Canada, once known as British North America, has been home to Mennonites since 1786. The first Canadian Mennonites came from Pennsylvania and were followed by an intermittent stream of immigrants which swelled on at least three other occasions into major movements of Mennonites to Canada.

The first group of Mennonites that came to Canada were pushed in part by hostility at home arising from their pacifism during the American Revolution. But they were also pulled by the promises and opportunities of a new western agricultural frontier where minority rights seemed better protected than in revolutionary America.

It is estimated that approximately 2,000 Mennonites came from Pennsylvania to Ontario between 1786 and 1825. A detailed Canadian census in 1841 enumerated 5,379 Mennonites, of whom 3,022 lived in the Niagara District, 933 in the Wellington (Waterloo) district, and 859 in the Home (Markham) district.

A second major migration of Mennonites to Canada occurred in the 1870s, when thousands of Mennonites living in Russia sought new homes on North American prairie frontiers. Both American and Canadian authorities were eager to recruit successful settlers and offered major religious, military, and educational concessions. Canada promised more concessions, but economic prospects seemed better on the American frontier. As a result, approximately 7,000 Russian Mennonites migrated to Manitoba in the 1870s, while about 10,000 went to Kansas and Nebraska.

In Manitoba two large land reserves were set aside for the Mennonites in the 1870s, and two more in what would become Saskatchewan in the 1890s. None of these reserves were ever completely filled by Mennonite settlers, and all were eventually thrown open to non-Mennonites. Many other Mennonites moving west from Manitoba, Ontario, the United States, Germany, and Russia chose to take up individual homesteads rather than to occupy land or establish traditional Mennonite villages in the reserved tracts. Mennonite land ownership in Canada therefore developed a rather diverse character.

The third major influx of Mennonites into Canada came as a direct result of the Russian Revolution and Civil War. Approximately 22,000 Russian Mennonites were able to emigrate to Canada between 1923 and 1929, thanks largely to the active support of Mennonites in Canada. Canadian Mennonites worked closely with the Canadian Pacific Railway, and with Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King, who had learned to know the Mennonites while growing up in Waterloo, Ontario. The immigrants of the 1920s made no attempt to achieve a geographical separation from the rest of Canadian society and sought no exclusive land grants or reserves.

Table 1. Mennonites in Canada Census Figures

Source: Census of Canada for each of the above years. In 1871, 1881, and 1891, no separate figures were given for Mennonites. In 1871 and 1881 they were included with Baptists, and in 1891 they were included with other denominations. These figures include Amish, Hutterites, and Brethren in Christ, to the degree that they identified themselves as Mennonite to census workers. Figures include children, i.e., are not limited to baptized church members.

World War II set in motion the last major wave of Mennonite immigrants to Canada. These were Mennonite war refugees and displaced persons from eastern Europe, of whom about 7,000 came to Canada in the late 1940s. Few of these displaced persons took up farming in Canada on a permanent basis. Instead, they pursued new economic opportunities, usually in the cities, and played a key role in the urbanization of Canadian Mennonites and in their integration into Canadian economic, social, cultural, and educational life.

Canadian Mennonites are a rather divided and fragmented denomination. Major historical distinctions can be made between those who came from Swiss and south German Anabaptist stock, and those from Dutch and North German backgrounds. Most of the former came to Canada from Pennsylvania in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, while most of the latter came from Russia and eastern Europe after 1870. Theologically, these two main streams of Mennonitism have remained close, and after World War II historical and cultural differences have decreased.

Mennonites initially organized themselves into small, local, and relatively autonomous communities and congregations, but in 1825 the first Ontario Mennonite Conference was established. In western Canada some of the Mennonites who had arrived there from Russia and northern Germany after 1870 organized their own conference, the Conference of Mennonites in Central Canada, in 1903. The Mennonite Brethren, a group that had already organized separately in Russia in 1860, organized their own conference in the United States in 1879, with Canadian congregations included in a "Northern District" of the conference. The Mennonite Church (MC, sometimes also known as the "Old Mennonites"), the Conference of Mennonites in Canada (often referred to as "General Conference Mennonites") and the Mennonite Brethren are the three largest Canadian Mennonite groups. The other, smaller conferences and groups manifest much diversity.

Table 2. Mennonite Groups In Canada (1989)

Numbers in parentheses indicate membership in more than one group.

Source: Margaret Loewen Reimer, One Quilt Many Pieces (Waterloo: Mennonite Publishing Service, 1990), 52.

Despite the schisms and differences among various Canadian Mennonite groups, they have all joined together to undertake joint relief, immigration, and economic assistance programs. They do so through the Mennonite Central Committee, which was first organized in North America in 1920 to extend economic assistance to Russian Mennonites then hard pressed by war, revolution and civil disorder. Mennonite Central Committee Canada was organized in 1963. Other joint ventures, such as the Conference of Historic Peace Churches, the Non-Resistant Relief Organization, and the Canadian Mennonite Board of Colonization were organized for specific purposes and then disbanded.

While relief and economic assistance to those in need could be undertaken jointly, Canadian Mennonites have not been able to achieve a similar unity in their various foreign and home mission ventures. All major and many of the smaller Mennonite groups have committed considerable effort and resources to missionary activities, which have added many new members. Canadian Mennonites have, however, also suffered high attrition rates as various missionary and revival movements have drawn many persons of Mennonite background into other denominations.

