Sir Clifford Sifton

Liberal MLA, Canada Attorney General, Federal Minister of the Interior, Superintendent General of Indian Affairs.

He wrote about the immigration policy of Canada in the Maclean’s Magazine: (1)

” . . People who do not know anything at all about the policy which was followed by the department of the Interior under my direction quite commonly make the statement that my policy for Immigration was quantity and not quality.

Our work was largely done in the North. Then, came the continent – where the great emigrating center was Hamburg. Steamships go there to load up with people who are desirous of leaving Europe. The situation is a peculiar one. If one should examine twenty people who turn up at Hamburg to emigrate he might find one escaped murderer, three or four wasters and ne’er-do-wells, some very poor shop-keepers, artisans or laborers and there might be one or two stout, hardy peasants in sheep-skin coats. Obviously the peasants are the men that are wanted here. Now, with regard to these twenty men, no one knows anything about them except the shipping agents. These men are sent in from outlying local agencies all over Europe. They arrive at Hamburg and the booking agents have their names and full descriptions of who they are and where they came from. No one else has this information.

When I speak of quality I have in mind, I think, something that is quite different from what is in the mind of the average writer or speaker upon the question of Immigration. I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality. A Trades Union artisan who will not work more than eight hours a day and will not work that long if he can help it, will not work on a farm at all and has to be fed by the public when his work is slack is, in my judgment, quantity and very bad quantity. I am indifferent as to whether or not he is British born. It matters not what his nationality is; such men are not wanted in Canada, and the more of them we get the more trouble we shall have.

For some years after the changes in policy which followed my retirement from office, Canada received wholesale arrivals of all kinds of immigrants. As above stated, there was no selection. Particularly from the continent it is quite clear that we received a considerable portion of the off-scourings and dregs of society. They formed colonies in Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg and other places and some of them and their children have been furnishing work for the police ever since.”

Notes

1. “The Immigrants Canada Wants,” April 1, 1922, pp. 16, 32-4.

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This entry was last updated: November 6, 2014