Good time to celebrate Ukrainian migration to Canada

How times change. Ninety or 100 years ago, Ukrainians were one of the most despised ethnic minorities in Canada. This year, the 125th anniversary of the start of their migration to Canada, they can look back on a record of accomplishment.

Their collective story has lessons for other ethnic or religious communities — and for Canadian society in general.

A century ago, serious people who considered themselves reasonable talked about how these strange new settlers — with their unfamiliar language, religions and customs — would permanently change this country for the worse. Mass deportations and punitive laws — making Ukrainian-language education more difficult, for example — were prescribed.

The story of Ukrainian immigrants needlessly interned or harassed during the First World War has been told elsewhere. The persecution did not end with the Armistice in 1918, though. When the Ku Klux Klan came to Canada in the 1920s, its main targets were eastern Europeans and Catholics. The Anglican bishop of the diocese of Saskatchewan infamously referred to “dirty, ignorant garlicsmelling unpreferred continentals.” The parallels with today’s anti-immigrant prejudice are obvious.

The response of immigrants from what’s now Ukraine was to endure and improve themselves through hard work and, especially, education. When the Second World War broke out, Ukrainian-Canadians enlisted in disproportionately large numbers to show their attachment to their new country.

Prejudice was slow to end. As the late Serge Kujawa relates in his autobiography, when he sought membership in the Law Society of Saskatchewan 60 years ago, he found a sneering challenge to his education and character that drove him to prove himself; he retired as one of the highest-profile lawyers in the province.

By the early 1990s, some of the highest positions in the province were held by the children or grandchildren of humble Ukrainian immigrants: premier, lieutenant governor, finance minister and chief justice. In the accomplishments of them, and others, are examples to others. This summer, it was heartening to see the Regina branch of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress reach out to First Nations and say, in effect, “We, too, have known pain and prejudice. Let us learn from each other.” This is not an entirely happy story. The Ukrainian republic, established after the 1991 breakup of the old Soviet Union, remains bedevilled by bickering and corruption among its leaders and especially by Russia’s armed occupation of much of the country’s eastern half and the Crimean Peninsula, with the constant fear the Russians will invade to take more, or even all, of the country.

A people of such strength and resiliency deserve more. And Canada is the better for so many people of Ukrainian heritage finding it here.