Although "push factors" caused many emigrants to leave their countries, the "pull factors" for western Canadian immigration were also strong. The Canadian government's promise of 160 acres of free land seemed especially attractive, and a reviving national economy provided a large market for Canadian wheat. New, faster-maturing and hardier wheat strains were being developed, such as Red Fife and Marquis, which pushed farming settlements northwards where frost came earlier. In addition, increasingly efficient farm machinery and farming techniques, such as dry-land and irrigation farming, were being invented. Most importantly, Canada benefitted from the closing of the American frontier after 1890. When the best land in the American West was gone, western Canada became the "Last Best West."

The result was a vast influx of immigrants from the United States, Britain, Germany, Scandinavia, the Balkans, the Ukraine, and Russia. Western Europeans comprised the largest proportion of immigrants to Canada during this period, but many came from central and eastern Europe as well. For example, 170,000 Ukrainians came to Canada during the great wave of immigration at the turn of the twentieth century. Not surprisingly, the arrival of such a large number of groups, many of whom settled in the West and homesteaded, transformed the nation and helped make it the polyglot society that it is today.