Antisemitism in Canada, "None Is Too Many" and the MS St. Louis

Approaching this lesson

This lesson looks at a painful part of Canada's own history: antisemitism at home and the government's refusal to help Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi persecution. Learning this history is not about blaming people today. It is about understanding how ordinary prejudice, built into institutions, had deadly consequences, and how Canada has since tried to acknowledge it.

As Lesson 5 showed, the Nazi regime in Germany made antisemitism into law. From 1933, German Jews lost jobs, rights and property. In November 1938, during Kristallnacht, Nazis attacked Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues across Germany and Austria. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish people desperately tried to leave. They needed countries willing to take them in.

Antisemitism in Canada

In the 1930s, antisemitism was common and mostly legal in Canada. Jewish Canadians, about 1.5% of the population, mostly lived in Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg.

• Education: some universities, including McGill, limited the number of Jewish students they admitted.
• Work: many banks, law firms, hospitals and other employers refused to hire Jewish people. In 1934, interns at Montreal's Notre-Dame Hospital went on strike to protest the hiring of a Jewish doctor, Samuel Rabinovitch; he resigned.
• Housing: restrictive covenants in property deeds banned selling or renting to Jewish (and often Black and Asian) people.
• Leisure: some beaches, resorts and clubs posted signs excluding Jewish people. You learned about the Swastika Clubs and the Christie Pits riot (1933) in Lesson 5.
• Boycotts and propaganda: in Quebec, an "achat chez nous" ("buy from our own") campaign encouraged people to avoid Jewish businesses, and Adrien Arcand's fascist newspapers spread antisemitic propaganda.

Jewish Canadians resisted: they built their own hospitals (such as Montreal's Jewish General Hospital, opened in 1934), community organizations such as the Canadian Jewish Congress, and protested discrimination. Some non-Jewish Canadians also spoke out.

"None is too many": Canada's refugee policy

• Canada's immigration rules in the 1930s were very restrictive for everyone, because of the Depression. But Jewish refugees were treated with special suspicion.
• Frederick Charles Blair, director of the Immigration Branch from 1936, strongly opposed Jewish immigration. Prime Minister Mackenzie King and his cabinet, including Justice Minister Ernest Lapointe, supported keeping Jewish refugees out, partly because they feared a political backlash, especially in Quebec.
• At the Evian Conference in July 1938, Canada, like almost every other country there, refused to take more refugees.
• Between 1933 and 1945, Canada admitted fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees, according to historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper. That was one of the lowest numbers of any Western country.
• Their book's title, None Is Too Many (1982), comes from a remark by an unnamed senior Canadian official who was asked how many Jewish refugees Canada would accept after the war. His answer: "None is too many."

The MS St. Louis, 1939

In May 1939, the German ocean liner St. Louis left Hamburg with 937 passengers, almost all Jewish refugees. They had paid for permits to land in Cuba, where many planned to wait for visas to the United States.

When the ship reached Havana, Cuba cancelled most of the permits. Only 28 passengers were allowed to land, and the ship was ordered to leave. The United States refused to let the passengers land. In Canada, on June 7, 1939, 41 prominent Torontonians petitioned Prime Minister King to offer the passengers sanctuary. King asked his officials; Lapointe was strongly opposed and Blair said the refugees did not qualify under Canada's rules. Canada refused.

The ship returned to Europe. Britain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands each agreed to take some passengers. But within a year, Germany conquered France, Belgium and the Netherlands. According to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 254 former St. Louis passengers were murdered in the Holocaust.

Acknowledging the past

• 2011: the Wheel of Conscience memorial, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was unveiled at the Canadian Museum of Immigration at Pier 21 in Halifax. Its turning gears represent hatred, racism, xenophobia and antisemitism, and the passengers' names are on the back.
• November 7, 2018: Prime Minister Justin Trudeau formally apologized in the House of Commons for Canada's refusal of the St. Louis passengers and for its antisemitic immigration policies.
• Antisemitism did not end in 1945. The revised Grade 10 course asks you to think about antisemitism today as well. Police-reported hate crime data from Statistics Canada show that Jewish people are among the groups most often targeted by hate crimes in Canada.