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The Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies (CIUS) was established in July 1976 at the University of Alberta’s Faculty of Arts. It gathers, preserves and disseminates scholarship regarding Ukraine and Ukrainians in Canada and around the world. It has offices in Edmonton, Toronto and Lviv, Ukraine. Since 1976, the CIUS Press has published books on Ukrainian history and Ukrainians in Canada. The CIUS also publishes the Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine, which began in 2001.  

There was likely sporadic immigration of Ukrainians to Canada as early as 1812. But the first recorded Ukrainian immigrants to Canada were Ivan Pylypow and Wasyl Eleniak, farmers from Galicia. Encouraged by German friends who had settled in Canada, they came in September 1891 seeking a suitable area for settlement.

In 1892, a small group of immigrants organized by Ivan Pylypow arrived in Winnipeg from Nebyliw, Ukraine. Two years later, the families of Mykola Tychkowsky and Antin Paish left the group to settle east of Edmonton at Edna (now Star). It was Canada’s first and soon largest Ukrainian block settlement. The fertile land with sufficient streams made it perfect for farming, while an abundance of trees provided building material for homes and barns. Pylypiw moved to Edna a year later. The settlement grew as more people arrived from Galicia and Bukovyna.

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.

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.

Mary John Batten earned a law degree from the University of Saskatchewan. After winning the Saskatchewan Liberal Party’s nomination in Humboldt, she won the riding in the 1956 election. She was re-elected in 1960. Batten left politics in 1964 to become the first woman in Saskatchewan (and only the second in Canada) to serve as a federal judge. In 1983, she became Saskatchewan’s first female chief justice.

Ukrainian agronomy professor Dr. Jósef Olesków (born 28 September 1860; died 18 October 1903) published two pamphlets in 1895 encouraging Ukrainian agricultural settlement in Canada. Olesków thought the Canadian Prairie was perfect for the excess rural population of Galicia. His efforts led to a more targeted flow of Ukrainians to Canada than anywhere else, eventually making Ukrainians the largest Slavic group in Canada.

Ukrainian immigrants to Canada were generally either Eastern-rite Catholic or Orthodox Christian. Until 1912, Ukrainian Catholics were under Roman Catholic jurisdiction. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada was founded in 1918. Each church eventually became its own metropolitanate (or bishopric): the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada in 1951 and the Ukrainian Catholic Church in 1956.

The 1931 census found that there were 225,113 Ukrainians in Canada. By 1961, that number had risen to 473,337, just under 2 per cent of Canada’s population. The census reported that the mother tongue of 86.5 per cent of Canadians was English or French and 3.1 per cent was German. In fourth place was Ukrainian at 1.9 per cent.

Sir Clifford Sifton was the federal minister of the interior and superintendent-general of Indian Affairs from 1896 until 1905. He initiated the program that raised the number of immigrants to Canada from around 16,000 to more than 140,000 per year. He specifically sought Central and Eastern European farm families. In 1922, when asked about bringing so many non-British settlers to Canada, Sifton said, “I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality.”

The first wave of Ukrainian immigration to Canada (1896–1914) ended with the First World War. After the war came the second wave (1919–39). The 1931 census reported that the number of Ukrainians in Canada had risen to 225,113 — 2.2 per cent of Canada’s population. The census found that, unlike the first wave, less than half of Ukrainians immigrants in the second wave settled on farms. Most found homes in cities and jobs in urban factories or mines, often in central and eastern Canada. But overall, by 1931, more than 85 per cent of Ukrainian Canadians lived in the three Prairie provinces, and 77.9 per cent were rural.

In a national referendum with 84 per cent turnout, 90 per cent of Ukrainian voters cast a ballot for Ukraine to declare independence from the USSR. The Soviet Union split into 15 independent countries following its formal dissolution on 31 December 1991. Canada was the first Western country to recognize Ukraine’s independence. In 1994, Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons to Russia in exchange for a guarantee that its border would always be respected. By the end of the century, economic hardships had led to 23,000 people leaving Ukraine for Canada. After 2001, roughly 2,500 immigrated per year.

In 1896, Dr. Jósef Olesków arrived near Dauphin Lake, Manitoba. He determined that it would be perfect for a group of 30 families that he was organizing to move to Canada from Bukovyna and Galicia. They arrived in 1897 and worked with the railway and at sawmills to save money to establish farms. A growing number of Ukrainian settlers survived bitterly cold winters and an 1899 prairie fire that took many homes and barns. By 1913, the predominantly Ukrainian community had become the government seat and commercial centre for the Northern Judicial District.

Michael Luchkovich (born 13 November 1892; died 21 April 1973) was born in the United States to Ukrainian immigrants who moved to Edmonton. In the 1926 federal election, Luchkovich was a candidate in Vegreville for the United Farmers of Alberta. He became the first Ukrainian Canadian to be elected to Parliament. A vigorous defender of minority rights, Luchkovich spoke out against the Holodomor in 1932–33. He was also a founding member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. He ran for the CCF in the 1935 election but was defeated. He went on to write many books and translated many others into Ukrainian.

The 1991 census reported that 1,054,295 Canadians were of Ukrainian descent and comprised 3.9 per cent of the country’s population. More Ukrainians worked in agriculture than the Canadian average, but the majority of Ukrainian Canadians were urban and worked in a wide range of professions. The census found that 196,000 Canadians reported Ukrainian as their mother tongue. It also found that 23.2 per cent of Ukrainian Canadians were Ukrainian Catholic, 20.1 per cent were Roman Catholic, 18.8 per cent were Orthodox, 10.9 per cent went to the United Church and 12.6 per cent reported no religion.

A second-generation Ukrainian Canadian, Wayne Gretzky is the NHL’s all-time leader in goals, assists and points. Considered by many to be the greatest hockey player of all time, “the Great One” held or shared 61 NHL records when he retired in 1999 after 20 seasons. Other notable Ukrainian Canadian hockey players include Terry Sawchuk, who won the Vezina Trophy four times and holds the record for most shutouts (103), and Dale Hawerchuk, who scored 100 points or more in six seasons with the Winnipeg Jets.