Young readers will learn that:
- Canada hasn’t always welcomed newcomers. In the past, certain ethnic groups, including people of Black, Asian and Jewish heritage, were banned from our country.
- New France was populated with the help of les filles du roi, or “daughters of the King,” young, often poor, women sent to New France to marry soldiers.
- Orphaned and destitute British “home children” arrived in Canada to work as labourers in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
- After World War II, some 1100 Jewish war orphans whose parents died in the Holocaust came from Europe to live with Jewish Canadian families.
- More than 3 million immigrants from all parts of the world have arrived in Canada in the last 25 years.
- Of the 200,000 new immigrants who come to Canada each year, about 20,000 are refugees.
