A Time for Atonement

Canada’s First National
Internment Operations and the
Ukrainian Canadians 1914-1920

Lubomyr Luciuk

After the entry of Great Britain into the First World War (4 August 1914), the government of Canada issued an order in council which provided for the registration and in certain cases for the internment of aliens of “enemy nationality”. Suddenly, and entirely as a result of Government decree, many Ukrainian Canadians found themselves described as “enemy aliens”. Over the next six years various repressive measures would be directed against them. Since they were also known at the time by such regional names such as “Galician” and “Bukovynian”, or as “Ruthenians”, the ethnic identity of these victims of Canada’s first national internment operations has sometimes been misunderstood.

Most of the 171,000 Ukrainians living in Canada were by 1914 settled in the Prairie region, although significant communities began forming, after 1905, in Ontario and Quebec, where Ukrainians worked in the timber and mining industries, on construction, and in various factories. Since these immigrants had generally come to Canada from the Austrian crownlands of Galicia and Bukovyna, their citizenship, but not their nationality, could be described as “Austrian” or “Austro-Hungarian”. Those so categorized were, under the terms of the same War Measures Act (1914) that would later be used against Japanese Canadians (1941) and the Quebecois (1970), subject to imprisonment in one of 26 receiving stations and “concentration camps” established across Canada or at least to registration as “enemy aliens”. 1 Between 1914 and 1920, 8,579 “enemy aliens” were incarcerated, among them women and children, as reported by Major-General Sir William D. Otter, the Officer Commanding these internment operations for the Department of Justice. Of this number only 3,138, according to General Otter’s calculations, could be classed as “prisoners of war”, all others being civilians. 2 Of the remaining 5,441, it has been estimated that the vast majority (5,000) were of Ukrainian origin. Over 80,000 others, most of whom were also Ukrainian, were categorized as “enemy aliens” and obliged to report regularly to their local police authorities or to the North West Mounted Police. They were issued with identity papers that had to be carried at all times, the penalty for noncompliance being arrest and possible imprisonment.

Determining the nationality of the internees or of those registered as “enemy aliens” is difficult, since relevant archival materials were destroyed at the National Archives of Canada after World War II. 3 Today there are few survivors left to provide eyewitness testimony. 4 However, those records which were preserved suggest that the majority of the so-called “Austro-Hungarians” were of Ukrainian origin. This was certainly the largest East European immigrant community in Canada at the time. Some Poles, Italians, Bulgarians, Croatians, Turks, Serbians, Hungarians, Russians, Jews, and Romanians were also imprisoned or registered as “enemy aliens”. 5

Most of the POWs of German nationality and German-speaking Austrians were separated from the other internees and placed into a “first-class” category. This meant that they were generally kept in relatively more comfortable camps, such as the one established in Fort Henry, near Kingston, Ontario. However, the majority of those described as “Austrians” (on lists of prisoners these men were often more precisely categorized as “Galicians” of “Greek [Ukrainian] Catholic” religious affiliation or as “Ruthenians”, although the word Ukrainian was also used in some official reports) were sent to work sites in Canada’s hinterland, to places like Spirit Lake, Quebec; Castle Mountain, Alberta; and Otter Creek, British Columbia. There they were obliged not only to construct the internment camps but to work on road-building, land-clearing, wood-cutting, and railway construction projects  As the need for soldiers overseas led to a shortage of workers in Canada, many of these “Austrian” internees were released on parole to work for private companies, the federal and provincial governments, and the railway companies. Their pay was fixed at a rate equivalent to that of a soldier, which was less than what they might have expected to make if they had been able to offer their labour in the marketplace. 6 As General Otter drily noted, this “system proved a great advantage to the organizations short of labour”. 7 Thus, the internment operations not only uprooted families but also allowed for exploitation of many of the internees’ labour. 8

Upon each individual’s arrest, whatever valuables they might have had were seized. Some of this confiscated money was stolen. As early as 1915 General Otter wrote that “difficulties have … arisen in accounting for the monies received”. In his final report, he observed that:

As many of those interned were residents of Canada and possessed real estate, securities, etc. such have been turned over to the ‘Custodian of Enemy Alien Properties’ for the future decision of the Government. 9

Over $32,000 in cash was left in the Receiver-General’s Office at the end of these internment operations (estimated present-value $1.5 million). What the property, securities, and other valuables that were also confiscated might now be worth has yet to be calculated. The human costs of these internment operations are, of course, incalculable.

