This is an excerpt from A Nation’s Paper: The Globe and Mail in the Life of Canada, a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming this fall from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
In February, 1856, a group of about 100 Irishmen met at a hotel in downtown Buffalo to discuss the hundreds of thousands of Irish famine refugees who had landed in North America in recent years. Many were living without means – poor, in Canadian and American cities, in dire need of aid.
At the meeting, the men – about half of them Canadian – proposed a number of solutions. One was to settle the refugees in then-Upper Canada, along the Ottawa Valley. The Globe, reporting on the meeting later, was aghast.
This would “flood the province with a population likely to be as great a curse to it as were the locusts to the land of Egypt,” a Globe editorial declared. “Settle the Roman Catholic Irish in masses and we should have a second Connaught, a second District of Quebec, a second Naples.”
The Globe office on King Street West as it looked in the mid-1850s, when its editorial writers balked at the idea of new Irish refugee settlement in Upper Canada.Toronto Public Libraries
Such sentiments were common for Upper Canada at the time. Many among the primarily Protestant, largely British population felt a strong distrust toward Catholics. And many were particularly disdainful toward the Irish Catholics, whom they blamed for a wide variety of social ills, from poverty and crime to disease. Other newspapers of the day, particularly The Toronto Telegram, were also vocal about their contempt.
But The Globe was a particularly important voice among the anti-Irish-Catholic chorus. Publisher George Brown was a staunch believer in the notion of a secular state – of the separation between church and state. He was vehemently against the idea of the Catholic Church wielding any influence over Canadian affairs. And he wasn’t shy about using The Globe as a platform for his message: The newcomers were a hindrance to national unity.
It was the first time the young country, then just a group of colonies, had faced such a large influx of outsiders. As such, it serves as an important lesson. Canada’s response, as reflected in The Globe, would reverberate throughout the country’s history. Newcomers would repeatedly be seen as a threat – not just to their neighbours in Toronto, or Montreal, or cities and towns in which they were settling, but to the very idea of Canada.
“People like to think Canada was always welcoming and tolerant,” says Allan Levine, historian and author of Toronto: Biography of a City. “When sometimes, the exact opposite was true.”
In the mid-19th century – around the time the Irish refugees first began appearing in Upper Canada – it was common to see buildings with orange roofs dotting the country’s landscapes. The buildings, which were across Ontario and concentrated especially in cities like Toronto, were meeting places, clubhouses of sorts for a fraternity called the Orange Order.
The Orangemen (named after William of Orange, the Dutch Protestant king who defeated the Catholic king, James II, in the Glorious Revolution) had first appeared in Northern Ireland in the 18th century. In the face of religious tensions, the Orange Order served there as a kind of Protestant defence organization, viewing themselves as guardians of Protestant rights and liberties. Earlier waves of Irish-Protestant settlers brought the group to Canada, where local Orange Orders became a symbol of an allegiance to the Crown, Britain and Protestant conservatism.
Toronto, with its large British-Protestant population, emerged as a particularly Orange city. The organization had a stronghold on the city’s power centres – from City Hall to the police department to the fire stations. For decades, only Orangemen – or those allied with them – filled senior positions in these institutions. Until the 1950s, almost every mayor of Toronto was a member of the powerful Protestant organization.
New arrivals wait in quarantine at Grosse-Île in 1847, when the Quebec island housed Irish refugees who Canadian settlers feared would bring cholera with them.Parks Canada / Bernard Duchesne
So in the summer of 1847, the arrival of 38,000 Irish refugees in Toronto in the span of just a few months, sent shockwaves through the city. Until that point, Toronto’s population had been just 20,000. And while many of the refugees quickly moved along to other parts of the country, the thousands who stayed – many of them Catholic – quickly transformed the face of the city.
Around the same time, the Catholic Church had begun making moves in Europe. The Vatican was rebuilding, appointing bishops across the continent, including in Britain. The Globe reported on these “papal aggressions” breathlessly. “Protestants in Upper Canada felt that not only was their homeland being taken over – with the Catholics on the march in Europe – but that they were on the march here, too,” says Mark McGowan, a professor of Celtic studies at the University of Toronto.
