Canada's Immigration Policy, 1896–1910

Extract

Tonight I am going to exercise the prerogative of the President to make an address to a large extent unornamented by the extensive documentation and citations which perhaps too often go by the name of scholarship. My primary theme is our immigration policy. In developing this, I am going to deal mainly with the period from 1896 to 1910, since that is the period over which policy shifted from one at least theoretically laissez-faire to the selective policy inherent in the Immigration Act of 1910. My method will be to consider for a space the characters of two men, to follow that by narrative and analysis respecting the changes which occurred and then to draw together what seem to me to be the morals of the story.

When Clifford Sifton took over the Ministry of the Interior in the autumn of 1896, entry to Canada was proscribed to three classes of persons only: the diseased; the criminal or vicious; and those likely to become public charges. Even these might find entry not too difficult if they went the right way about gaining it. The controls exercised under the law by the Minister covered only entries by ocean ports and here the general assumption was that only steerage passengers were immigrants. There was no control over those who entered by railway. Once immigrants coming by steamship had passed inspection and had become “landed immigrants” deportations were administered by the Department of the Interior with the assistance of the Department of Justice and generally on complaint of the municipal authorities. It was only after Clifford Sifton had left the cabinet in early 1905 that a sequence of events occurred forcing a series of restrictive measures which were finally embodied in the Immigration Act of 1910.