Ukrainian Canadians

Ukrainian Canadians (Ukrainian: Українські канадці, Україноканадці; translit. Ukrayins'ki kanadtsi, Ukrayinokanadtsi) is a term that refers to Canadian citizens of Ukrainian descent or Ukrainian-born people who emigrated to Canada. In 2011, there were an estimated 1,251,170 persons of full or partial Ukrainian origin residing in Canada (mainly Canadian-born citizens) making them Canada's ninth largest ethnic group, and giving Canada the world's third-largest Ukrainian population behind Ukraine itself and Russia. Self-identified Ukrainians are the plurality in several rural areas of Western Canada. Of the 1,251,170 who identify as Ukrainian, only 144,260 (or 11.5%) can actually speak either the modern Ukrainian language or the archaic Canadian Ukrainian dialect.

History

Over the last thirty years, a debate has been ongoing whether a tiny number of Ukrainians settled in Canada before 1891. Most controversial is the claim that Ukrainians may have been infantrymen alongside Poles in the Swiss French "De Meurons" and "De Watteville" regiments who fought for the British on the Niagara Peninsula during the War of 1812 – and that Ukrainians were among those soldiers who decided to stay in Upper Canada (southern Ontario). Other Ukrainians supposedly arrived as part of other immigrant groups; it has been claimed that individual Ukrainian families may have settled in southern Manitoba in the 1870s alongside block settlements of Mennonites and other Germans from the Russian Empire. "Galicians" are noted as being among the miners of the British Columbia gold rushes and figure prominently in some towns in that new province's first census in 1871 (these may have been Poles and Belarusians as well as Ukrainians). Because there is so little definitive documentary evidence of individual Ukrainians among these three groups, they are not generally regarded as among the first Ukrainians in Canada.