Curious Canadian History

During the course of the Second World War nearly 22,000 Japanese-Canadians were uprooted and forcible interned by the government of Canada. More than half of those had been born in Canada, thousands more were naturalized British subjects. Despite no shred of evidence that the population posed any threat to the Canadian nation at war the internment continued until after the war in the Pacific had ended. In September 1945, Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had experienced internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment and the government sought to do all in its power to ensure as many Japanese-Canadians as possible accepted their potential new fate.

To dive into this subject today we’ve brought on two historians Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross. Eric is a Professor of Law at the University of Alberta, Faculty of Law. He publishes widely on Canadian constitutional law, theory, and history. Jordan is Professor of History at the University of Victoria and Director of Past Wrongs, Future Choices, a research partnership that is working to understand, from a global perspective, the uprooting of people in Japanese descent in the 1940s. The two have recently co-authored the book Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution which was published in 2025 by UBC Press. 

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