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Once a Refugee, Always a Refugee

GEORGE MELNYK

I was three years and four months old when I arrived in Halifax aboard the USAT General C. C. Ballou, a repurposed American troop ship that was bringing the “huddled masses” of post–World War II Europe to North America. It was December 1949. Sixty-seven years later to the month, I stood with a group of friends in the Calgary International Airport as we welcomed our privately sponsored Syrian refugee family to Canada. It seemed fitting for one refugee to welcome another refugee family to Canada in the same month they had arrived many years previously. It is such serendipitous moments that make this a story about linkages, those curious and often unseen or subconscious connections that ground refugees as they embrace their Canadian identity. It is also the story of anyone who has been forced to seek refuge in another country and then had to situate themselves in an unfamiliar place, culture, and language. That story began long ago.

Canada began offering a home to refugees when it was still a British colony. The American War of Independence (1776–83) generated British North America’s first major influx of refugees, who consisted of British soldiers and United Empire Loyalists fleeing the newly created United States of America. The Loyalists journeyed to what was then called British North America mainly on ships from New York, just as I came by ship from Hamburg 170 years later. Yet, while these Loyalists were given “refuge” from the newly founded United States, they were also very useful to Great Britain, which needed to solidify its foothold in North America after having just lost a major portion of it in the war. The arrival of some forty thousand English-speaking newcomers also added significantly to the population of what had, until the end of the Seven Years’ War (1755–63), been New France.

This influx of refugees needs to be juxtaposed with less positive moments in Canadian history. In 1758, during the Seven Years’ War, the British captured the Fortress of Louisbourg, in what is now Nova Scotia, and began deporting French settlers to New Orleans, then still under French authority. It was, for all practical purposes, ethnic cleansing. Colonial Canada also provided a home to African American slaves who journeyed along the famed Underground Railroad in search of freedom. Travel along the railroad reached its zenith during the 1850s and 1860s, but fugitive slaves had begun arriving after the passage, in 1793, of the Act to Limit Slavery in Upper Canada. Although the act did not outlaw slavery, it prohibited the introduction of any new slaves, thereby ensuring that, once in Upper Canada, fugitive slaves would be free. Yet these freedom seekers were not the first ex-slaves to arrive in the Canadian colonies. They were preceded by the Black Loyalists—slaves who had fought on the side of the British during the American Revolution and were subsequently rewarded with emancipation and then resettled elsewhere, principally in Nova Scotia. While this may seem like a positive turn of events, we should remember that Britain did not abolish slavery within the empire until 1833. This meant that slaves who accompanied white Loyalists who had migrated to Canada were not automatically freed, a situation that understandably produced tensions. Moreover, even if slaves who made it to Canada were considered free, they were rarely equal: they faced discrimination because of the colour of their skin. In the century following Confederation, the image of Canada as a welcoming country would continue to be undermined by deportations, racially inspired immigration policies, and a selective openness with regard to refugees.

Unbeknownst to me as a toddler, I was part of that selective bias. After World War II, Canada was looking for inexpensive labour and while it painted its acceptance of European refugees as an act of humanitarianism, the decision was founded more on economics than anything else. As a white European family, we fit the profile the country wanted at the time. We were officially “displaced persons,” but our displacement was to Canada’s advantage as it accepted thousands of young men and women with the potential of contributing many years of useful employment to capitalists (manufacturing was then a cornerstone of the economy) and income taxes to the state. Canada needed strong bodies in the twentieth century as much as it needed them in the eighteenth. My father, whose origins were lower middle class, became a blue-collar factory worker for the rest of his life, while I embraced the promise of advancement that education offered.

Canada as a British colony preferred English-speaking migrants who felt bound to the mother country. But that was not always possible, especially as the United States became a nineteenth-century beacon to Europeans of all nationalities, thus allowing it to expand its population rapidly. An urgency developed in Canada to attract any white settlers that it could to offset the immigration juggernaut on its border. When British-occupied Ireland experienced a dreadful famine in the mid-nineteenth century, many Irish fled to Canada for relief and were accepted. And then in the 1890s, after the building of the trans-continental Canadian Pacific Railroad, the federal government advertised widely in Eastern Europe for settlers to occupy land on the Prairies that had been “surrendered” during the making of the Treaties. Hundreds of thousands eventually came. None of these new immigrants and refugees were of Anglo-Saxon origin, but they were taken in because of racially biased policies and acts that made immigration from other parts of the world, like China, difficult. If Canada wanted to populate/colonize the land that it had bought from the Hudson’s Bay Company and had subsequently taken over by treaty from Indigenous peoples with European settlers, it had to look beyond the Anglo world. Fifty years before I arrived in Winnipeg, the so-called “Men in Sheepskin Coats” who were of my own ethnic group—Ukrainian—came West as settlers. That generation was mythologized for future arrivals like me. They were the forbears I knew nothing about. However, while Eastern Europeans were courted reluctantly, there was a racial line that the government would not cross. The thousands of Chinese labourers who had come to Western Canada to build the trans-continental railroad in the 1880s were asked to go home when the work was done; if they stayed they were prohibited by law from owning land and had to pay a punitive head tax aimed at discouraging Asian immigrants who wanted to bring their wives and families to Canada.

