-fire]

"....new tensions had appeared within the working class at the Lakehead. Part of the explanation lay in the experiences of the unorganized workers. These workers were largely Italian, Greek, Finnish, and Ukrainian in origin and could be found employed as freight handlers for the CPR in Fort William and the CNR in Port Arthur. Many also lived in the coal dock sections of the two cities, a region located in the southern portion of Fort William hugging the outskirts of the industrial area, and notorious for substandard living conditions and overcrowding. The work was hard, heavy, and sporadic, and paid lower than the national average for unskilled labour. Not surprisingly, this area was also the centre of most of the labour unrest between 1906 and 1914. For example, a full-fledged gunfight erupted when authorities imported four train cars full of strikebreakers to break a Fort William freight handlers’ strike in 1906.

Local newspapers, disregarding the Anglo-Saxon identities of the strike’s leaders, focused relentlessly on the theme of “British citizens” struggling with “foreigners.” For the Port Arthur Daily News, the very eruption of the strike had constituted an insult to the community, which it defined in very nativist terms:

For a community of British citizens to have to submit to the insult and armed defiance from a disorganized horde of ignorant and low-down mongrel swash bucklers and peanut vendors is making a demand upon national pride which has no excuse.

Likewise, when the CPR refused to hire Greek or Italian workers on account of their role in the previous year’s strikes, British and Northern European workers, two groups deemed to have been moderate during the strikes, were hired as they were thought to be “more than a match for [the] Greeks” should trouble arise. It was into this strife-ridden situation that the Socialist Party of Canada was relaunched in 1908."

- Michel S. Beaulieu, Labour at the Lakehead: Ethnicity, Socialism, and Politics, 1900-35. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2011. p. 25.