Civilian Internment in Canada

Histories and Legacies

Rhonda L. Hinther, Jim Mochoruk, Rhonda L. Hinther, Jim Mochoruk

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780887558450
• eBook ISBN: 9780887555916
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Civilian Internment in Canada initiates a conversation about not only internment, but also about the laws and procedures—past and present—which allow the state to disregard the basic civil liberties of some of its most vulnerable citizens. Exploring the connections, contrasts, and continuities across the broad range of civilian internments in Canada, this collection seeks to begin a conversation about the laws and procedures that allow the state to criminalize and deny the basic civil liberties of some of its most vulnerable citizens. It brings together multiple perspectives on the varied internment experiences of Canadians and others from the days of World War One to the present.

This volume offers a unique blend of personal memoirs of "survivors" and their descendants, alongside the work of community activists, public historians, and scholars, all of whom raise questions about how and why in Canada basic civil liberties have been (and, in some cases, continue to be) denied to certain groups in times of perceived national crises.

PART I

METANARRATIVES

CHAPTER 1

The Rule of Law and Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century

DENNIS EDNEY

The world today faces grave challenges to the rule of law and human rights. Previously well-established and accepted legal principles are now being called into question in all regions of the world through what I would suggest are ill-conceived responses to terrorism. Many of the achievements in the legal protection of human rights are under attack.

Terrorism does pose a serious threat to human rights and all countries have an obligation to take effective measures against acts of terrorism. Under international law, governments have both a right and a duty to protect the security of all their citizens. However, since September 2001, many countries have adopted new counterterrorism measures that are in breach of their international obligations. In some countries, the post-9/11 climate of fear and insecurity has been exploited to justify long-standing human rights violations carried out in the name of national security. This represents a continuum with patterns evident historically in Canada and elsewhere, as the other chapters in this collection, and perhaps most notably the introduction, demonstrate.

These recent circumstances have led to an intense debate over where the balance lies between the rule of law, human rights, and civil liberties on the one hand and security on the other. In April 2000 U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright described her view of an appropriate balance between security and civil liberties. She stated: “We have found, through experience round the world, that the best way to defeat terrorist threats is to increase law enforcement capabilities while at the same time promoting democracy and human rights.”1

These remarks would have struck many Western liberal audiences, at the time, as mainstream beliefs, consistent with the rule of law and reflective of values which we prided ourselves on at that time. However, since 9/11, many Western democracies have reappraised the balance described by Secretary Albright and embarked upon a politics of fear to limit civil liberties.

In adopting measures aimed at suppressing acts of terrorism, we are involved in more than a simple utilitarian calculation of security at the expense of our civil liberties or a balancing of the right to security of the many against the legal rights of the few. It is only by upholding our core principles, these standards, these obligations to protect civil liberties that we are able to define the boundaries of permissible and legitimate state action against terrorism.

We are fighting for more than the safety of our citizens, though that is an important objective. We are also fighting for the preservation of our democratic way of life, our right to freedom of thought and expression and our commitment to the rule of law; those liberties which have been hard won over the centuries and which we should hold dear. In our commitment to the rule of law, we cannot compromise on long-standing principles of justice and liberty.

And what do I mean by that lofty phrase “the rule of law”? Simply, that law restrains and civilizes power.

There are those who see the rule of law in negative terms: as a constraint on freedom and creativity; as a series of traps for the unwary; as a set of rules designed to stifle initiative and enterprise. They see the Constitution as a means of enabling courts to frustrate the will of elected bodies (parliaments). To some, the rule of law is thought to require the police to investigate and bring to prosecution every act which infringes upon the “rule book,” no matter how harmless or incidental that act might be.

This is not what law is about. The rule of law is meant to be a safeguard, not a menace. I prefer the statement by the political philosopher Edmund Burke, who described civil society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.”2

Law is not the enemy of liberty; it is its partner.

