This essay relies heavily on Irving Abella and Harold Troper’s indispensable work None Is Too Many: Canada and the Jews of Europe 1933–1948, a book that ought to be read by every Canadian who has ever repeated, with unearned confidence, that this country occupies the world’s moral high ground.
It is not a comfortable book. Nor is it meant to be. It strips away the national habit of self-congratulation and replaces it with something far more bracing: evidence.
“None is too many.” Few sentences in Canadian history possess such chilling efficiency. Uttered in 1945 by a senior immigration official when asked how many Jewish refugees might be admitted after the Holocaust, the phrase was less a remark than a revelation. It exposed a governing mentality in which exclusion was not a reluctant necessity but a deliberate objective.
Abella and Troper dismantle the mythology of Canada as a welcoming refuge. Between 1933 and 1948, fewer than 5,000 Jewish refugees were admitted — one of the worst rec…
