The Canadian Bulk Labour and Close Relatives Schemes

Origins and purpose

The Canadian government moved before the International Refugee Organisation had produced a general resettlement plan. On 6 June 1947 Cabinet agreed to select up to 5,000 displaced persons from the camps as a bulk labour movement: 1,400 forestry workers, 2,000 workers for the clothing industry, 2,000 female domestics for hospitals and private homes, and a small reserve. Those selected would agree to work for ten to twelve months with a designated employer at specified wages, and employers would pay for their transport from the port of entry. Refugees selected as close relatives were counted separately and were not to come out of the 5,000.1

Demand outran the allocation almost at once. By 10 July 1947 the acting minister told Cabinet that the numbers under consideration exceeded 5,000 and asked for another 5,000, which was granted, and more places followed. Deputy Minister H. L. Keenleyside framed the programme as enlightened self-interest: Canada would help solve the refugee problem, gain workers it needed, and set an example to other countries.1

Ukrainian Canadians lobbied for that opening. The Ukrainian Canadian Relief Fund, created in 1945 by the Ukrainian Canadian Servicemen's Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Committee, gathered nearly 200,000 dollars between 1945 and 1947. Its relief mission, headed by Bohdan Gordon Panchuk with A. Crapleve and A. Yaremovich, worked through the Canadian Red Cross and the IRO in the British zone of Germany to organise Ukrainian schools, resist forced repatriation, lobby for resettlement in Canada and assist family reunions.3

The close relatives route was the older of the two. Order-in-Council PC 2071, announced on 28 May 1946, permitted Canadian citizens to sponsor first-degree relatives from Europe, defined narrowly as a parent, an unmarried child under eighteen, an unmarried sibling, or an orphan niece or nephew under sixteen; the order made no mention of refugees. The bulk labour route needed a legal change of its own: an Order-in-Council that had barred contract labour from being brought into the country had to be repealed before Canadian industries could select workers in the camps and bind them to work agreements for their first year of residency.9

The bulk labour movement was run as an interdepartmental undertaking, supervised by delegates of the departments of Mines and Resources (Immigration Branch), Labour, External Affairs and the RCMP. Orders passed between July 1947 and October 1948 permitted over 45,000 displaced persons to enter Canada.812

How it worked in practice

Selection was done by Canadian teams travelling between camps. By 8 August 1947 three teams were examining applicants in Germany and Austria. Each had six to eight members: an immigration inspector, a doctor, an officer from the Department of Labour, a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, a female officer to select domestics, and a representative from industry. The Intergovernmental Committee on Refugees, and then the Provisional Committee of the IRO, assembled the refugees for examination with chest X-rays and blood tests ready for the medical officer.1

The scale of rejection was part of the system. In the early months some 16,000 cases were approved under the close relatives scheme and 10,000 for the bulk labour movement, out of 26,000 applications for bulk labour. Nearly 4,000 applicants were interviewed for the first 1,500 forestry workers, and half were rejected on medical and other grounds.1

Conditions in the field were rough. Teams often lacked transport and accommodation, many camps could be reached only by motor vehicle, and all movement within the occupation zones needed orders and permits. A headquarters was set up in Heidelberg in mid-November 1947 to coordinate immigration work in Germany and Austria, and moved to Karlsruhe in March 1948. Ocean transport was the other constraint, eased by the refit of the SS Beaverbrae, committed to carrying immigrants for three years, which took thousands of them to Pier 21.1

The trades in demand shifted as the movement grew. In the fiscal year ending 31 March 1948 the Interdepartmental Immigration-Labour Committee approved 19,899 positions under the bulk labour movement, with the greatest demand for railways, steel manufacture, forestry, hydroelectric transmission line construction, clothing manufacture, domestic labour and agriculture. All were destined for arranged employment. Only 8,702 bulk workers were actually admitted in that year, because selection could not keep pace with the approved positions.1

The priority given to bulk labour angered Canadians waiting for relatives. On 21 October 1947, 10,264 close relatives had been approved but only 1,102 had arrived, 23.5 per cent of the whole movement. The Immigration Branch then directed that close relatives should make up 40 per cent of the movement, and by the end of March 1948, 5,042 relatives had arrived, 35.5 per cent of the total. Many close relatives were ethnic Germans outside the IRO mandate, and their cases were handled through the Canadian Christian Council for the Resettlement of Refugees. In September 1948 Keenleyside recommended shifting the emphasis towards relatives, and Cabinet approved on 29 September.1

Selection tested bodies as much as documents. Several displaced persons told of being made to show Canadian authorities the callouses on their hands, and one Ukrainian recorded that Canadian railway representatives examined his father's arms and shoulders to judge whether he was fit for railway labour. The teams also screened for ethnicity: Canadian officials on them routinely rejected Jewish applicants while accepting non-Jewish Germans, on instructions from Ottawa.9

