How Canada Chose Exile: The decision to banish Japanese Canadians, 1946

This event is proudly co-presented by the University of Sydney Law School and Discipline of History.

In-person event

As the end of the Second World War drew into view, federal officials in Canada faced a policy problem of their own creation. They had displaced over 22,000 people of Japanese descent from their Pacific Coast communities and dispossessed them of their homes. With the scale of Nazi crimes in Europe increasingly known, mass internment of people on the basis of race had become unsustainable. Yet, many remained convinced that Japanese Canadians were “unassimilable” in Canadian society on the basis of race. To resolve the problem of internment, Canadian officials devised a new harm, seeking to banish to Japan as many as possible so that the diminished number left behind could be allowed to live freely. This presentation explores Canada’s tangled path to exile amidst the dramatic shifts and stubborn continuities of the close of the Second World War. Seeking to situate Canada’s exile within a global history of the unmixing of peoples in the 1940s, the paper will close in reflection on Australia’s own expulsion of people of Japanese descent in the same era.

About the author:

Jordan Stanger-Ross is Professor of History at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. His past publications include Landscapes of Injustice: A New Perspective on the Internment and Dispossession of Japanese Canadians (2020) which received the John T. Saywell Prize in Canadian Constitutional Legal History.

Friday 3 May, 1-2pm AEST

Venue: Level 4, Common Room, New Law Building (F10), Eastern Avenue, Camperdown campus

CPD Points: 1

This event is proudly co-presented by the University of Sydney Law School and Discipline of History.