Ivan Franko’s Canadian Connection

One of Ukraine’s greatest writers was behind the first wave  of immigration to Canada

By Thomas M. Prymak

In the late 1890s, the Austrian government, which at that time governed Galicia, a territory in today’s south-western Ukraine, did not encourage emigration.  Galician bureaucrats and the Polish gentry, who largely controlled the Galician bureaucracy, had a negative attitude towards it.

Local-level administrators hindered emigrants and feared that unscrupulous immigration agents, out to make a quick buck, would exploit the peasants.  Thus, in January 1892, when Ivan Pylypiw, the first Ukrainian peasant to settle in Canada returned home with stories about free land across the ocean, he was promptly led to jail at bayonet point. 

The same year, Ivan Franko, one of Ukraine’s greatest writers, penned a spirited defence of the peasants’ right to emigrate, which was published in a Viennese newspaper.  Franko argued that necessity was driving the population abroad and that newspaper stories about foreign immigration agents were nonsense. He argued that the reasons for immigration were economic, namely that the parcelization of land and lack of industrial growth led to extreme poverty, overpopulation, and even recurring famines.  In Franko’s view, the Polish gentry discouraged emigration because they wished to keep wages low through a captive labour supply.

Conditions were so bad that country folk not only migrated to other parts of the Austrian Empire, Germany or North America, but also left for the forests of Brazil and the empty steppe lands of Russian Asia.

The economic situation became critical after 1893, when, during a severe depression, factories in the American mid-West began to close down. Many immigrant workers were compelled to return home. Under such desperate conditions, the Galician peasant did indeed become prey to unscrupulous immigration agents.

When horror stories about exploitation by coffee plantation owners, Indian massacres and the unhealthy climate in Brazil began to reach Galicia the Ukrainian intelligentsia, including Franko, became truly alarmed.

The dilemma of the peasants, caught between messianic dreams and bitter realities, captured Franko’s imagination. At the height of his literary powers, he wrote a poem, Do Brazilii on this theme, in which he tells the sad story of the hardships in the old country, the difficulties of the ocean voyage, and the disappointment upon landing in the new country.

One individual, in particular, Osyp Oleskiv, an agricultural expert and friend of Franko’s, raised his voice on behalf of the peasants who wanted to emigrate. Oleskiv happened on some literature on Canada and investigated the possibilities of emigration there.  He made some preliminary inquiries and in July 1895 his booklet, About Free Lands, was published by the Prosvita Educational Society. In this booklet, Oleskiv urged villagers to give up the idea of going to Brazil and, instead, consider going to Canada where the immigrant farmer regularly received 113 morgs of free land and where social conditions and life in general were better.

After an interview with the Galician governor, who later became the Austrian prime minister, and after contact with Canadian government officials, Oleskiv set out, in person, to discover the possibilities of the new land. There is evidence that Franko himself considered getting involved in Oleskiv’s Canadian adventure. He wrote to the Ukrainian scholar Mykhailo Drahomanov in May, 1895: “At this time we are talking a lot about Canada with Dr. Oleskiv….He is going there to seek a place for Ruthenian colonists, and if an appropriate place can be located…I will be the first who is ready to go across the ocean.”

While Oleskiv was in Canada, Franko wrote articles about the various dangers of immigration. When Oleskiv returned to Galicia, a conference was held on the subject of immigration in November 1895, which Franko attended.

Upon his return, Oleskiv gave a very favourable report on the prospects of mass immigration to Canada and set out his plan for changing the direction of immigration from Brazil to the Canadian prairies. Oleskiv wanted to the immigration process to be better organized, the emigrants to travel in groups, to have proper provisions, and translators or at least experienced leaders. As a result of these proposals, an emigrant aid committee was formed.

Franko continued to write on this subject for Polish newspapers and attended a number of conferences and meetings.  His presence at one such meeting was witnessed in the winter of 1895-1896 by the literary critic Mykhailo Machulski. After the meeting, Machulski wrote:  “Franko and Oleskiv sat together with a group of students. When the lecture ended there was a discussion. Some students were against immigration, considering it the loss of the best national forces. Others were for immigration, giving as a reason that in any immigration, people acquire a broader point of view and usually return from immigration better off in the homeland. Franko, as far as I remember, was not against immigration but insisted that it be well-organized and wisely carried out.”

Franko often similarly defended the Galician peasantry in its attempts to emigrate abroad and criticized the Galician administration for its attempts to limit emigration.  In particular, Franko spoke on the subject during the so-called Vichovyi Rukh, which were mass public meetings held in the countryside where perhaps thousands of peasants gathered at once. 

At one such meeting, at Velyki Mosty, Franko compared the relative merits of emigration to Canada and Brazil. He discussed the civil order in each country and concluded that people live much better in Canada.  In Brazil, Franko said, immigrants receive ten morgs of forest, while in Canada they receive 100 morgs of good wheat-growing land (a morg was roughly equivalent to an acre). Moreover, argued Franko, in Canada, a man’s property and life were safe, while in Brazil they were not. The main problem with Canada, Franko informed his audience, was that it cost 120 Austrian guilders to get there, whereas passage to Brazil was free. Franko advised those who could afford it, to go to Canada, but he cautioned that they should wait until the spring because there was no work in Canada during the winter, and they had to have enough money to tide themselves over. “Those who do not have enough money to travel to Canada,” he said, “should wait for a while because in Lviv at this very moment they are trying to arrange for free passage.”  He concluded that those wanting to emigrate must turn to Canada because “it is a thousand times better there than it is in Brazil.”

The efforts to redirect immigration to Canada were not in vain. In the following months, several well-organized groups of villagers left Galicia to settle in Manitoba. In the fall of 1896, a Canadian immigration official reported to the commissioner of Dominion Lands in Winnipeg that there had been a large increase in the number of Ruthenian settlers from Austrian Galicia. The official ascribed the increase to the efforts of Oleskiv who was now well-known to the Canadian government and he stated that upwards of 100 families, in all 630 persons, had settled principally in Manitoba and Alberta.

Thus, between 1895 and 1987 Oleskiv, Franko and others were instrumental in the initiation of the great immigration movement to Canada. 

Franko’s old school companion and political sympathiser, Kyrylo Genyk, led Oleskiv’s second group of organized settlers to Winnipeg in July 1896.  Upon Oleskiv’s suggestion, the Ministry of the Interior of the Canadian government hired Genyk as an interpreter, and, in this capacity, the new Canadian civil servant greatly helped the new immigrants. 

By 1902, according to an official report drafted by Genyk, some 38, 435 Galicians, the vast majority of them ethnic Ukrainians, settled in Manitoba in the North West.  With the help of Franko and other activists, Oleskiv’s project was beginning to bear fruit. By 1914 there were well over 100,000 settlers of Ukrainian ethnic origin living in Canada.

The descendants of the early Ukrainian immigrants to the Canadian prairies can thus partly credit their existence in Canada to one of Ukraine’s greatest creative geniuses.

This article is an abridged version of a presentation made at the 2006 Canadian Congress of Social Sciences and Humanities on May 27 in Toronto as part of a session devoted to Ivan Franko on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth. The author, Thomas M. Prymak, is a historian by profession and is currently a Research Associate, Munk Centre International Studies, University of Toronto.