When many people think of the internment of Japanese citizens, they assume that it is only something that happened in the United States, but they would be mistaken on this point. In fact, the Canadian government issued a similar internment proclamation which ended up housing twenty two thousand Japanese Canadians at the time of World War II. Unlike the American internment process which happened rather rapidly, the one issued by the Canadian government happened through a series of escalating laws. The main cause for concern among the government was for those Japanese Canadians which were working in the boating industry and had access to the Pacific Ocean where it might be easy for one of them to communicate with the Japanese Navy.

The worries about spies infiltrating the Japanese boating industry and giving over information on the Canadian Navy were deemed unwarranted by both the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the military, but the public continued to push the leaders in government until they were forced to act. The first thing that happened was that many workers of Japanese descent were fired from large companies like the Canadian Pacific Railway as many Japanese fishing boats were confined to the ports. This prevented many Japanese families living in Canada from earning wages to support their families.

By 1942 an area of land one hundred miles wide next to the Pacific Coast was declared as a protected zone and Japanese men who were between eighteen and forty five were removed from this area. The government took them to lands that had been set aside in the interior of the country. Many of those who were now being interned had been veterans of the Canadian Expeditionary Force and had served the country during World War I, many of them receiving accommodations for their bravery. And, even though most of the Japanese who lived in Canada were natural born citizens, the government threatened to deport them to Japan if they do not go to the relocation centers. This would have forced people who had never even lived in Japan to make the choice of going to a land they didn’t know or going to a prison like setting in their own country. This power was granted by the War Measures Act on February 24th, 1942, which granted the government the power to move all people of Japanese origin.

Because of the restrictions on many Japanese in the country, the confiscation of their homes and property, and the anti-Japanese sentiment that had caused many of them to lose their jobs, the people were faced with the fact that they could not support themselves outside of the camps. Their kids were not even legally allowed to attend schools outside of the camps and it has been said that there was no schooling provided by the government for the children in the camps. This meant that the only education many of the young evacuees received was from their parents and siblings. Eventually the churches and the government arranged for classes to be held for those children who were of school age for elementary through high school. In fact, the camps in Canada were often worse than those found inside the United States as it is estimated that the Canadian government only used a small percentage of the amount of money to feed, cloth, and house their detainees. The Red Cross is even said to have deferred shipments of food to the camps because of the poor conditions.

To make matters worse, the Japanese who had entrusted their belongings to the government would lose most of their possessions in auctions held without their permission while they were being held at the interment camp. The money did not go to the Japanese, but rather was used to pay off fees and claimed for storage charges. After the war ended, the Japanese were given the choice of deportation to Japan or forced removal to an area east of the Rocky Mountains. This law was argued in front of the Canadian Supreme Court which ruled in a five to two decision that the law was valid and that the government could force a citizen to be deported from their own country. It was partially repelled in 1947 and Japanese Canadians did not have to go to Japan, but four thousand had already left the country. It wasn’t until 1949 that Japanese citizens were once again given the freedom to live anywhere in Canada they wanted. The government also gave compensations for lost land (only property damages, not civil rights damages) to approximately fifteen hundred Japanese Canadians.

However, this compensation would be challenged later on as the politics and actions of the government were put up against a spotlight following the revelation of certain government documents in the 1970’s which established that the interment was due to a strong anti-Japanese sentiment rather than a legitimate military action based on intelligence about threats. In 1983, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) began a campaign to have the government issue them a formal apology and to address the issues of lost wages, property, and civil rights violations of those citizens which had been forced into interment or relocation camps during World War II. The losses were evaluated by Price Waterhouse and through the records of the Custodians of Aliens (the organization responsible for much of the auctioning off of property and possessions of the interned Japanese) it was determined that the loss for those interned citizens amounted to approximately four hundred and forty three million dollars by the monetary standards of 1986.

In September, 1988, coinciding with the time that Reagan was offering the initial compensation to interned Japanese Americans; the Prime Minister issued an official apology to Japanese Canadians and initiated the beginning of a compensation plan that would give twenty one thousand dollars to each surviving detainees and grant citizenship to those who had been forcibly deported to Japan. Twenty four million dollars was given out as well, half to the NAJC to help the Japanese community and half to establish a group to help end racism, the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.