Daily existence in the internment camps was, by all accounts, strenuous. Prisoners were denied access to newspapers; their correspondence was censored and limited. They were forced not only to maintain the camps but to work for the government and private concerns, and they were sometimes mistreated by the guards. As General Otter wrote:

The various complaints made to you by prisoners as to the rough conduct of the guards I fear is not altogether without reason, a fact much to be regretted, and, I am sorry to say, by no means an uncommon occurrence at other Stations. 10

The difficult working and living conditions and enforced confinement took their physical and mental toll. Altogether 107 internees died, 69 of them “Austrians”. But there were other costs as well. Watson Kirkconnell, who served at both the Fort Henry and Kapuskasing internment camps, observed that “among the camp population”, there were:

few on whom the long years of captivity had not left their mark … confinement in a strange land, inactivity and hopeless waiting were in themselves enough to shatter the nerves and undermine the health. 11

Otter admitted that “insanity was by no means uncommon among the prisoners”. A relative described how his wife’s brother had suffered in the Petawawa internment camp:

They had broken his spirit up there….He could never get over the injustice of his treatment, the falseness of his hope in this new world. 12

While passive resistance was common, some internees were more vigorous in protesting against the conditions in which they found themselves. There was, for example, a full scale riot in 1916 in the Kapuskasing internment camp, involving some 1,200 prisoners and 300 guards, while in Sydney, Nova Scotia a group of Ukrainian internees sent from Ontario to work in the local mines and steel mills went on a hunger strike, demanding to be returned to Ontario or sent back to Austria. There were also numerous escape attempts. 13 During several of these, Ukrainian Canadians were killed. Others committed suicide. A board of enquiry into the death of William Perchaluk, in Alberta in 1916, determined that he had killed himself in a police station while being detained there pending investigations being made as to his nationality. It was concluded that his “rash act would appear to have been committed during a fit of despondency”. 14

The authorities did receive information to the effect that they were interning Ukrainians who had no sympathy with the war aims of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. In July 1916, for example, a group of Ukrainian-Canadian editors addressed an appeal to the Canadian people. In part, it read:

The Ukrainians…of Western Canada…have found themselves heavily handicapped since the outbreak of the war by the fact of their Austrian birth, which has led…the Dominion Government, as well as Canadian employers of labour, to unjustly class them as Austrians, and therefore enemy aliens. Many have been interned, though they are no more in sympathy with the enemy than are the Poles, for they are as distinct a nationality…which hopes to emerge from the war in the enjoyment of a wide measurement of national autonomy…[yet] Ukrainians in Canada are treated as enemy Austrians. They are persecuted, by thousands they are interned, they are dismissed from their employment, and their applications for work are not entertained. And why? For only one reason, that they were so unhappy as to be born into the Austrian bondage… 15

Throughout the war years, numerous other letters, petitions, and memoranda would be addressed to the federal and provincial authorities by Ukrainian-Canadian organizations, all asserting that the allegiance of Ukrainian Canadians lay with the Dominion of Canada and the British Empire. Similar messages were sent by individuals. For example, in mid-November 1914, Paul Wacyk of Komarno, Manitoba, wrote to R. Fletcher, Deputy Minister of the Department of Education in Winnipeg:

I have heard no movement on the part of the people here which would in any way indicate that they were disloyal to the British Empire. 16

The word Ukrainian was itself used in official descriptions of the camps (i.e. report on a visit to the Banff Internment Camp, May, 1916  and in newspaper accounts dealing with Eastern Europe during and after the war. Surviving internees reported that they explained to their interrogators the differences between “Austro-Hungarian” citizenship and Ukrainian nationality. Canadian lawyers even addressed letters to camp commandants pointing out that some of those imprisoned, because they did not speak English well, “could not explain [their] nationality”, which was probably the only reason they were interned. 17 Even General Otter acknowledged that rather than disloyalty it was the “tendency of municipalities to unload their indigents [that] was the confinement of not a few”. 18

