A HISTORICAL OUTLINE OF CANADA

In its short history Canada has become a diverse and pluralistic modern society, both in terms of its geography and the contacts among its cultural groups. When the first European explorers – mainly from France and Britain – arrived on the east coast of Canada in the 1500s they found a land populated by less than half a million Aboriginal peoples. The Inuit lived along the coastal edges and islands of the Arctic; First Nations, or Aboriginal, peoples inhabited the rest of the land. As the population of French and British colonialists grew, settlers expanded westward for trade and land by colonial policy and war. Following the American Revolution of 1776, colonists loyal to Britain came up from America and settled in Canada. The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries saw a steady flow of British immigrants on the one hand, and Chinese, Italian, and Irish workers on the other.

In the early twentieth century, many settlers originating from Eastern European countries came to the Canadian prairies to farm. After the 1930s, with the growth of cities, the tide of immigration flowed to urban centres, where the majority of Canadians resided and worked. Between 1946 and 1954, 96 percent of the immigrants admitted to Canada came from Europe. In the 1950s the federal government's immigration policy had been to fill the country's needs in the natural resource and industrial sectors; the policy later shifted toward acceptance of professionally educated workers.