Recruiters favoured the unencumbered. Most of the displaced persons channelled into farm labour were single men; others were married and had to leave their families in Europe until their contracts expired and their travel loans were repaid, although some were allowed to migrate as family units. One Ukrainian woman interviewed decades later recalled a Canadian delegation taking only single people for the mines, her husband leaving at the end of 1947 on the promise that he would return for her.1013

The contract bound the worker for the year, and the machinery behind it assumed the bond would hold. Canadian immigration officials negotiated an arrangement with the International Refugee Organisation under which displaced persons who failed to live up to their labour contracts would be returned to the camps in Germany and Austria. The IRO paid for and arranged the ocean passage of those who could not afford it, and inland transport to the farm was paid by the farmer, who could deduct the cost from the worker's monthly pay.13

The Ukrainian experience within the schemes

Ukrainians were the second largest group in the movement. Official admissions by nationality for the three fiscal years 1947-48, 1948-49 and 1949-50 record 19,215 Ukrainians, behind 23,900 Poles and ahead of 11,064 recorded as Hebrew, 8,436 German and 7,917 Lithuanian. Their arrivals peaked in 1948-49 with 10,277. Over a longer span, the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine counts 34,000 Ukrainians reaching Canada between 1947 and 1954, and Parks Canada names Poles and Ukrainians as the largest groups among the more than 157,000 displaced persons who came between 1945 and 1951.124

Estimates of the Ukrainian total differ between scholars. Harold Troper counts 165,000 displaced persons entering Canada, 26,000 of them, or 17 per cent, Ukrainians; Ihor Stebelsky, working from unpublished government statistics, puts Ukrainian immigration for 1945 to 1955 at 34,329. The counts cover different periods and rest on different bases, and they cannot be reconciled with the official admissions figures above. Ukrainians were regarded by recruiters as among the best peasant labourers in Europe, and most came as members of the bulk labour scheme.810

The work they were admitted to do was mostly manual: farm work, railway maintenance, logging, mining, hydroelectric generation and transmission, and the needle trades. The scheme was tailored to the Canadian job market, targeting groups such as miners, lumberjacks, farmers and domestics, and workers were recruited in groups on the orders placed by Canadian employers. Domestics were placed in homes across Canada, and a large number worked in Ottawa in the households of prominent public figures; between 1947 and 1950, 10,499 female displaced-person domestics arrived under the Department of Labour's group movement plan. In agriculture, approximately 7,016 displaced persons were channelled into the southwestern Ontario fruit and vegetable industry between 1947 and 1954, on one-year contracts with their passage paid by the International Refugee Organisation. Others went to farms, to remote lumber camps and to mines in northern Ontario and Quebec. With few exceptions refugees admitted under the bulk worker schemes honoured their contracts and then moved to the cities when the term ended.181113

Arrival is documented in individual Ukrainian journeys through Pier 21. One family left the Lexenfeld displaced-persons camp in Austria, sailed from Bremerhaven aboard Marine Falcon and reached Halifax on 23 June 1948, then travelled by Canadian Pacific train to Taber, Alberta, where a sponsoring sugar-beet farmer met them and housed them in a converted grain bin. Another Ukrainian family reached Halifax aboard Samaria on 27 March 1949, sponsored by a relative who had found them through a notice in a Ukrainian newspaper, and was put on a train for Regina.67

Later testimony from Ukrainians who came as contract workers fills in what the year of assigned labour meant. In a study of Ukrainian former forced labourers in Canada, twelve of the informants had entered on work contracts in the mining or forest industries, domestic service or other industrial and agricultural sectors, and six had come through sponsorship by family members who had emigrated twenty to forty years earlier. Several described the obligation plainly: the jobs were not pleasant, but the year had to be worked out before a person could go wherever they wanted. One woman was sent to a dry-cleaning business in Saskatchewan under a one-year contract; another found her contract placement an isolated farm at Alliston, Ontario, with nobody around.10

What happened afterwards

The pattern of work established in the spring of 1947 continued until about 1952, ending as the European camps emptied and the remaining refugees were resettled locally. Admissions had already fallen in 1949-50, to 33,197 from 50,610 the year before, as the United States and Australia expanded their own programmes and as the establishment of Israel opened another route. Keenleyside noted at the time that most displaced persons would now apply first to United States officials and come to the Canadian teams only if refused.1

By the time the bulk labour scheme ended in October 1951, some 100,000 refugees had arrived in Canada under its general provisions of industry sponsorship, and the schemes continued to function for a few months beyond the end of the IRO's mandate in 1952. Of the 163,984 displaced people who resettled in Canada between April 1947 and March 1952, about 60,000 arrived through the evolving private sponsorship programme that had grown out of the close relatives scheme.911

The people who came stayed. The third wave brought a well educated, politically active Ukrainian population into communities founded by earlier migrations, and a great many settled in the industrial cities of the east, particularly in Ontario.34