Italian Canadians
By Frank Sturino
Italian Canadians are among the earliest Europeans to have visited and settled the country. The steadiest waves of immigration, however, occurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. Italian Canadians have featured prominently in union organization and business associations. In the 2016 census, just under 1.6 million Canadians reported having Italian origins.
As a group, they were singled out as enemy aliens due to Canada's allegiances in the Second World War, and have been stereotyped as mafiosi due to widespread portrayals of organized crime as an Italian phenomenon. However, the community as a whole has thrived in Canada, and Italians have played a major role in developing and promoting multiculturalism. The earliest Italian contact with Canada dates from 1497, when Giovanni Caboto (John Cabot), an Italian navigator from Venice, explored and claimed the coasts of Newfoundland for England. In 1524, another Italian, Giovanni Verrazzano, explored part of Atlantic Canada for France. Under the French regime in the 1640s, Francesco Giuseppe Bressani was part of the Jesuit missionary advance into Huron country and later published a sympathetic account of life in Iroquoian-speaking bands as part of the Jesuit Relations (or reports). Enrico di Tonti (Henri de Tonty) acted as RenéRobert Cavelier de La Salle’s lieutenant in the first expedition to reach the mouth of the Mississippi River in 1682. Italians served in the military of New France (e.g., in the Carignan-Salières Regiment),
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in which several distinguished themselves as officers. Several hundred Italians also served with the de Meurons and de Watteville Swiss mercenary regiments in the British army during the War of 1812. Following the example of Italian ex-soldiers in New France who settled on the land in the late 17th century, some 200 of the mercenaries took up lots granted by Britain in the eastern townships of Québec and in southern Ontario. Origins Over 75 per cent of Italian immigrants to Canada have come from Italy’s rural south, especially from the regions of Calabria, Abruzzi, Molise and Sicily, each with over 10 per cent of the total. About three-quarters of these immigrants were small-scale farmers or peasants. Unlike northern Italy, which dominated the newly formed (1861–70) Italian state and continued to industrialize, southern Italy remained rural and traditional. Overpopulation, the fragmentation of peasant farms, poverty, poor health and educational conditions, heavy taxation and political dissatisfaction acted as a “push” towards emigration. Factors that “pulled” Italians to Canada included rising expectations,