Hutterites

The Doukhobors and Hutterites are Christian pacifists that found refuge in Canada from Tsarist Russia. Despite their many similarities, the Hutterites thrive today, while the Doukhobors do not. Both groups experienced hardship and inner turmoil in the twentieth century, with the Hutterites forced to excommunicate the heretical Bruderhof, and the Doukhobors compelled to denounce the violent Sons of Freedom. The steps taken by the Hutterites ensured their communal longevity, qualified by the works of Christoph Brumann. For the Doukhobors, their inability to effectively expel the Freedomites from their fold led to a gradual decline in the solidarity and population of their community. Roger Gould’s theory of strife out of symmetry, alongside the theories Brumann, best explains why the Doukhobors face irreversible decline today.

In recent years, freedom of religion jurisprudence has emerged as a key site for the illumination of assumptions and conceptual tensions at work but often unseen within Canadian constitutionalism. This article approaches the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision in Wilson Colony as an access point into the relationship between constitutional reasoning and the management of cultural difference. In this decision the Court both expresses what it finds so difficult about religious freedom cases and articulates a substantial shift in the justificatory analysis under s. 1 of the Charter. Drawing out and explaining both points, this article exposes a deep irony at the core of the Wilson Colony judgment, an irony that betrays the true complexity inherent in the management of religious difference by means of rights-based adjudication. The article concludes by adding the Court’s decision in A.C. to the mix, suggesting that the two cases lay bare the enormous ethical demands involved in the adjudication of constitutional claims rooted in deep cultural difference, demands that our courts may not yet be willing or able to meet.

The younger scholarship on migration history has identified and analyzed the introduction of individual examination of would-be migrants based on certain legally determined criteria as an important factor in the development of modern nation states’ migration policies. This paper analyzes the underlying cleavages inherent in the establishment of that system by presenting a peculiar example of group migration in a time in which the basic legal apparatus of individual migrant examination and admission was still in the making. Between 1917 and 1919, the eventual entry into Canada of large groups of Hutterites, a highly industrious, uncompromisingly pacifist anabaptist group of German descent whose lives centered around communal living and pious deeds, challenged the Canadian government’s developing migration regime. The Canadian parliamentary debates, which the paper analyzes, upheld the idea of individual assessment whilst awkwardly trying to bend the criteria in order to exclude the H...

The younger scholarship on migration history has identified and analyzed the introduction of individual examination of would-be migrants based on certain legally determined criteria as an important factor in the development of modern nation states’ migration policies. This paper analyzes the underlying cleavages inherent in the establishment of that system by presenting a peculiar example of group migration in a time in which the basic legal apparatus of individual migrant examination and admission was still in the making. The eventual entry into Canada of large groups of Hutterites, a highly industrious, uncompromisingly pacifist anabaptist group of German descent whose lives centered around communal living and pious deeds, between 1917 and 1919 challenged the Canadian government’s developing migration regime. The Canadian parliamentary debates, which the paper analyzes, upheld the idea of individual assessment whilst awkwardly trying to bend the criteria in order to exclude the Hutterites as a group. The paper connects thus this case of group migration to the recent literature concerned with the development of individual migrant assessment and deduces that the MPs were unanimously certain that migrants should be assessed individually and that the state had the right to reject certain individuals deemed unfit for entry into the country. Also, however, ambiguities concerning the state’s conception of individuals’ identities and group memberships on the one and of desirable migrants and citizens on the other hand are addressed.