Those who would place security at the expense of civil liberties could benefit from considering the words of former U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Brennan. As he observed, “There is considerably less to be proud about, and a good deal to be embarrassed about, when one reflects on the shabby treatment civil liberties have received in the United States during times of war and perceived threats to national security. . . . After each perceived security crisis ended, the United States has remorsefully realized the abrogation of civil liberties was unnecessary. But it has proven unable to prevent itself from repeating the error when the next crisis came along.”3 One has to look no further than Guantanamo Bay to understand how easy it is for a nation to fall into lawlessness when it does not get the balance right between security and civil liberties. Guantanamo has been called everything from an off-shore concentration camp to a legal black hole. It is a complex of brutal prisons where hundreds of men and youths from all over the world have been held by the U.S. government under incredibly inhuman conditions and incessant interrogation.

It was in January 2002 that we witnessed the first shocking images of detainees, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, much as other human beings had been carried in slave ships 400 years earlier. On their arrival at Guantanamo Bay, we witnessed the humiliation of these anonymous beings, unloaded on the tarmac like so much human baggage to then be transported to open-air wire cages that would be their home for many years—all without access to family, friends, lawyers, human rights organizations, or any semblance of due process or judicial oversight.

Photos of detainees, in orange jumpsuits, crouched in open cages—cuffed, hooded, and masked, while kneeling at the feet of U.S. soldiers, became emblematic of how the United States intended to fight its “War on Terror.” For the watching world, no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions was needed to understand that what was being witnessed was unlawful. This was not a manifestation of the Geneva Conventions at work; nor was it an act of deportation or extradition. It was far worse. It was the unlawful transportation of human beings to a world outside the reach of law, and the clear-cut intention of the American authorities was to have them remain so, held indefinitely as internees.

In that world, crimes against humanity were to be carried out in Guantanamo Bay. And, it was into this hellish world that a young Canadian boy, Omar Khadr, was abandoned.

There were simply no boundaries to the human rights violations carried out on Omar and other internees. Organizations such as the International Red Cross, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch reported that such violations were standard operating procedures: procedures which included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, and even murder.

I would never have envisaged that the history of the new century would encompass such an erosion of moral order. And never in my wildest imagination could I have foreseen in countries such as the United States and Canada the destruction and distortion of fundamental legal and constitutional principles that have been in place since the seventeenth century. We appear to have forgotten the lessons of the Star Chamber, where the accused were submitted to torture, to accusations based on secret evidence, heard by a secret court, while being shackled in extremes of isolation.

During his ten years both at Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in Afghanistan and then Guantanamo Bay, Omar endured repeated interrogations, some by a military interrogation team under the control of Spc. Joshua Claus, who was later implicated in the death of two Bagram prisoners and was convicted of assault, prisoner maltreatment, and lying to investigators in 2005. Claus used a host of torture techniques on Omar; techniques that included beatings, stress positions, water boarding, threats with dogs, hanging in a crucifixion pose on a prison wall for hours at a time, and, of course, psychological terror tactics—all in order to extract evidence.

Claus was eventually given immunity for his abuse of Omar Khadr in return for his testimony at Khadr’s trial. His testimony contained statements about what Khadr said to him under duress and abuse. Indeed, in a pre-trial hearing Claus, identified as “Interrogator #1,” as much as admitted that Omar had been threatened with the prospect of being “gang-raped to death” in prison if he did not cooperate. Despite this, and despite Claus’s own 2005 conviction for assault, prisoner maltreatment, and lying to investigators—which earned him five months in jail—Claus was a star witness against Omar in his murder trial at Guantanamo Bay.4 Is there any better example of the perversion of the rule of law than this?

I recall my first meeting with a young Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay. He was being held in one of the notorious secret prisons, called Camp 5, designated for enhanced interrogation techniques as described by the Pentagon, namely torture.

