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The Ontario NDP, who have a human rights award in his name, brag “Woodsworth fought against racial and religious discrimination in Canada and stood up for the right of all Canadians to vote, regardless of skin colour or socioeconomic status.”

All this adulation ignores Woodsworth’s stunningly racist, classist and xenophobic beliefs that he published in his 1909 book Strangers Within Our Gates, Coming Canadians, a 331-page primer for average Canadians on how to decide who to let into Canada and who to keep out.

Strangers, replete with dozens of statistical tables, lays out a hierarchy of races and countries of origin as a crude ranking system for immigration desirability, analyzing such traits as physical stature, intelligence, social habits, moral character, criminality, religion, ambition, industriousness and propensity to assimilate.

Top of the immigrant heap for Woodsworth are the English: “We need more of our own blood to assist us to maintain in Canada our British traditions and to mould the incoming armies of foreigners into loyal British subjects.”

But not the English poor: “We sympathise with these poor people, but we are glad that the Canadian Government is taking steps to prevent the ‘dumping’ of these unfortunates into Canada … we must express the fear that any large immigration of this class will lead to the degeneration of our Canadian people.”

Indigenous people barely warrant a mention in Strangers, as Woodsworth lumps them into a four-page section called “The Negro and the Indian,” wherein Woodsworth promotes Christian proselytization, education and assimilation as the only hope for these “savages”: “Many are devout Christians leading exemplary lives, but there are still 10,202 Indians in our Dominion, as grossly pagan as their ancestors, or still more wretched, half-civilized, only to be debauched.” Woodsworth mused, “the Indian of today is very much nearer to the civilized white than to his pagan ancestor,” which assumed progress he warns has been hampered by “the mistaken kindness of the State.”