Ontario Ukrainian Heritage Day

By Volodymyr Kish

It was my pleasure this past Thursday to be a guest at the Ontario Legislature to witness the passing of Bill 155, a private member’s bill that officially designates September 7 of each year as Ukrainian Heritage Day in the Province of Ontario.  The Bill was introduced by MPP Gerry Martiniuk, the Conservative member for the constituency of Cambridge, and received the unanimous support of all parties and MPP’s in the Ontario Legislature.  A number of MPP’s, including Gerry Martiniuk (Conservative), Donna Cansfield (Liberal), Rosario Marchese (NDP), Tony Ruprecht (Liberal) and Jerry Ouellete (Conservative), spoke at some length of the significant contributions that Ukrainians have made to the Province of Ontario.

For those of you who may wonder about the significance of the September 7 date, it represents the day in 1891 when Wasyl Eleniak and Ivan Pylypiw arrived in Halifax on the steamship Oregon, becoming the first official Ukrainians to arrive in Canada.  This started a huge wave that would see some one hundred and seventy thousand Ukrainian immigrants arriving in Canada prior to World War I.  

By far, the vast majority of these immigrants proceeded west to the Prairie Provinces where the promise of free land had a strong attraction for settlers who were essentially peasants seeking better opportunities.  However, a significant number never made it to the West, finding better employment opportunities in Ontario and Quebec.  Northern Ontario, in particular, was experiencing a mining boom, and by 1905, significant numbers of Ukrainians were to be found working in mines in such places as Cobalt and Copper Cliff.

The mining industry continued to attract Ukrainians from succeeding waves of immigration to the north for the next six decades, and dozens of towns in Northern Ontario such as Fort Frances, Sudbury, Espanola, Timmins, Kirkland Lake, Kapuskasing, and Virginiatown would eventually see sizeable populations of Ukrainians.  My own parents settled just across the border from Kirkland Lake in the Northern Quebec mining town of Rouyn-Noranda where I was born.  Much as Ukrainians in the West were a significant factor in developing Canadian agriculture, Ukrainians in Ontario and Quebec played a major role in making Canada a leader in the world’s mining industry.

But mining was not the only economic sector to attract Ukrainians to Ontario.  The turn of the century saw a rapid expansion of Ontario’s industrial base with factories of every kind springing up all over Southern Ontario.  All these factories needed vast numbers of labourers, and where there were jobs being created, Ukrainian immigrants followed shortly thereafter.

The first known Ukrainian immigrants to settle in Toronto were Panteleymon Ostapowich, Wasyl Neterpka and Joseph Strachalsky who arrived in 1903 via the U.S.  Many followed soon after, settling in the Queen and Spadina area as well as in the West Toronto neighbourhood that was known as The Junction.  By 1911, there were some 2,500 Ukrainians living in Toronto. By 1914, they had built their first church, St. Josaphat on Franklin Ave.

The auto industry at this time was also starting to become a major industrial employer and soon large numbers of Ukrainians were beginning to settle in places such as Oshawa, Windsor, St. Catharines, Welland and many others.  As early as 1917, the Ukrainians in Oshawa had already formed a “Prosvita” Ukrainian Reading Society to create an organizational capacity to develop their cultural and social life.

Ukrainians have traditionally placed a great premium on education, and within a generation or two, Ukrainians were playing a major role in the economic, political, business and intellectual life of the Province.  The current Speaker of the Ontario Legislature, Steve Peters is Ukrainian.  Over the past decades, there have been dozens of Ontario MPP’s and Cabinet Ministers of Ukrainian origin.  Former Premier Ernie Eves is part Ukrainian.  The list of prominent Ontario Ukrainians who have left their mark on Ontario in every sphere of endeavour would be exhaustive.

This September 7 and for all the ones after, we will have the opportunity to honour those prominent Ukrainian Ontarians, and indeed all the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians who have made Ontario their home and contributed so much to the life, culture and success of this marvellous province.