"Enemy Aliens": Internment and Wartime Discrimination

Neighbours become "enemies"

In 1914, tens of thousands of people living in Canada had come from Austria-Hungary and Germany. Many were Ukrainians from the Austro-Hungarian provinces of Galicia and Bukovyna who had come to farm on the Prairies or work in mines, railways and cities. They had left those empires behind, often to escape poverty and discrimination. Now Canada was at war with the countries named on their old passports.

Using the War Measures Act, the federal government issued orders in 1914 that applied to "enemy aliens": residents from enemy countries who were not naturalized British subjects.

What the government did

• Registration: about 80 000 people had to register and report regularly to the police or local officials. They were not allowed to own firearms and had to carry identity papers.
• Internment: 8 579 people, almost all of them men (some women and children joined interned husbands and fathers), were held in 24 receiving stations and internment camps from 1914 to 1920. Most had committed no crime. Many were arrested because they were unemployed and poor, and some because officials thought they might be disloyal.
• Who was interned: most internees were Ukrainians; others included Germans, Poles, Croats, Serbs, Hungarians, Slovaks, Turks and others from the enemy empires.
• Where: camps included Kapuskasing and Fort Henry (Kingston) in Ontario, Spirit Lake in Quebec, and Castle Mountain and the Cave and Basin in Banff, Alberta.
• Forced labour: internees cleared land, built roads and other infrastructure in national parks such as Banff, and worked in mines and forests, for very little pay.
• Losses: money and property were taken and some was never returned. From 1916, as labour became scarce, many were paroled to work for railways, mines and other companies. The last camp, at Kapuskasing, closed in 1920, more than a year after the war ended.

Wider wartime discrimination (B2.6)

• German Canadians faced suspicion and hostility. In 1916, the city of Berlin, Ontario, changed its name to Kitchener, after a British general. German-language schools and newspapers came under pressure, and in 1918 publications in "enemy languages" were restricted.
• People lost jobs: some employers fired "enemy aliens", especially after veterans returned.
• The Wartime Elections Act (1917) took away the vote from many naturalized citizens born in enemy countries (previous lesson).
• Conscientious objectors, such as many Mennonites, Hutterites and Doukhobors, whose faith forbade fighting, were exempt from service under earlier promises, but faced suspicion and were also stripped of the vote.

These actions reflected fear, nativism (the belief that people born in the country, or of certain origins, deserve more rights than immigrants) and wartime pressure. Many internees and their families stayed silent about the experience for decades.

Remembering and acknowledging

For decades, few Canadians knew about the internment. Descendants and community organizations, especially within the Ukrainian Canadian community, gathered evidence and campaigned for recognition. In 2005 Parliament passed the Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act, and in 2008 the government created the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund to support education and commemoration. Plaques now mark the former camp sites.

Looking ahead: Ukrainian Canadians' history connects to later units. In the 1930s, millions of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union died in the Holodomor, a famine caused by Soviet policies; you will study it and Canada's responses in Canada, 1929–1945.