Federal grant-funded video claiming Prairie settlement fueled by anti-black disinformation

A federally funded video shown to schoolchildren portrays early 20th-century Prairie settlement as shaped by anti-black racism and government-led disinformation, according to documents released through Access to Information.

Blacklock's Reporter says the Department of Canadian Heritage paid $50,000 for the video, intended to promote critical thinking and digital literacy.

The project, part of the Digital Citizenship Initiative, featured a short film titled Last Best West, produced by the non-profit Historica Canada. A summary described the video as aimed at “educating Canadians about disinformation and helping them to think more critically about media that Canadians consume.”

The video claims that black families from Oklahoma seeking refuge from racism were deliberately discouraged from settling in Canada by federal authorities.

“To stem the tide of black immigration the government began a secret campaign of disinformation,” said Historica. “Uncovering this deception from 1911 can help us think more critically about media we consume today.”

Narration in the video tells students: “It was a beautiful idea, the promise of free, fertile land in Western Canada. At the turn of the century many black Oklahomans wanted a part of it.”

The narrator continues: “Canada, however, was not so eager to receive them,” adding that officials warned black settlers would not fare as well as white immigrants in Canada’s harsh climate.

Historica, led by former journalist Anthony Wilson-Smith, has received $5.9 million in federal funding since 2023. The $50,000 Last Best West project was described in government records as having “spread awareness” of past discrimination and the historical use of disinformation by public institutions.

While the video frames Prairie settlement through a lens of exclusion, historical data presents a broader picture of immigration during the period. From 1911 to 1921, the black population in Canada grew by 8.4%, from 16,877 to 18,291 people, according to Statistics Canada. Most black immigrants arrived after 1971.

The Dominion Bureau of Statistics’ 1927 Year Book described the Prairie expansion as “spectacular,” noting immigration between 1901 and 1911 totaled 1.8 million. The population of the four Western provinces increased 44% in the following decade, growing from 1.7 million to 2.5 million.

Census records from 1921 showed Canada’s 8.78 million people were predominantly of English, Scottish, Irish, French, and German descent. Other groups included Scandinavians, Dutch, indigenous peoples, Russians, Italians, Poles, Ukrainians, and 126,000 identified as “Hebrew.”