Scholar explains how Canada's leaders justified internment of immigrants (05/15/05)

Scholar explains how Canada's leaders justified internment of immigrants

by Dale Barbour

WINNIPEG - A total of 8,579 people of Ukrainian and Central European descent interned in Canada during the first world war, 1914-1918, were caught in the middle of two battles. The war between the alliance and central powers was the most obvious, but it was the internal debate between imperialist and nationalists in Canada that might have been the most telling.

Prof. Bohdan Kordan of the University of Saskatchewan delivered the 2005 Prof. Michael and Dr. Iraida Tarnawecky Distinguished Lecture, titled "Canada's Enemy Aliens During World War I: The Predicament of Belonging," on Thursday, March 31, to over 150 people in St. Andrew's College.

The lecture was hosted by the Center for Ukrainian Canadian Studies and before the presentation, center director Denis Hlynka drew the audience's attention to lists of names posted through the lecture hall.

"We've posted the names of the individuals who were interned in the camps," Mr. Hlynka said. "There are 85 pages of names in all and you're welcome to look through them after the lecture to see if there are any names familiar to you."

The enemy aliens were detained in 24 camps across Canada, most of them in Alberta and British Columbia, and forced to work on public works projects.

"Much of Canada's public parks system infrastructure was built by the detainees," Prof. Kordan said. "When you drive along the Bow Valley Parkway in Banff National Park you're driving on a highway built with their labor."

About 800 of the interned people had been merchant marines for Germany or the Austro-Hungarian Empire, but the vast majority were simply civilians living in Canada. Of all the combatants in the first world war, only Canada went so far as to treat civilians as prisoners of war - Germany and Great Britain also interned civilian enemy aliens but in those countries the civilians had far more freedom and were not put to work on public projects.

So why did Canada choose to intern civilians?

The most obvious reason would be that Canada was caught in patriotic war frenzy and quickly turned on people from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, seeing them as potential enemies.

The truth, however, is more complicated.

"When you see statements from officials about why the policy was necessary, what is so clear from the archives is that there is very little evidence of the patriotic argument," Prof. Kordan said. "There isn't the shrill rhetoric about the need to defend the country that you would expect."

If anything, the official record portrays a coolly dispassionate attempt to carry out the policy of internment, he added.

The closest rationale Prof. Kordan could find in the records was a statement in 1914 from a deputy justice minister concluding that there was nothing under international law to prevent Canada from interning its enemy aliens.

The truth of the matter lies in where the new immigrants - who had been part of the great 19th century wave of settlers in Canada - fit in Canada.

During the pre-World War I wave of immigration when the Wilfred Laurier Liberals had been in power, the focus had been on settling the country. The new immigrants had actively recruited to come to Canada. The approach to citizenship was nationalist - people could become citizens of Canada by choosing to be part of the country.

But at this point Canada was still a dominion of the British Empire. Control of internal policy rested with the Canadian Parliament, while control of external affairs rested with Great Britain. When the Conservatives came to power under Robert Borden in 1911, they tilted toward the imperialist view of Canada.

But the imperialist world view complicated things for immigrants, Prof. Kordan said. Imperialism was based on the view that people were ultimately loyal to the crown, or leadership, of the country they were born in. So people who came to Canada from the Austro-Hungarian Empire were seen as still owing their first allegiance to that empire.

Under the imperial system, immigrants to Canada could become naturalized citizens of Canada but they could not become citizens of the British Empire - only people born in Canada could be considered British Empire citizens, Prof. Kordan said.

As Canada rolled into war in 1914, these sort of distinctions became critical - to the imperial mind the loyalty of immigrants was questionable and under the imperial system their position as citizens in the empire was tenuous. It was by this reasoning that the Canadian government was able to justify to itself that enemy aliens could be considered prisoners of war.

But it would be events on the ground that would lead to Canada putting that sort of reasoning into action.

"The period in 1913-1914 was a time of economic depression in Canada," Prof. Kordan said. "And the enemy aliens came to bear the burden of the faltering economy. Management and unions felt the enemy aliens should be the first to be let go."

Often the recent immigrants were left looking for work and congregating in the cities. Local communities were unable to provide support for the enemy aliens, so it left the federal government wondering what its obligations were toward the recent immigrants. While the enemy aliens had been invited to come to Canada in a nation-building effort, after 1914 the priority of Canada became the war. As the war scare grew in 1914 and the imperial ideology gained ascendancy, the problem of status and obligations toward the enemy aliens resolved itself by terming them prisoners of war and interning them.

"But it was less a result of what was happening on the ground than a failed conceptualization of belonging," Prof. Kordan said. "Ultimately it was a failed policy and imperialism as an approach for creating identity would also be a failure. It was unsustainable for Canada, which would inevitably come to base its identity on a citizenship polity."

The Tarnawecky lecture is made possible through an endowment fund created by Michael Tarnawecky, a former engineering professor at the university, and Iraida Tarnawecky, a former Slavic studies professor.

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