Dr. Jill Vickers
via Zoom – Please contact Gail Larose at glarose0@gmail.com for Zoom link details.
Thursday, October 22, 2026
7 pm ET
Refugee Resettlement & Sponsorship in Canada & Ottawa.
The lecture will explore refugee resettlement and sponsorship in Canada and Ottawa in four periods. It draws both on the existing literature and insights from my participation in small groups of ordinary citizens sponsoring and resettling refugees in Ottawa.
In the first period of refugee resettlement, from the American revolution to Confederation (1776-1867), Britain transported between 30,000 and 40,000 ‘Loyalists’ to its four North American colonies. Six waves of refugees followed.
In a second period (1867- 1951), the newly minted Canada gained greater control over refugee resettlement. It resettled multiple waves of refugees, including 18,000 Jewish refugees fleeing violence and oppression in Germany and The Pale (1870- 1914). But subsequently Jewsih refugees were excluded. However, 400,000 Ukrainians fleeing violent struggles for independence from the USSR were resettled.
In the third period (1951-1977), the Canadian government resettled multiple waves of refugees. Between 1945 & 1959, the allies struggled to resettle millions of displaced persons (DPs) from a devastated Europe. The UN defined refugee status, which became embedded in international law and governed the treatment of refugees.
A fourth period (1978-2025) began with passage of the Private Refugee Sponsorship Act (1978), which lets ordinary Canadians sponsor and resettle refugees. From 1978 to 2019, private citizens sponsored and resettled 327,000 refugees, including over half of Canada’s 60,000 ‘Boat People’ and over half the 62,000 Syrian refugees. With over two million ordinary citizens involved, many Canadians have a personal stake in refugee sponsorship. However, not all refugees receive the same treatment so the lecture explores why Somali refugees were treated differently.
The lecture concludes by overviewing changes in refugee resettlement policy initiated by the Carney government in 2025 and briefly assesses Canada’s resettlement history in a global context.
Jill Vickers’s scholarship mapped new cutting-edge research in Political Science, Women’s Studies and Canadian Studies, resulting in her election as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. With a PhD from the London School of Economics, she taught in all three fields at Carleton University focusing on how gender, race and nation interact with politics. The significance of her work in introducing a feminist perspective into Political Science was shown by the establishing of the Jill Vickers prize in gender and politics by the Canadian Political Science Association. She also received the Life-Long Achievement award from the American Political Science Association and the Distinguished Scholar Award from the International Association of Political Science. Since retiring as Emeritus Chancellor’s Professor, she developed the new gender and federalism subfield co-editing two special issues of Publius: the Journal of Federalism and two international volumes.
