In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence - Ukrainian Canadian Civil ...

In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence
disfranchised most Ukrainian Canadians. [53] There was little effective
protest against this law, although Canada’s oldest daily newspaper, the Daily
British Whig of Kingston, Ontario, did ruminate:
It is quite probable that if this proposal becomes law the alleged
‘foreigners’ and hitherto ‘naturalized’ Canadians will bear their
reproach meekly, but they will have sown in their hearts the
seeds of a bitterness that can never be extirpated. The man
whose honour has been mistrusted, and who has been singled
out for national humiliation, will remember it and sooner or
later it will have to be atoned for. [54]
Likewise the editorial writers of Toronto’s Globe commented, on
21 August 1917 (see “The Naturalized Voters, page 4), “that no
country could take a short cut to victory by wrong-doing without
suffering moral loss and damage.” Condemning proposals to
disfranchise naturalized citizens as “legally indefensible and morally
wrong” the editorial went on to insist that those who had “settled in
our midst at our invitation, trusting implicitly in our good faith”
must not be “treacherously and without provocation and
justification deprived of their rights as Canadian citizens because of
their race and blood.” And, readers were reminded, “the alien who is
naturalized ceases to be an alien. He becomes a Canadian citizen.”
Not everyone took so liberal a view. An anonymous correspondent
from Toronto, whose letter was published on 28 August, asserted that
quite a few people had not agreed with the paper’s stance, for a “German
is always a German,” and the majority of aliens from enemy states could
be expected to vote for whatever political party went for peace at any
price, which was simply not acceptable. Moreover, since Canada was a
British possession, “everyone of British stock had to take commonsense
steps to keep it that way,” which did not include allowing these “aliens”
a vote.
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