The largely British and Scottish population had a specific contempt toward the Irish – one that seemed to extend beyond religion. “Irish Need Not Apply” signs, for example, were common in Toronto storefronts at the time. A series of cholera epidemics in the early 1850s, blamed on the arrival of Irish immigrants, further fuelled these attitudes. “There was a sense that they were poor, ignorant, feckless people who were a drain on British society,” McGowan says.
Newspapers, including The Globe, fed into this perception. In 1856, the paper published this: “Irish beggars are to be met everywhere. And they are as ignorant and vicious as they are poor. They are lazy, improvident, unthankful; and fill our poorhouses and prisons.” The words came from a letter first published in the News of the Churches – which The Globe later chose to reprint. They’ve been mistaken, often, for Brown’s own words.
A decade later, in 1866, a Globe reporter’s tour of Stanley Street referred to the almost entirely Irish enclave as “a plague-spot of filth and misery, that cesspool of disease.”
Within a few years, Irish-Catholic communities began to organize in response. They created their own groups, such as the Young Men’s St. Patrick’s Association, to defend themselves and provide aid to those who needed it. They organized Catholic parades and marches to celebrate and protect their culture.
Americans make a run on a bank during the Panic of 1857, when economic crisis created more prejudice against working-class Irish newcomers.U.S. Library of Congress
The Panic of 1857 – an economic depression that rippled across the border from the U.S., leaving many suddenly jobless – had only aggravated matters. “You had lots of people out on the streets without work, and looking for some sort of release,” says William Jenkins, a professor of history at York University.
The long-simmering hostilities eventually boiled over, from street brawls to full-on riots. From the late 1850s until about 1880, violence between Orangemen and Irish-Catholic groups became commonplace. The 12th of July parades (“Orangemen’s Day,” where Protestants would march the streets of Toronto to commemorate the victory of King William of Orange over King James II) became an annual site of violent conflict. At an 1858 St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Toronto, an Orangeman drove a horse and cart into the procession and an Irish-Catholic man died in the violence that ensued. In 1878, shots were fired at a celebration for the Papal Jubilee in Toronto.
These “Orange v. Green” clashes took place in Toronto, but across the country, too – particularly at centres for Irish labourers in the Niagara Peninsula, Kingston and around Montreal. Across the country, battle lines were drawn, often along city and town boundaries. A town was either Orange or Green.
The town of Cavan, for instance, was deeply Orange. Irish Protestants had first settled in the town – about halfway between Toronto and Kingston – in 1816. It was generally understood that Catholics weren’t welcome. And in case there was any confusion, the Cavan Blazers, a vigilante group of local Orangemen, was there to enforce the understanding.
The Canadian Statesman would later describe the Cavan Blazers as “social regulators” who considered their duty “correcting persons acting in a manner injurious to the community.” In the 1850s, for example, the Blazers took it upon themselves to crack down on a local Cavan farmer who had begun holding monthly Catholic masses at his home. They set fire to the farmer’s house one Sunday during a mass. Decades later, the story would become inspiration for the writer Robert Winslow in his play The Cavan Blazers. The play is still staged almost annually in nearby Millbrook, Ont.
In a paper titled “United in Oppression: Religious Strife and Group Identity,” University of Alberta professor Albert Braz explores the question of whether the tensions between the Orange and Green might have been avoided. Braz describes a scene from Winslow’s play, in which the head of the Blazers says to a Catholic leader, “We should have talked.” He wonders whether simple conversation might have ended the conflict. But in the end, Braz decides, the answer is no. “Not because the two groups have conflicting collective memories,” he says. “But because they both see themselves as victims, of each other.”
Orange versus Green represented a fight over religion, loyalty and race. But above all, the fight was over identity – and over the idea of a Canadian identity.
The Loyalists, whose vision for Canada was a British North America – a British colony, that followed a British way of life – treated the arrival of the Green as a threat.
Part of it was insecurity. “It wasn’t yet a foregone conclusion that ‘Canada’ would survive,” Jenkins says. Canada was still a young country – not even a country but a group of colonies, unsure of what might become of them. It was warding off threats of annexation from the U.S. And for Upper Canada in particular, it wasn’t yet clear whether their English-speaking Protestant colony would successfully counterbalance the French-Catholic population of Quebec.
Another factor was loyalty. The Globe and other newspapers at the time would endlessly debate whether the Catholic newcomers were loyal to the Queen or to the Pope. The debate around separate Catholic schools, for instance – an idea that Brown ardently opposed – only fed into this sense of distrust.
