Dismantling Racial and Ethnic Barriers
At war's end in 1945, Canadian immigration regulations remained unchanged from the restrictive pre-war years. Yet change was not long in coming. Driven by a postwar economic boom, growing job market, and a resulting demand for labour, Canada gradually re-opened its doors to European immigration. Initially, to immigrants Canada traditionally preferred — those from the United Kingdom and Western Europe — but eventually to the rest of Europe as well. However, with the onset of the Cold War, immigration from Eastern Europe came to a halt. Borders to the west were closed by the Soviet Union and its allies. However, large numbers of immigrants entered Canada from southern Europe, particularly Italy, Greece and Portugal.
Unlike immigration from previous decades, postwar immigration was not streamed exclusively into agricultural or rural-based resource extractive industries. Canada emerged from the Second World War as an urban, industrial power, and many postwar immigrants soon filled jobs in the manufacturing and construction sectors. Some helped expand city infrastructure while others — like the better-educated immigrants — met the strong demand for trained and skilled professionals.
Canadian immigration underwent other dramatic changes in the postwar years. Canadian governments, federal and provincial, slowly yielded to pressure for human rights reform from an earlier generation of immigrants and their children. Increasingly middle class and politically active, the now well-integrated immigrants had sacrificed in common cause with other Canadians in the war effort; as such, in the postwar era, they refused to assume second-class status in a country they had helped protect. Supported by like-minded Canadians, they denounced the ethnic and racial discrimination against them and demanded human rights reform. They forced governments to legislate against discrimination on account of race, religion, and origin in such areas as employment, accommodation and education. And, just as Canada was making discrimination illegal at home, the government moved to gradually eliminate racial, religious or ethnic barriers to Canadian immigration.
By the late 1960s, overt racial discrimination in immigration policy was gone from Canadian immigration legislation and regulations. This opened Canada's doors to many of those who would previously have been rejected as being “undesirable” on the basis of race or ethnicity. In 1971, for the first time in Canadian history, the majority of those immigrating into Canada were of non-European ancestry. This has been the case every year since.