What does it mean to be European? and Canadian?

What does it mean to be home?

These three multilayered, complex and entangled questions are the skeleton of this research.

CoMe-Home traces the housing history of a migration wave, from the postwar European peninsula to Canada. After the devastation left by the Second World War, more than one million people embarked on this transatlantic journey, carrying with them different labels: displaced persons, refugees, expellees, stateless people, or others considered simply labour migrants. Each label meant different rights, different waiting periods, and a different chance of being resettled.

The typical account of this migration, as told in the ethnic histories of specific communities, is a success story of integration following initial hardship and discriminatory policies. Their housing experience tends to sound similar too: a room in someone else's basement leads, in time, to a mortgage and a lawn. This did happen, and it happened often enough that it has become the story people expect to hear. But was it like this for everybody? The narrative assumes that housing was always available, and that owning a house was always the final point of settlement.

The stories of those who did not fully participate in their ethnic community's institutional life, who kept renting, or who lived their entire lives in apartment buildings are harder to trace. They all left thinner archives, and this imbalance shapes the picture we end up with. This is the main reason I decided to dig deeper into those histories, focusing, as a starting point, on two urban areas: Halifax, one of the main ports of entry for this migration wave, and Toronto, one of the largest resettlement centres of the period.

The project aims, first, to enrich the story of this migration wave by moving beyond the ethnic lens that gives us celebratory accounts and success stories, looking instead for interconnected threads among communities and with the mainstream society as a whole, through social history, for instance. Second, it asks whether these transnational entanglements can also tell us something about the idea of Europe itself. And finally, perhaps most importantly, whether they can help us understand Canada better.

These migrants arrived in a nation that was itself in a state of uncertainty: a settler-colonial country, officially bilingual in English and French, built on land that was originally Indigenous, already shaped by earlier waves of stratified migration, and increasingly under the influence of its neighbour to the south. A country still working out its own identity.

What was their role in all this? Was it really a success story of integration? And if it was, did being depicted as European, and welcomed into the category of whiteness, play a part? Can we talk about privilege here, or not? Were the structural and economic conditions of Canada in the 1950s and 1960s favourable enough to make that success possible?

The project looks at the people, the policies, and the places.

Canada has long presented itself as a country that welcomes newcomers, offering opportunity to those willing to work for it. This research looks at that story with fresh eyes, asking whether it was true, and for whom it held.