10 December 2008 Michael Ignatieff Becomes Liberal Party Leader Michael Ignatieff, the grandson of Count Paul Ignatieff, who was the last education minister under Tsar Nicholas II, is one of the most prominent Russian Canadians of all time. He led the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011, when it formed the official opposition. Ignatieff had a long and distinguished career across much of the English-speaking world as a history professor and journalist. 22 August 2014 On the 100th anniversary of Parliament’s adoption of the War Measures Act, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the federal government unveiled 100 commemorative plaques about internment across the country. In 2013, Parks Canada opened a permanent exhibit — Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Canada’s First World War Internment Operations, 1914–1920 — in Banff National Park to increase public awareness of internment. 10 May 2016 By 2016, Canada was home to the second-largest Ukrainian diaspora in the world, behind Russia. Approximately 1.36 million Canadians, 3.8 per cent of the population, have Ukrainian heritage, making them Canada’s 11th-largest ethnic group. As of 2016, 51 per cent of Ukrainian Canadians, nearly 700,000, lived in the Prairie provinces, where they comprised 11 per cent of the population; 27.7 per cent lived in Ontario, 16.8 per cent in British Columbia and 3 per cent in Quebec. 24 February 2022 After annexing Crimea in 2014 and fighting for control of the Donbas region ever since, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. By 8 March, the resulting refugee crisis was the biggest in Europe since the Second World War. By 25 October, more than 7.7 million people had fled Ukraine. Between 1 January and 16 October, 105,651 Ukrainians arrived in Canada. The Canadian government received 628,492 temporary resident applications, as well as 60,000 applications for a special three-year visa created specifically for the crisis. The Canadian government pledged to take in an “unlimited” number of Ukrainian refugees. Russian Jews Immigrate as Soviet Union Collapses There was an effective ban on emigration from the Soviet Union beginning in the 1920s and lasting until the country’s dissolution in 1991. As the USSR began to collapse in the mid-1980s, emigration policies began to ease. Faced with antiSemitism, Soviet Jews began to emigrate in large numbers to various countries, including Canada. By 1996, about 20,000 Jewish people from the former Soviet Union lived in Canada. They settled mainly in Montreal and Toronto, cities that had large Russian and Jewish populations. 1991 100th Anniversary of War Measures Act is 2016 Census Figures Russia Invades Ukraine, Sparking Humanitarian Crisis
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