Trevor Busch

As demands for stricter immigration policy mount in Canada and the federal government prepares to overhaul existing legislation to institute more stringent refugee policy, a dark chapter in Canadian history has been all but forgotten.
In None is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe, 1933-1948 (Key Porter Books, 1983), Irving Abella and Harold Troper document the systemic prejudice against the Jews that festered throughout all levels of Canadian society prior, during and after WWII, which virtually slammed the refugee door in the face of Jews fleeing Nazi persecution, and later, the horrors of the Holocaust.
None is Too Many is not only a disturbing indictment of Canada’s indifference to the suffering of European Jewry, but also many other nations in the West which chose to play lip service to the issue of Jews suffering Nazi persecution, but only allowed a trickle of refugees to pass through their borders, including Britain and the United States.
But while many of these nations refused entry to percentages of Jews seeking refuge, no other nation at the time had a more draconian and flagrantly anti-Semitic immigration policy than Canada.
Abella and Troper detail how one of the main figures and a top bureaucrat in Canada’s immigration department, Frederick Charles Blair, held back at every turn and stifled any attempt at Jewish immigration throughout the 1930s and well into WWII.
Blair’s attitude, hardly unique among government officials at the time, including Prime Minister Mackenzie King — was that Jews were essentially an unassimilable ethnic group and entirely “unsuitable” for agricultural settlement. All of which was simply code for a virulently anti-Semitic immigration policy, and whitewash for keeping Jews out of Canada at all possible cost.
Even while Hitler’s factories of death were working overtime funneling millions of Jews into the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Sobibor and Treblinka and the many other concentration camps scattered across Europe, Canada still turned a blind eye towards Jewish refugees that might have been saved had the country opened her borders.
None is Too Many also brings to light the disturbing truth that even when evidence the Nazis were presiding over the systematic extermination of European Jewry had become incontrovertible, Canada still refused to offer sanctuary to the few Jews that managed to escape their grasp, in Vichy France, Spain and Portugal.
First published in the early 1980s, None is Too Many is the product of exhaustive research by the authors, who are also Canadian university professors. While impressive in scope and detail, if the work has a failing it would be too great a focus on the historical aspects of the period rather than a more personal account of what Canada’s heavy-handed restrictions had meant to the average European Jew fleeing Nazi tyranny, or to those Jews in Canada who were unable to save family and loved ones due to the cold ministrations of bureaucratic indifference.
It was only in the post-war period, when displaced persons’ camps still held hundreds of thousands of refugees in Europe, and an economic boom raised demands for cheap, accessible labour, that Canada finally flung her door wide open to immigration, regardless of race-based restrictions.
In the decades which followed, the nativism and latent anti-Semitism which had flourished in Canada during the first half of the 20th century was eventually stripped away, relegated to the extreme fringes of a society which had chosen to purge itself of much of its racial baggage.
Today, Canada is still nominally a champion of refugees and refugee rights, as well as a nation which still accepts a large number of immigrants every year.
None is Too Many warns us to remember that it wasn’t always that way. Abella and Troper’s work takes its title from the words of an anonymous senior Canadian official who was asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war. “None,” he said, “is too many.”
A well written and relatively easy read at only 290 pages, None is Too Many opens a window on the darker aspects of a Canada that many today might not have believed existed 60 years ago, considering the progressive nation that has been forged since and the freedoms and protections it provides for its citizens, both and new and old.