Involuntary Immigrants

School teachers struggling to make Canadian history appealing to the young must sometimes envy their American and Australian counterparts, at least for the relative glamour of their stories of early European settlement. Courageous and greedy fur traders, never mind land-hungry habitants and pioneers, cannot really compete with the Pilgrims’ quest for religious freedom or with shiploads of abused convicts, some of them children.

So one hopes the schools are devoting some attention to Canada’s own involuntary immigrants, the 80,000 British children shipped here from Confederation until the last years of the First World War. Their story offers both extremes: evangelicals and social workers driven (at least in their own evaluation) by Christian fervour, wedded to a level of suffering among many of the children that rivals the misery of any transported felon.

There is, by now, a great deal of material to draw on. Even today, the best introductory works probably...