The loyalty of Ukrainian Canadians to Canada and the British Empire is also not in doubt. They joined the Canadian army in record numbers, doing so by misrepresenting where they had been born or reportedly even changing their surnames to “Smith” in order to enlist. As Mr. H.A. Mackie, MP for Edmonton East, wrote to Prime Minister Borden in October 1918:

To estimate the number of Ukrainians who have enlisted with the Canadian Expeditionary Forces would be very hard as they were enlisting in various battalions from the Atlantic to the Pacific coast, but it is safe to say that, to the approximate half million soldiers in Canada, if the figures of the War Office were available, it could be that these people, per population, gave a larger percentage of men to the war than certain races in Canada have, after having enjoyed the privileges of British citizenship for a period of a century or more. 19

While some Ukrainian Canadians, like Corporal F. Konoval, would go on to win the Victoria Cross, others who had enlisted but were then discovered to be “Austrian” were expelled from the army and interned. One such Ukrainian Canadian, Nick Chornomod, writing from a camp near Halifax to a Captain Adams of the 6th Military Division, recorded that not only had he joined a battalion being formed in Edmonton in August 1914, but that he had lived in Canada for seven years, married a Canadian-borne woman, become naturalized, and taken up a homestead in Alberta. Having so affirmed his loyalty, he added that he could not understand “on what charge I am being kept here”. 20

The internment of several thousand Ukrainian Canadians  was accomplished by the passage of the War Time Elections Act of 1917, which disenfranchised most Ukrainian Canadians. 21 There was very little effective protest against this, although Canada’s oldest daily newspaper, the Daily British Whig of Kingston, Ontario, did observe:

It is quite probable that if this proposal becomes law the alleged ‘foreigners’ and hitherto ‘naturalized’ Canadians will bear their reproach meekly, but they will have sown in their hearts the seeds of bitterness that can never be extinguished. The man whose honour has been mistrusted, and who has been singled out for national humiliation, will remember it and sooner or later it will have to be atoned for. 22

Since anti-immigrant feeling was part of most veterans’ cultural milieu, there was considerable support for the Great War Veterans Association when, in 1918, it demanded the suppression of “enemy alien” newspapers, compulsory badges for “foreigners”, and forced labour for “Austrian” and German men in Canada. 23 During the fall and winter of 1918, the Canadian government did in fact declare several Ukrainian language newspapers and organizations illegal. Just after the end of the war, several hundred Ukrainians were also deported as a result of the “Red Scare”. Hundreds more remained in the internment camps, some of which were kept operating until 1920. Former “enemy aliens” were made out to be “dangerous foreigners”, individuals who, without ever having left the camps, had somehow become “Bolsheviki” after the 1917 revolution in the tsarist empire. 24 It was not until 24 February 1920 that the last of Canada’s internment camps was shut down. On the 20 June of that year the Internment Operations office in Ottawa was itself closed.

Given such a political climate, many Ukrainian Canadians long remained, as an RCMP officer observed to his superiors in Ottawa, “in fear of the barbed wire fence”. 25 American intelligence agents echoed that conclusion, noting that “Ukrainian-Canadians are still under a handicap resulting from their experiences in the First World War”. 26 Decades later a Ukrainian Canadian would recall that these years had been “a bad time to be a Ukrainian” in Canada. 27 Reflecting on his own experiences, another internee wrote:

Memories of the camp gradually begin to fade away…[but] one could never really forget it…. 28

Today, Ukrainian Canadians, in reminding the nation of what they suffered as a people in this country, are appealing to the government of Canada, asking that it publicly acknowledge responsibility for the wrongs done to the Ukrainian Canadian community between 1914-1920 and that it compensate them for their losses. 29 The meaningful and honourable redress now called for will help ensure that Canadians are never again subjected to such a mass violation of their human rights and civil liberties. Although what happened can never be undone, a time for atonement has surely come.

FOOTNOTES

1 The term “concentration camp” was used at the time. See for example, the Officer Commanding, 5th Military Division, Quebec, to Major General Otter, 4 January 1915 in National Archives of Canada (NAC) Record Group (RG) 24, Volume 4513, File 2.