Shackled to the floor, in a freezing, concrete windowless cell with a harsh fluorescent light bulb on twenty-four hours per day, was the tragic figure of Omar: blind in one eye; partially blind in the other; partially paralyzed on his right side; and his whole body suffering from extensive shrapnel injuries. Meanwhile, his cell was purposely kept cold so that he would never be able to rest, spending much of his time trying to stay warm. In all my years visiting Omar in Guantanamo, he was always restrained by leg shackles.

At some point, I was able to obtain video footage showing American and Canadian intelligence agencies interrogating Khadr while sleep-deprived for three weeks at a time. ln a major rebuke to the Canadian government, the Canadian Supreme Court ruled that the U.S. treatment of Khadr contravened the International Convention on Torture and the Geneva Conventions and that Canada had been complicit in his torture.

There can be no greater rebuke levied against a government that purports to uphold the rule of law than to have participated in the torture of a youth. And what greater betrayal can there be of Canadian values?

The worst excesses of the past years should have sounded loud alarms, not least because of that precise historic parallel to the Star Chamber. We are now witnesses to Habeas corpus being abandoned; secret courts being created to hear secret evidence; guilt inferred by association; torture nakedly justified; and vital international conventions consolidated in the aftermath of the Second World War—the Geneva Conventions, the Refugee Convention, the Torture Convention, and more—deliberately avoided or ignored in the “War on Terror” by Western governments, including our own.

International Law

Our generation has had the most sophisticated development of international laws, treaties, and conventions the international community has ever known, all stating that human rights abuses will not be tolerated. These international instruments include the Geneva Conventions, the Convention on Torture, the Convention on the Rights of the Child and many more, all applicable to Omar Khadr and all denied to him. It is no exaggeration to say that the international consensus reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the Charter of the United Nations, that no one in the future would fall outside the protection of the law, has been overridden and supplanted by lawlessness.

As a signatory to all these international treaties, Canada has an obligation to protest when they are not being applied to one of its citizens, and yet it refused to uphold its human rights obligations when it came to Omar Khadr. By failing to do so, former Canadian governments have demonstrated a shocking, reckless,...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• PART I
• The Rule of Law and Human Rights in the Twenty-First Century
• Human Rights and the Politics of Freedom: Civilian Internment in the Canadian Museum for Human Rights
• PART II
• Reinserting Radicalism: Canada’s First National Internment Operations, the Ukrainian Left, and the Politics of Redress
• Collateral Damage: The Defence of Canada Regulations, Civilian Internment, Ethnicity, and Left-Wing Institutions
• PART III
• An Unprecedented Dichotomy: Impacts and Consequences of Serbian Internment in Canada during the Great War
• The Ex-Minister and the Fascist: A Tale of Two RCMP Informants during the Second World War1
• PART IV
• “Camp Boys”: Privacy and the Sexual Self
• “Likely to be Hampered and So She Prepared for the Worst”: Far Left Women and Political Incarceration during the Second World War
• PART V
• Informal Internment: Japanese Canadian Farmers in Southern Alberta, 1941–1945
• Destroying the Myth of Quietism: Strikes, Riots, Protest, and Resistance in Japanese Internment
• Japanese Canadian Internment: A Personal Account
• PART VI
• Anecdote and Document: The Internment Experience of Rolf Schultze and Dorothy Caine
• Ukrainian Internment during the Second World War: The Case of the Ukrainian Labour Farmer Temple Association and Peter Prokopchak
• PART VII
• The New Brunswick Internment Camp Museum: Preserving the History of Internment Camp B-70
• Exhibiting Contentious Topics: Finding a Place for the Internment Violin in the Canadian History Hall
• Civilian Internment and the Impact of War: Legacy and Public History
• PART VIII
• The Paradox of Survival: Jewish Refugees Interned in Canada, 1940–43
• Narrating Internment, Narrating Canada: Wartime Experiences of German Merchant Seamen
• PART IX
• A Numbers Game?: Stories of Suffering in Italian Canadian Internment in the Second World War
• The Internment of Japanese Canadians: A Human Rights Violation
• by Art Miki