Essay, Research Paper: Canada's Immigration

The Europeans who "discovered" North America, it has been said, were those men who believed
least in its existence: merchants and adventurers looking for a northwest ocean passage to the Far
East. The continent - inhabited by Inuits and Amer-Indians - that blocked their way gradually
became the site of permanent settlements, first French and then English. Eventually bitter trade
rivalry, leading to war between Britain and France, resulted both in the decimation of the native
peoples (movingly registered in the lamentations of the female "memorizers" of the Nootka oral
tradition, for example) and also, notwithstanding the decisive British military victory at the Battle
of the Plains of Abraham in 1759, in permanent linguistic, cultural, and religious divisions
between anglophone and francophone Canada.
After the American War of Independence in 1776, the immigration of tens of thousands of
Loyalist men, women, and children from New England - colonists who chose to remain loyal to
Britain and were rewarded with land grants - added another indelible mark on the Canadian
character, which is generally seen as more respectful of law and order and less ruggedly
individualistic than the American. Loyalist immigration not only strengthened the political,
social, and economic dominance of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant community, but it also
determined that Canadian literature in English would represent the confluence of the two main
streams in the language-those of Britain and the United States.