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CHRIS KOSTOV
would be considered traitors and sentenced to death unless they returned to
Bulgaria within six months. Their relatives in Bulgaria would also be deprived
of civil rights and a part or whole of their property would be confiscated. In a
confidential letter of 9 June 1953, the RCMP Commissioner in Ottawa informed
the Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs A.M. Ireland that a number of
Bulgarian Canadians in Toronto received letters from their relatives in Bulgaria
asking them to return home because they were afraid of government reprisals
against them.” Punitive measures could include, firing relatives of immigrants,
resettlement in the remote Bulgarian countryside, or not allowing them to
receive university education. Nevertheless, Bulgarian Canadians preferred to
stay in Canada and yet, these brutal measures of the Bulgarian government
diminished the number of Bulgarian immigrants significantly. The small
numbers of Bulgarian immigrants, as well as the process of assimilation of
the second and third generations kept the number of Canadian citizens of
Bulgarian origin virtually the same for the duration of the Cold War. In the
1941 Census of Canada, 1,157 Ontarians declared Bulgarian as their mother
tongue.” In 1976, the number of Ontario residents declaring Bulgarian as their
mother tongue dropped slightly to 1,125. According to the 1986 Canadian
Census, which could be considered the last Census for the Cold War period, the
number of Bulgarians by birth was 1,130 in Ontario.“ Kostadin Gurdev also
noted that during the Cold War most second and third generation Bulgarian
immigrants in Canada did not speak Bulgarian well and oftentimes declared
simply a Canadian national identity. Another reason for the voluntary
assimilation of the Bulgarian Canadians and their unwillingness to declare a
Bulgarian identity was the repressive communist regime in Bulgaria. Most of
them opposed it, because they were usually political dissidents. The Bulgarian
citizens who reached Canada during the Cold War were considered refugees
and not immigrants by Canadian law. Most of them had to leave Bulgaria
illegally. The only people who managed to reach Canada were political refugees,
usually men. Thus, it is not surprising that, out of 1,615 Bulgarians by birth in
Ontario in 1991, 990 were men.** Some of these immigrants had experienced
repressions and prison terms in Bulgarian Gulags and thus, they associated
Bulgaria with communism. A number of them severed all connections with
“ “Threats against Bulgarian Residents in Canada and their Relatives in Bulgaria by the
Government of Bulgaria,’ Library and Archives Canada (LAC), RG25, G2, Vol. 4392, File
11786-40, Pt. 1.
® Census of Canada, 1941, Ottawa, Dominion Bureau of Statistics 1943, 750-751.
#3 Census of Canada, 1976, Population: Demographic Characteristics, Vol. 2, Ottawa, Statistics
Canada, 1979, 21.
4 Census of Canada, 1986, Language: Part I, Ottawa, Statistics Canada, 1987, 7.
® Gurdev, Bulgarskata emigraciya, 95.
16 Census of Canada, 1991, The Nation: Immigration and Citizenship, Ottawa, Statistics Canada,
1992, 18.
° 64 ¢