2 Sir W.D. Otter, Internment Operations 1914-1920 (Ottawa, 1921), 6. Reprinted in J.B. Gregorovich, editor, Ukrainian Canadians in Canada’s Wars: Materials for Ukrainian Canadian History, (Toronto, 1983), 74-94.

3 See P. Melnycky, “The Internment of Ukrainians in Canada”, in F. Swyripa and J.H. Thompson, editors, Loyalties in Conflict: Ukrainians in Canada During the Great War, (Edmonton, 1983), 23-24.

4 Part of the testimony of N. Sakaliuk was transcribed and reprinted in L.Y. Luciuk, Internment Operations: The Role of Old Fort Henry in World War I (Kingston, 1980), 29-33. Two tape-recorded interviews with Sakaliuk are on deposit at the Multicultural History Society of Ontario in Toronto [UKR-6283-SAK, 14 February 1978, and UKR-8447-SAK, 5 November 1980]. See also the reminiscences of P. Yasnowskyj in H. Piniuta, Land of Pain, Land of Promise: First Person Accounts by Ukrainian Pioneers 1891-1914, (Saskatoon, 1978), 179-195.

5 See J. Boudreau, “The Enemy Alien Problem in Canada, 1914-1920”, (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1965).

6 Otter, Internment Operations, 13.

7 Otter to the Officer Commanding, 5th Military Division, Quebec, 25 February 1915, NAC RG 24, Volume 4513, File 2. The kind of work the internees were involved in is described, for example,, in a report by Major A.E. Hopkins, the commandant of the Jasper, Alberta internment camp. He wrote to Otter that, on Saturday, the 19th February 1916, internees had cut fence posts in the bush, dug a ditch, hauled water and wood, further cleared up their camp, and worked on the town of Jasper’s water main. See Hopkins to Otter, NAC RG 24, Volume 4744, File 2.

8 In 1916, Frank Oliver, a Liberal MP, complained that although the internees had committed no crime they were subjected to compulsory labour at twenty-five cents a day wage. See Canada, Parliamentary Debates (Commons), 122, 1 (1916), 849-850.

9 See Otter, Internment Operations, 12. Professor J.H. Thompson, a historian at McGill University, has said that the Canadian government sold the seized property of “enemy aliens” at auction for 10 cents on the dollar. See “Ukrainians stripped of rights in Canada during 1st World War”, The Westmount Examiner, (Westmount, Quebec), 26 March 1987, 1.

10 Otter to the Officer Commanding, 13th Military District, Calgary, Alberta, 16 December 1915. NAC RG 24, Volume 4721, File 1. In a letter sent to Otter from the headquarters of Military District No. 13, dated 16 November 1915, it was noted that the prisoner Chiskolok complained that he had been forced to work even though he was sick at the time. Upon his refusal to go out, the “guard struck him with his rifle and called him a son of a bitch”.

11 See W. Kirkconnell, “Kapuskasing — An Historical Sketch”, Queens’ Quarterly, XXVIII, 3, (January, 1921), 11.

12 Cited in Luciuk, Internment Operations, 9.

13 A description of the successful escape of N. Demczuk from the Banff, Alberta internment camp is found in NAC RG 24, Volume 4721, File 2, 22 January 1916. Other prisoners who escaped from this camp were subsequently recaptured, See Major P.M. Spence’s report to the Officer Commanding, 13th Military District, Calgary, Alberta, regarding the cases of W. Wiwcheruk and W. Stefiuk, in the same file.

14 Verdict of jury re: William Perchaluk “Deceased”, Calgary, Alberta, 6 December 1916, NAC RG 24, Volume 4721, File 3.

15 This letter, signed by six Ukrainian-Canadian newspaper editors, was drafted at a mass meeting of Ukrainians held in Winnipeg, Manitoba on 2 July 1916. It was published in the Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg, Manitoba) on 17 July 1916 and is reprinted in Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict, 166-168.

16 P. Wacyk of Komarno, Manitoba to R. Fletcher, Deputy Minister of Education, Winnipeg, Manitoba, 18 November 1914, NAC RG 18, