Canadian Migration Patterns from Britain and North America (review)

All Canadians – even our First Nations – are immigrants with varying degrees of seniority, since they crossed the Atlantic and Pacific, and the forty-ninth parallel. Indeed, the profound political sensitivity of Canada's immigration policies and public attitudes to them require us to be better informed of diversity in our encounter with our modern diasporas and trans-national connections. But despite this volume's overarching claim of 'patterns,' it is really a collage of vignettes; the focus on 'Britain and North America' signals a myopia regarding the full global context of the Canadian immigration experience.

But if it is a somewhat biased Anglo-Celtic potpourri, most of the contributions are excellent in their own right. Marjory Harper's opening essay presents a historiographic survey of migration studies in British-Canadian and Scottish-Canadian contexts, highlighting the themes of recruitment, cultural continuity, mechanisms of transfer, and future developments. This is followed by a series of case-studies: post-1812 'loyalists' from the u.s. (Peter Marshall); the 'romantic myth' of post-1837 Rebellion emigration from Upper Canada to the United States (Ronald Stagg); a rigorous analysis of the 'invisible' English immigrants overshadowed by the 'historical high drama' of Acadian expulsions, Highland Scots Clearances, and Irish famine victims (Bruce Elliott); the phenomenon of parish-assisted immigration from England in the 1830s (Wendy Cameron).

Several of the studies address the importance of information flows, decision making, and the reaction to the migration experience: the manipulation of emigrants' correspondence from Upper Canada as a 'sleight of hand' to support emigration as a solution to poverty and unemployment in Wiltshire and Somerset (Terry McDonald); temporal linkages that contributed to one family's migrations to Canada over time (Kathleen Burke); the use of letters to reveal the social and economic circumstances of a Highland cotter family and how their migration experience was shaped by previous migrations in the United Kingdom aimed at sustaining independence and overcoming declining economic prospects (Duff Crerar); a feminist exploration of the loss of 'significant others' in the lives of two sisters who migrated from Nova Scotia to British Columbia (Joan Bryans); a genteel family's encounter with freedom from Old World concepts of status and new ways to make a living in frontier British Columbia (Donald F. Harris); the power of exhibitions, lectures, and newspapers in influencing emigration from East England to Western Canada (John Davies).

But the emigration-immigration nexus is more than facts and information fields: the power of ethnic and social factors is also considered in this study: immigrants' encounter with stereotyping and stigmatization in the slums of early twentieth-century Toronto (Richard Dennis); the complexity of emigration decision-making in Ireland in the 1950s (Tracey Connolly); the importance of sexual orientation, human rights, and social justice for Mexican emigration to Canada (Sebastian Escalante) and of wage rates on the brain-drain from Canada to the United States in the 1990s (Gary Hunt and Richard Mueller).

Finally, one of editor Barbara Messamore's operating assumptions is that given current diasporic patterns and trans-national linkages, new Canadians are 'unlikely to embrace a chauvinistic nationalism' and more likely to adopt 'a genuinely global perspective, born of kinship with all the world.' This tension between global networks and local identities is also addressed: the lens of literature is focused on the representation of the role of migration in the cultural imaginary of the Atlantic and argues that both regional and national identities are solidifying in the face of global linkages (Christopher Armstrong); a similar conclusion is reached by a study of voice and emotion in migration songs that represent the complex role of longing for both roots and new homes, a sense of 'places-lost' and 'places-found' (Karen Clavelle).

I concur with Messamore's proposition that the history of Canada is essentially a history of migrations, that these have shaped the nation's culture, and that migration – both international and internal – is an essential component of most Canadians' life-experience. I also...