Such Hardworking People: Italian Immigrants in Postwar Toronto

Steve Pitt is a Toronto-based freelance writer and an award-winning journalist. He has written many young adult and children's books, including Day of the Flying Fox: The True Story of World War II Pilot Charley Fox.

It is an accepted notion that Ontario is a province of immigrants. What
is less understood about this phenomenon is that when the immigrants
come it is often in sudden waves. Between 1951 and 1961, 240,000
Italians emigrated to Canada, and of those immigrants 90,000 settled in
Toronto. Like the American Loyalists of the 1780s and the “famine”
Irish of the 1840s, these immigrants had an impact on the existing
culture that was immediate and not always amicable.

Iacovetta has enjoyed the rare opportunity of writing a sociohistory at
a time when many of the actual subjects are still alive and the myths
have yet to take over. She uses both official government documents and
personal accounts to recapture the post–World War II Italian immigrant
experience. It is, overall, a success story: tens of thousand of
Italians came to Canada to find a higher standard of living; after much
heartbreak and struggle, most found it.

Iacovetta’s lean prose leaves little room for romanticization. In the
1950s the Canadian government was undeniably racist, the Italian
government unabashedly opportunist, and Canadian recruitment
corporations occasionally unscrupulous. The would-be Italian immigrant
quickly proved to be a shrewd player in this high-stakes poker game.

Once here, Italians were quickly streamed into dangerous, backbreaking,
and low-paying work. Yet established Canadians were soon complaining
that the new immigrants were undercutting the labor market, exploiting
the generosity of the welfare system, and persisting in their own
peculiar habits and customs rather than trying to become “Canadian.”

This book is both enlightening and sadly familiar to anyone acquainted
with the immigration experience. It finds echoes in the immigration
stories of the last century, and in the current calls to gerrymander our
immigration laws to favor certain races and income groups over others.

Such Hardworking People, therefore, is not a book about Italians or
Italian-Canadians; it is about Canada and people who would be Canadians.