This
article was written for and first published in
Captive Canada:
Renditions of the Peaceable Kingdom at War,
from Narratives of WWI and the Red Scare to the Mass Internment of Civilians
Issue #68 of
Press for Conversion (Spring 2016),
pp.14.
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Coalition to Oppose the Arms Trade
(COAT).
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From Frying Pan to Prairie Fire:
One
Captivation after Another
By
Richard Sanders, Coordinator, Coalition to
Oppose the Arms Trade (COAT)
Captivated by the hype of ads churned out by
Canada’s
government and profit-seeking shipping firms, many Ukrainians left the political
and economic confines of their homeland, only to have their dreams of freedom
dashed on the prairies. As historian Orest Martynowych noted, Ukrainians were
“economically exploited,
socially oppressed, culturally neglected, colonized people, preyed upon by
foreign landowners, bureaucrats and merchants, and frequently patronized and
humiliated by...privileged members of their own nationality.”1
But,
“for many of these Ukrainian peasants, immigration to Canada did not prove to be
a liberating experience.” In fact, “isolated from modern sectors of Canadian
society and left without basic social services,” said Martynowych, “life
continued to be no less hazardous and insecure than...in the Old World.”2
Likewise, Canada’s political system was anything but liberating. As
Ukrainian researcher Wasyl Swystun wrote in J.S.Woodsworth’s government report,
Ukrainian Rural Communities (1917): “Ukrainians in
Canada...are disgusted with the
political corruption, which is worse than anything they have known in the Old
Country,” and “see no great difference between platforms of the two parties
[Liberal and Conservative].”3
In December 1917, a former Manitoba Liberal MP,
Robert L.Richardson—while campaigning for the Conservative’s Unionist
Party—called for the outright enslavement of “enemy aliens.” “[W]e won’t need
many guards,” he said. “It will be easy enough when a few foreigners are shot;
the others will work eagerly.”4
Ukrainian socialists replied to this by writing that the
“Ukrainian immigrant did not
flee from the Kaiser’s knout [whip] in order to fall under another knout in
Canada.
He refuses to tolerate Kaiserism regardless of who tries to impose it.”
In
postCzarist Ukraine,
they asserted, “liberty and democracy are held in higher esteem than here in
Canada.”5
Despite, or likely aided by, his hyped-up xenophobia, Richardson—the novelist,
journalist and owner/editor of the Winnipeg Tribune—was easily re-elected
to Parliament in 1917. Like “many other businessmen,” he was “swept up in the
hysteria of the ‘Red Scare.’” In 1919, Richardson warned Prime Minister Borden that a
“‘Bolshevik’ uprising” was brewing in
Manitoba.
Later, his newspaper’s hate-filled, phobic rants blamed Winnipeg’s 1919 General
Strike on violent “reds” and “irresponsible, lawless, anarchistic agitators”6
who were riling up Canada’s “undesirable” east Europeans.
After
fleeing the tyrannies of eastern Europe, many radicalised newcomers to Canada
were thrown headlong into challenging new struggles for freedom, and—in
thousands of cases—they were thrown straight into Canada’s slave labour camps.
References
1. Orest Martynowych,
Village radicals and peasant immigrants: The social roots of factionalism among
Ukrainian immigrants in
Canada, 1896-1918,
1978, p.3. (MA thesis, Graduate Studies, Manitoba.)
