Polish Canadians (, ) are citizens of Canada with Polish ancestry, and Poles who immigrated to Canada from abroad. At the 2016 Census, there were 1,106,585 Canadians who claimed full or partial Polish heritage. History The first Polish immigrant on record, was Dominik Barcz, came to Canada in 1752. He was a fur merchant from Gdańsk who settled in Montreal. He was followed in 1757 by Charles Blaskowicz, a deputy surveyor-general of lands. In 1776 arrived army surgeon, August Franz Globensky. His grandson, Charles Auguste Maximilien Globensky, was elected to the House of Commons in Ottawa in 1875. Among the earliest Polish immigrants to Canada were members of the Watt and De Meuron military regiments from Saxony and Switzerland sent overseas to help the British Army in North America. Several were émigrés who took part in the November Uprising of 1830 and the 1863 insurrection against the Russian Empire in the Russian sector of partitioned Poland. In 1841, Casimir Stanislaus Gzowski arrived in Canada from partitioned Poland via the US, and for 50 years worked in the engineering, military and community sectors in Toronto and Southern Ontario, for which he was knighted by Queen Victoria. His great-grandson, Peter Gzowski, became one of Canada's famous radio personalities. Charles Horecki immigrated in 1872. He was an engineer with the cross-Canada railway construction from Edmonton to the Pacific Ocean through the Peace River Valley. Today, a mountain and a body of water in British Columbia are named after him. Polish immigration stopped during World War I and between the wars, over 100,000 Polish immigrants arrived in Canada. Group-settlers The first significant group of Polish group-settlers were ethnic Kashubians from northern Poland, who were escaping Prussian and German oppression resulting from the occupation after the partitions. They arrived in Renfrew County of Ontario in 1858, where they founded the settlements of Wilno, Barry's Bay, and Round Lake. By 1890 there were about 270 Kashubian families working in the Madawaska Valley of Renfrew County, mostly in the lumber industry of the Ottawa Valley The consecutive waves of Polish immigrants in periods from 1890–1914, 1920–1939, and 1941 to this day, settled across Canada from Cape Breton to Vancouver, and made numerous and significant contributions to the agricultural, manufacturing, engineering, teaching, publishing, religious, mining, cultural, professional, sports, military, research, business, governmental and political life in Canada. Geographical distribution Data from this section from Statistics Canada, 2021. Provinces