What was the Great Migration to British North America?

The Great Migration was a wave of British and Irish immigration to British North America from about 1815 to 1860 that brought roughly 800,000 immigrants. The migration transformed the population, language, and political character of the colonies and laid the foundation for English-Canadian society. The migration occurred in three main phases: an early phase (1815 to 1830) of demobilised British soldiers and middling Scottish settlers; a middle phase (1830 to 1845) dominated by Irish, English, and Scottish working-class migrants; and a late phase (1845 to 1860) that included the Famine Irish exodus.

Several factors drove the migration. In Britain and Ireland, the post-Napoleonic War economic depression, the Highland Clearances in Scotland (1780s to 1850s), the Irish Potato Famine (1845 to 1852), industrial displacement, and rural poverty pushed people to emigrate. In British North America, available cheap land, free passage assistance schemes, and chain migration (family members joining earlier arrivals) pulled settlers in. The British government and major colonial landlords actively recruited immigrants in some cases, including Lord Selkirk's Highland schemes and the Peter Robinson assisted emigrations of 1823 and 1825 (about 2,500 Irish Catholics from County Cork to the Peterborough area of Upper Canada).

The Famine Irish migration of 1846 to 1851 was particularly intense and traumatic. About 100,000 Irish immigrants arrived in 1847 alone, the worst year of the Famine. Many arrived sick with typhus, cholera, and other epidemic diseases. The quarantine station at Grosse Île on the St. Lawrence (about 50 kilometres downstream from Quebec City) processed about 100,000 immigrants in 1847; about 5,400 died on the island and were buried in mass graves. Grosse Île is now a Parks Canada national historic site with memorials to the Famine victims. Toronto (then about 20,000) received about 38,000 Famine immigrants in summer 1847; many died of typhus at the city's Emigrant Hospital.

The Great Migration profoundly reshaped British North America. By 1860 Upper Canada (Canada West) had a population of about 1.4 million, compared to about 80,000 in 1815. The demographic balance shifted decisively toward English-speakers; for the first time English-speakers outnumbered French-speakers in British North America. The migration also produced major social tensions, including anti-Irish-Catholic violence (the Tory-Orange riots of the 1830s and 1840s) and labour competition in Maritime and Canadian cities. The Great Migration laid the demographic and cultural foundation for the English-Canadian majority that would shape Confederation and the post-Confederation expansion to the West.