Two unique circumstances have greatly influenced the Canadian Mennonite experience. Canada retained British values, emphasizing loyalty, conservatism, respect for parliamentary institutions, and tolerance of minorities. These were values that Mennonites shared, and many of the confrontations with civil authorities that mark the histories of Mennonites in other countries were muted or did not happen at all in Canada. If the Mennonites sought separation, the authorities, with only sporadic exceptions, did little to coerce them into the mainstream of Canadian life. However, when the Mennonites were ready to take a more active role, there were few major barriers or obstacles.

Canada was also the home of a substantial and politically powerful French Canadian minority. Mennonites and French Canadians rarely agreed on major policy issues, but they did reinforce one another, often inadvertently, on the two important issues of military conscription and public school policies.

The French Canadians were a conquered people, cut off militarily from their former homeland in 1759, and also philosophically and spiritually after the French Revolution (1789). They had little interest in remote imperialist conflicts, and strongly opposed any compulsory military service except that required to defend their own homes. Conscription for military service overseas was therefore a hot political issue in Canada. British parliamentary concerns about minority rights led to a search for acceptable alternatives. French Canadians were willing to serve in home defence units, Mennonites in a variety of restricted and alternative services.

Mennonites and French Canadians also shared a strong commitment to separate or private schools. Both had strong legal claims to such schools, the French Canadians and Ontario Mennonites on the basis of terms included in the British North America Act, and the Mennonites in western Canada on the basis of a federal Order in Council passed in 1873.

After 1890, and particularly during and immediately after World War I, some Canadian reformers hoped to eliminate all separate schools and to make the public schools major instruments of assimilation and Anglo-conformity. Educational legislation governing school curricula, patriotic exercises, teacher qualifications, and compulsory school attendance were passed in most Canadian provinces. This offended both Mennonites and French Canadians. The latter resorted to political measures, but at least 7,000 Saskatchewan and Manitoba Mennonites (Old Colony Mennonites) sold their farms and emigrated to Mexico and Paraguay. In this dispute the Mennonites found that the privileges and concessions they had obtained from the federal government in 1873 were of little value, since education in Canada is under provincial jurisdiction.

Canadian school legislation between 1890 and 1920 severely restricted what could be done in private or separate schools, but it did not abolish them entirely. The Canadian Mennonites who stayed accommodated themselves as best they could to the new state of affairs, accepting what could not be avoided while retaining and strengthening their own educational institutions within the changed Canadian context. In the years since the World War I hysteria, and particularly since World War II, Canadian Mennonites have built their own high schools and several colleges; these institutions have achieved high academic standards which are widely recognized by secular colleges and universities.

Early Canadian Mennonite immigrants sought isolation, religious freedom and economic security. In the early years almost all Canadian Mennonites were rural farmers. They have not, however, escaped the influences and events which have shaped Canadian society. Gradually, but at a rapidly accelerating rate after World War II, they have moved into the cities, where most have adopted a social, economic, and cultural lifestyle that is neither separatist nor distinctive. They have sought to redefine and refocus their distinctive beliefs in a manner which permits much greater accommodation but not complete assimilation into Canadian society. Some distinctive and colorful rural remnants remain, particularly in Ontario, but the Canadian census of 1981 showed that only 23 percent of Canadian Mennonites still lived on farms. Fifty-two percent were listed as living in urban centers with the remaining 25 percent being rural nonfarm people. For most Canadian Mennonites traditional separation, with its special life-encompassing value system, has given way to a more accommodative and integrated role in Canadian society.

See also Amish; Beachy Amish Mennonite Fellowship; Bergthal Mennonites; Brethren in Christ; Chortitzer Mennonite Conference; Church of God in Christ, Mennonite (Holdeman); Conservative Mennonite Church of Ontario; Conservative Mennonite Fellowship; Evangelical Mennonite Conference; Evangelical Mennonite Mission Conference; Fellowship Churches; Fellowship of Evangelical Bible Churches; Hutterian Brethren; Mid-West Mennonite Fellowship; New Reinland Mennonite Church of Ontario; Northern Light Gospel Mission Conference; Old Colony Mennonites; Reformed Mennonites; Reinländer Mennoniten Gemeinden; Sommerfeld Mennonites; Zion Mennonite Church; Alberta Provincial Conference of the Mennonite Brethren Church; British Columbia Provincial Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches; Canadian Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches; Mennonite Church Alberta; Conference of Mennonites in British Columbia; Conference of Mennonites in Canada; Conference of Mennonites in Manitoba; Conference of Mennonites of Saskatchewan; Conference of the United Mennonite Churches of Ontario; Manitoba Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches; Mennonite Conference of Eastern Canada; Mennonite Conference of Ontario and Quebec; Western Ontario Mennonite Conference; Northwest Mennonite Conference; Ontario Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches; Quebec Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches; Alberta; Atlantic Provinces; British Columbia; Manitoba; Ontario; Quebec; Saskatchewan.

See also Canada (1953) (Article published in volume 1 of Mennonite Encyclopedia in 1955)

Bibliography

Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, and Waterloo, Ontario, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 5, p. 121-124. All rights reserved. For information on ordering the encyclopedia visit the Herald Press website.

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