Excavations


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Friday, December 11, 2015

Syrian refugee crisis: how not to follow Canada’s anti-Semitic past. The case of “None is too many”.

For those who resist or oppose Canada’s current humanitarian involvement in the Syrian refugee crisis allow me to suggest a reading of None is too many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (1983).  It is a shameful account of appalling Canadian illiberalism, anti-Semitism and racism: xenophobia is not harsh enough a term.  Between 1933 and 1945, the years when Hitler was in power, Canada (with a population in 1939 of about 11 million “souls”) found space for less than 5,000 Jews.[1]  By comparison for the same period, the United States brought in some 200,000 Jews, mostly the cream of the crop, but still a paltry figure considering the Nazi extermination of some 6 million Jews, one third of whom were children.

It was not as if the Canadian government had no warning signs.  Kristallnacht, or “the night of broken glass” on 10 November 1938 in the words of historian Martin Gilbert was the most dramatic “prelude to destruction” when over 1,000 synagogues were burned to the ground, countless Jewish shops and homes looted, followed by many thousands of Jewish men being forced into concentration camps – and over 90 Jews murdered.[2]  But the Canadian government did nothing.

Whom do we blame?  Frederick C. Blair, the unelected Director of Immigration, was Canada’s pit bull guarding the gates against Jews, and on his late retirement in 1943 he received the highest award a civil servant could get in Canada.  This was also the same year when Hitler’s “Final Solution” became clear to Allied Forces.

Could we blame the Minister of Immigration, Thomas Crerar, who was as like-minded as his Director of Immigration?  What about the “pusillanimous” Prime Minister Mackenzie King, more interested in appeasing public anti-Semitism and in not losing votes?  When the Prime Minister finally did appear to budge on refugees, there was exploitation in false and cynical terms by the anti-Semitic Maurice Duplessis, known as well for his infamous anti-Communist Padlock Act, who gained a Quebec election victory in 1943 on terms reminiscent of Donald Trump.[3]

Elsewhere in the Canadian provinces, Liberal Premier Pattullo is on record for wanting to restrict Jewish refugee movement into British Columbia.[4]  In Alberta there was opposition to Canada as a home to 1,000 Jewish orphans, proposed at a time when the federal government did move slightly – after the war.[5]  Our first Canadian-born Governor General (from Ontario), yes our vice-regal figurehead, Vincent Massey actively disliked Poles and Southern Europeans almost as much as he did the Jews.  Only Georges Vanier, the subsequent Governor General, appeared consistently sympathetic to Jewish refugees, and it was he who introduced Canadians to the horrors of Buchenwald (a week after the camp was liberated) while on the CBC in 1945.

Consider a Gallup Poll of 1946, asking from a list: “If Canada does allow more immigrants are there any … nationalities you would like to keep out?”  Sixty percent of those polled ranked the Japanese as the most unwanted.  Second on the list were Jews (not Germans) who ranked at 49 percent. [6]

Today’s argument against the Syrian refugees are essentially a rehash of old prejudices against Jewish refugees from the period of the Second World War.  Absent from the Canadian public imagination was any understanding of what it was like to be ‘the other’, bereft of everything, a lack which was combined with the pathetic notion that Canada was somehow more “civilized”.
 
Prime Minister Joe Clark’s government, short as it was, benefitted from a draft reading of None is too many resulting in a significant influx of Vietnamese “boat people” to Canada, perhaps Clark’s greatest achievement.  Today we owe it to ourselves, to whom we claim to be as a nation, and to the countless Jews who never had a chance of reaching our shores to support Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government as they now help out in the Syrian refugee crisis.




[1] Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None is too many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), p. xx.
[2] See Martin Gilbert, Kristallnacht: prelude to disaster (Toronto: Harper, 2007).
[3] Abella and Troper, None is too many, p. 162.
[4] Ibid., p. 50.
[5] Ibid., p. 272
[6] Ibid., p. 232.

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