While I was ethnically connected to a much earlier migration, I was also ideologically connected to an earlier refugee story from the same region. The Doukhobors (Spirit-Wrestlers) were Russian religious pacifists who had been persecuted for their refusal to do military service under the Tsars. The famous novelist, Count Leo Tolstoy, sponsored many Doukhobors to make it possible for them to come to Canada in 1899 as a sanctuary from oppression. Here, they were exempted from military service and settled first in Saskatchewan as part of the colonization of the west, and later in British Columbia. My interest in the Doukhobors began in the 1980s when I was writing about cooperative and communal living in my book, The Search for Community (1984). It continued well into the twenty-first century, when I was active in the Consortium for Peace Studies at the University of Calgary because their story was part of the pacifist universe.

To compensate for its earlier generosity, the Canadian government passed an amendment to the Immigration Act in 1919 that effectively barred Doukhobors from entering Canada, along with such unlikely bedfellows as Mennonites and Communists because of their “peculiar customs, habits, modes of life and methods of holding property.” Fortunately, less than a decade later the Mennonite Central Committee that had been formed in the United States to help their brethren in the Soviet Union, and which had a branch in Canada, was able to convince the Canadian government to lift this restriction because Mennonites were a persecuted religious and ethnic (German) minority in Communist Russia. Many of these pacifist Mennonites made it to Western Canadian. A few of them came to play important roles in my life, including a neighbourhood friend from my teen days in Winnipeg. Later, I met the famed Western Canadian novelist, Rudy Wiebe, in Edmonton and he became a big support in my early literary efforts as a magazine and book publisher and editor. Rudy had gone to a Mennonite school not far from where I lived in East Kildonan, Winnipeg.

This sometimes open- and sometimes closed-door approach to refugees is most evident in the racist criteria of the Immigration Act of 1910, which excluded Asians. In the case of African Americans, Canada played a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde role. It allowed thousands of former African American slaves who crossed on the Underground Railroad to settle in Nova Scotia, but a 1911 Order-in-Council tried to prevent African Americans from settling in Canada. The racist attitudes of the day reflected in official policy took a long time to overcome. We are still struggling to overcome many of the racist attitudes that are reflected in official policy of that time.

I remember a scene from my early childhood in Winnipeg in the 1950s. Our street was named Pacific Ave, and the population that lived in the neighbourhood was diverse, though we didn’t use the term. One of the families was Japanese. I remember how the older Japanese boys would take on a phalanx of us younger immigrant kids in a mass snowball fight. Only much later as an adult did I learn that our Japanese neighbours had experienced deportation from their homes on the Pacific Ocean to internment camps deep in Canada during World War Two. These deportations and internments eventually garnered government apologies.

The threads that a refugee creates between distant histories, diverse ethnic groups, and the impact of their stories on his or her own life are necessary because they are the tendrils that nurture a sense of belonging. Without them there would a constant undercurrent of dislocation and alienation. Those who went before; those who suffered in a similar vein; and those who mirror one’s own identity serve as the psychological foundations of belonging and identification. In my case a birth identity as a stateless person has remained with me, creating a psychological need to identify with all refugees, whatever their nationality or wherever their home. You might say that once a refugee, always a refugee.¹ I constantly cross paths with others of similar background.

For example, I was living in Toronto as a graduate student when Canada began an airlift of Ismaili Muslims from Uganda because they had been given an impossibly short notice to leave the country. Welcoming these Asian-origin Muslims was a departure from the Canada’s earlier emphasis on allowing European refugees into the country. In 1967, a new Immigration Act officially ended racial discrimination by instituting a points system that applied equally to everyone, though the new system favoured certain classes and levels of education. The Ismailis were the first major group to benefit from the new approach. Many years later I also benefited from the Ismaili migration, when my closest colleague at the University of Calgary happened to be an Ismaili whose family had come from Tanzania in the mid-1970s. Although not officially a United Nations Convention refugee, my colleague came to Canada because of the economic pressures being put on this ethnic and religious group. When my colleague was an undergraduate in the 1980s, he was active in establishing the World University Service of Canada on campus that helped sponsor an Ethiopian refugee.

