II. Arrival in a New Land

II.1 Greek People Come to Canada

In Greek Canadian communities across Canada stories circulate which claim that the first Greek to visit Canada was the 16^th century navigator Juan da Fuca whose name now identifies the strait between Washington State and Vancouver Island. Greek Canadians say that Juan da Fuca’s real name may have been Apostolos Valerianos or even Yiannis Phokas; he is supposed to have been a Greek from Cephalonia in the Ionian Sea. However intriguing the story, that long-ago voyage is the stuff of legend. No significant number of Greek people came to Canada until the late nineteenth century. In fact, in 1871 only thirty-nine persons of Greek origin were known to be living in all of Canada. Many of those first Greeks in Canada were Greek sailors who left their ships and remained in Nova Scotia or British Columbia.

In the 1880s and 90s a number of factors produced widespread poverty in Greece. These factors included crop failures, hostilities with Turkey, the strain of providing dowries for unmarried women, and conscription of Greeks into the Turkish army in those areas dominated by the Turks. Since the time of the hero Odysseus, Greeks had always loved the sea and seafaring adventures. Some followed that search for adventure to find a better life abroad in the west. Thus, large numbers of Greek men, eventually followed by their families, left to find permanent homes in North America. The United States was the preferred choice for a new home. While there were already substantial numbers of Greeks in the United States by the middle of the nineteenth century, between 1890 and 1900 U.S. authorities registered the entry of 15,979 immigrants from Greece. Canadian census figures for 1900 are imprecise, but they do seem to indicate that only about 300 people of Greek descent were living in this country at the time.

By 1924 nearly 400,000 Greek immigrants had arrived in the United States. As immigrant quotas in the U. S. were reduced, Greek immigrants turned their eyes north to Canada where some of them already had relatives. In 1911 about 3,650 Greeks lived in Canada, with the largest numbers in Montreal and Toronto. By 1931 the numbers had swelled to 9,500- half of whom were Canadian-born. In the 1930s and 40s the number of Greeks in North America slowly increased, but after World War II and the subsequent Civil Wars in Greece a flood of immigrants arrived in Canada and the United States. Large numbers of immigrants continued to arrive into the 1960s and early 1970s during Greece’s military dictatorship. Unlike those who had come earlier, many of the later immigrants were skilled laborers or professional people who came to North America for post-secondary education, or because they knew of openings for their particular professional skills. They often possessed experience in urban living, acquired either in

Greece or in the industrial cities in Europe where they previously had been employed. Those who had left Greece continued to help relatives join them in the new lands. Many Greeks of the Diaspora (that is those who had gone abroad) still preferred marriage partners from the Greek homeland; hundreds of young women and men crossed the ocean as prospective spouses. In the period between 1950 and 1970 entire families also emigrated from Greece to Canada. In large part this was aided by new Canadian legislation introduced by the Conservative government in 1962 and carried out by the Liberals in 1967. That new legislation allowed any permanent resident of Canada to sponsor members of his/her extended family in their quest to immigrate. In Quebec, for example, special travel companies acted as mediators between Greek sponsors in Montreal on the one hand, and immigration authorities and transportation agencies on the other. These companies helped the immigrants and the sponsors every step of the way with screening, passport acquisition, embarkation and the like. It is not surprising that between 1951 and 1971, the population of Greeks in Canada increased from 13,866 to 124,475.

Since the 1970s the flood of permanent immigrants from Greece has largely stopped, due to increased prosperity and democratically elected governments at home. Some young Greeks continue to travel to North America for postsecondary education, but they eventually return to Greece. Today only a few leave permanently for work or for marriage. In the 1990s it is just as likely for a young Greek Canadian, (often with university degrees) to try to establish a career and life in Greece, as it is for a Greek from Greece to move permanently west across the Atlantic.

Immigration data from 1955 to 1972 offer the most detailed information concerning geographic origins of emigrants. During that period of time, 80% of Greek immigrants to Canada came from one of the following regions: Macedonia and Thrace in the north, the greater Athens area, the Peloponnese, the Dodecanese, the Cycladic Islands, and Cyprus. Although we cannot write in absolute terms, we can say that during that period most of the people from Macedonia settled in the Toronto area, while Greeks coming to the Maritime Provinces were likely to be from the Peloponnese, especially from the areas in Laconia and Arcadia.

Recent figures provided by Statistics Canada from the 1996 census show that 203,345 people in Canada list themselves as having Greek origin. [Note: Statistics Canada counts as Greek both those individuals who claim a “single ethnic origin” and those who claim “multiple origins”. The latter term refers to people who think of themselves as having descended from more than one ethnic group. The population figures quoted in the present text comply with the Statistics Canada practice. Statistics Canada also makes available a separate breakdown that differentiates between “single origin” and “multiple origin Greeks”.]

The largest populations of Greek people are in Ontario (85,000), Quebec (almost 50,000), and British Columbia (8,500). Most Greek Canadians in those provinces are concentrated in metropolitan areas such as Montreal (almost all 50,000 Greek Canadians in Quebec live in Montreal), Toronto (almost 65,000) and Vancouver (6,500). Each of the southwestern Ontario cities of Hamilton, London, KitchenerWaterloo, and Windsor has a Greek population close to or in excess of 3,000 people. Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta together have more than 6,000 Greek Canadians, and almost half of that number resides in, or close to Edmonton. Only about 70 people who claim Greek origin live in Canada’s northern regions. Atlantic Canada has about 3,185 people of Greek descent, with 2,045 of them living in Nova Scotia. Of these about 1,435 reside in the Halifax Regional Municipality. Statistics Canada lists 780 people of Greek origin in New Brunswick, with most living in Saint John (250), Fredericton (135), or Moncton

(90). For Prince Edward Island Statistics Canada lists 75 Greeks, most of these in or near the capital, Charlottetown. The 1996 census figures show 285 people who claim Greek descent living in Newfoundland, with about 90 of these residing in or close to St. John’s.

Although many first-generation Greeks now living in Canada came to this country from rural, agricultural backgrounds in Greece, few of them, and almost none of their children, work on farms today. The majority immigrated to the largest cities in each province. As the decades passed, even the few who had lived in smaller centres moved to the major cities, often choosing large cities in another province over a small city in the province where they originally lived. Probably as a result of increasing Francophone nationalism in Quebec, and a desire to have their children educated in English, some Greek Canadians from Montreal chose to move to an Anglophone environment. Most of them have relocated to Ontario, but a few settled in the Maritimes.