Black Canadian: Encyclopedia II - Black Canadian - Black immigration

Black Canadian - Black immigration

Black people arrived in Canada in several waves of immigration. The first of these alongside, French colonists as slaves. Others arriving in Nova Scotia through the underground railroad and Alberta through Native and quaker communities.

Canada was not suited to the large-scale agricultural slavery practiced in the United States and slavery became increasingly uncommon. In 1793, in one of the first acts of the new Upper Canada colonial parliament, slavery was abolished. It was all but abolished throughout the other British North American colonies by 1800, and was illegal throughout the British Empire after 1834. This made Canada an attractive destination for those fleeing slavery in the United States. From the 1830s until the American Civil War began in 1861 the Underground Railroad brought tens of thousands of fleeing slaves to Canada, while many of these returned to the United States after emancipation a significant population remained, largely in Southern Ontario.

In the late nineteenth century an unofficial policy of excluding blacks was developed, and in the 1920s formal racially based immigration standards, which excluded blacks, were developed. Thus the huge influx of immigrants from Europe and the United States in the period before First World War included only very small numbers of black arrivals. Restrictions on immigration remained until 1962 when racial rules were eliminated from the immigration laws. This coincided with the dissolution of the British Empire in the Caribbean, and over the next decades several hundred thousand blacks came from that region to Canada.

In the last couple of decades an increasing number of immigrants from Africa have been coming to Canada, as is the case with the U.S and Europe. This includes large numbers of refugees, but also many skilled workers pursuing better economic conditions. Today's black Canadians are largely of Caribbean origin, some of African origin (especially, but not exclusively, from Somalia) and smaller numbers from Latin American countries, but a sizable number of black Canadians descended from freed American slaves can still be found in the province of Nova Scotia and parts of Southwestern Ontario. However some descendants of the freed American black slaves, have mixed into the white Canadian community and have mostly lost their identity.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Black immigration", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki