text: Keepitverysimple,
  
  From the early 1840s to well into the 1870s exactly the same sort of things as you say were said in what are now Ontario and Quebec about the flood of Irish Catholics offloading during the 1840s from the coffin ships fleeing the Famine. These attitudes at that time poisoned politics and retarded social and economic progress for decades.
  
  Echos of those attitudes distorted debate over public financial support for schooling and set the stage for pitched street battles in Toronto (nicknamed little Belfast), violent clashes between Irish and French Canadian loggers for control of work in the Ottawa Valley lumber camps and the first Riel Rebellion and the serious political discord that followed.
  
  The early 20th century was marked by recurrences of such attitudes directed at Eastern Europeans and Orientals in Western Canada.
  
  Happily, reactionary xenophobia did not win out in the long run then and should not now.