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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 ¢