In 1969, Canada finally signed the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, some eighteen years after it had been first adopted by the UN’s General Assembly. In 1976, it passed a new Immigration Act, which recognized that Canada needed to make provision for the resettlement of refugees. One of the first beneficiaries of this policy were the Vietnamese boat people, some of whom were among the first refugees I helped.

One of the provisions of the new act was the establishment of options for the private sponsorship of refugees. These eventually included a category termed a Group of Five that enabled five or more individuals to collaborate in sponsoring a refugee. While we were living in Edmonton, my wife, who taught ESL to newcomers, and I worked with some friends of ours to use the Group of Five category to sponsor a young Vietnamese named Kiet for one year. Then we set up a non-profit group called Community Aid to Refugees Today (CART), which worked with churches and other private sponsorship groups that needed help dealing with refugees who did not speak English or were alone, were separated from their families, and whose culture was very different from that of their sponsors. We even got a bit of funding from the federal government to assist us in our efforts.

The provision for private sponsorship of refugees has been one of the great success stories of Canadian refugee resettlement. Over a quarter of a million refugees have come to Canada through this program, which is unique to Canada. Often privately sponsored refugees have done better in terms of resettlement than government-sponsored refugees have because of a voluntary hands-on involvement. The personal touch seems to work because it keeps the private sponsors directly connected to the issues that their refugees face daily—from accessing services to education to accommodation.

The exodus of the boat people was dangerous, costly in terms of refugee lives, and problematic because of long stays in camps in neighbouring countries. This desperate situation spurred Canadian church groups, led by the Mennonite Central Committee, to convince the federal government to establish a master agreement protocol that allowed an officially sanctioned body like the Anglican Church of Canada to serve as an umbrella for numerous private sponsorship groups. Individuals make donations to the Church for the charitable purpose of sponsoring refugees. The individuals get a tax receipt for their donation. They also work with their refugee family, while the Church supervises the Group of Five and is responsible for the family’s well-being in case something goes amiss. The master agreement is a form of insurance that the refugee will be looked after properly because it involves a larger entity than just a group of five people. Having these master agreements has advanced private sponsorship and made it a viable and popular option for Canadians.

I have continued my work in this area thanks to the Group of Five category. The civil war in Syria (ongoing since 2013) has created millions of refugees, living either in camps in Jordan and Turkey or on the street in Lebanon. With the help of Lebanese friend, a group of us identified a UN certified Syrian refugee family living in Lebanon that we wanted to sponsor. So we created a new Group of Five called “Calgarians Give Back” that sponsored this family. They arrived in December 2017. At the same time, we learned of a couple from Serbia who were gay activists. They had suffered discrimination, persecution, and assault before coming to Canada on tourist visas. Using contacts in our Group of Five plus other friends, we raised $5,000 to pay their legal fees in applying for refugee status within the country. Fortunately, they were successful in their refugee claim. You can read their story in this book in the chapter titled “From LGBTQ+ Activist to Refugee.”

In reflecting on my early status as a refugee and how it has affected my psyche, I now see that this particular identity has oriented me in certain directions and relationships that may not have occurred if I had been a non-refugee. In particular, I am referring to the large number of male Jewish friends I have had throughout my adult life and the near total lack of close Anglo-Canadian male friends. I have often wondered why this was the case because I am not Jewish myself. Having grown up in Winnipeg’s North End, an ethnic ghetto with a large Jewish and Ukrainian population, I remain unsure of myself in an Anglo-Canadian social setting.

But there is more to this than simple ethnicity. Here, too, there is refugee resonance. One of my best friends and colleagues of the 1970s in Edmonton was the son of Holocaust survivors who settled in Canada after World War II. They and my friend, like my parents and I, came in the same wave of post–war migration. We were all refugees. I am sure it mattered in subconscious ways, and perhaps we connected on a personal level through these shared identities. Also, in the 1970s another friend whom I have known now for forty years was part of the wave of American war resisters who fled to Canada either to avoid the draft or because of their ideological opposition to the Vietnam War. Coming to a new land is something I understand and that I share with him.

This reference to friendships illustrates just one of the mysterious ways in which the refugee identity can manifest itself over time. I never would have imagined that my most satisfying friendships would entail men with a refugee background like mine. But it makes sense. We have a camaraderie first forged by historical circumstance and its narrative of displacement and persecution, and then cemented by a similar generational experience in a particular region of the country. So, when one of these friends and I sat in a Calgary café not so long ago, it was not surprising that we spent some of that time comparing our baby photos taken in post–World War Two Germany. As newborns we had no idea that we were refugees or what it meant to be one. Now we know.

1 My mother wrote a poem many years ago titled “Eternal Refugee: Poem for Today.”