And then there was the kind of Canada they wanted to build. The British colony the settlers had envisioned was one of high moral order, where the problems of the “old country” – vices such as crime and prostitution – could be weeded out. Toronto, in particular, was preoccupied with the notion of a perfectly moral, ordered city.
“It was this idea of: Do these people fit the mould of what a ‘good Canadian’ is?” Levine says. “People in Toronto had a particular vision for their community, and the attitude about outsiders was: How are they going to ruin this?”
Ukrainian settlers arrive at Quebec City en route to Alberta in 1897.National Archives of Canada
This fear of outsiders would repeat itself throughout Canada’s history. Lawmakers, with the support of newspapers like The Globe, wrote the fear into legislation, deciding whom to include (recruiting Ukrainian settlers to Canada’s West, for example) and exclude, based on the idea of assimilation.
“It very much had to do with the question of who they thought was capable of assimilating,” says Laura Madokoro, a professor who teaches the history of migration at Carleton University. Some cultures, they felt, were unassimilable. And those decisions were made, she says, based largely on religion, class and race (and, in particular, whiteness).
Indigenous communities in Canada, of course, felt this first and most indelibly. Theirs was a population the British settlers felt they needed to be protected from, one that needed to be “civilized.”
Later, with the arrival of Chinese labourers in the late 19th century, The Globe warned of “inferior people” corrupting local populations, reminding readers of Canada’s goal of “building up a nation, founded on a superior standard of manhood.” And in 1914, when a steamship carrying hundreds of mostly Indian men arrived at a harbour in Vancouver, the newspaper described them as “infuriated Hindus,” who had to be “beaten back with showers of coal and other missiles.”
“Each time, the reaction was, ‘They’re not like us,’” McGowan says. “And the question was: ‘And can they ever be?’”
Rowan Gillespie's statues of Irish famine migrants look out at Toronto's Ireland Park.Kevin Van Paassen/The Globe and Mail
On the question of Irish Catholics, The Globe would eventually evolve. By 1870, the paper was debunking questions of “disloyalty” aimed at Irish Catholics. And by 1878, The Globe declared itself “the true friends of the Irish-Catholics,” and called for greater representation of Irish Catholics in Parliament.
By then, word had already spread around Ireland that Canada – and Toronto, in particular – was deeply Orange. The numbers of Irish immigrants had dropped off. Orange and Green tensions had begun to ease.
By the 1880s, the violence, for the most part, had dissipated. Towns or neighbourhoods were often still divided across Orange and Green lines, but the borders could be decided upon mutually. (Even today, there are still nine active Orange Lodges in Canada, according to the group’s website. Most are in Ontario, though their presence appears to be mostly symbolic.) The existing Irish-Catholic communities became settled and better established in their new homes. They “assimilated” – to an extent. They became “Canadians,” but also maintained – through their own perseverance – a religion and culture of their own.
Other waves of migrants – Ukrainian, Jewish, Italian and Greek – would eventually arrive in large numbers. The differences became less noticeable.
Brown would even come around to view the Irish Catholics as a valuable constituency in his political career. By the 1870s, Brown and the Liberal Party had positioned themselves as allies to Irish Catholics, promising to improve the community’s standing – in exchange, of course, for their votes.
Much later, under publisher George McCullagh, The Globe would in fact become so strongly associated with the community that, when the paper merged with The Mail and Empire in 1936, Protestant Conservatives responded with alarm. In Big Men Fear Me, author Mark Bourrie describes the reaction of competing newspapers at the time: The Kincardine News called the merger “a menace to Protestantism.”
It wasn’t until the latter part of the 20th century that Canada would officially replace the idea of “assimilation” with a new one: “multiculturalism.” Newcomers were still expected to embrace Canadian cultures and traditions, but they could expect to do so while maintaining their own cultures and traditions.
To Madokoro, multiculturalism is not only an idea, but also a continuing process “of negotiating difference and accommodating difference.”
So in that process, we trudge along. Toward the lofty but elusive ideal of a Canada that’s inspired by difference, not threatened by it. It’s an ideal that millions of immigrants have spent many decades fighting toward. And first among them were the Irish Catholics, there to pave the way.
Ann Hui is demographics reporter at The Globe and Mail.
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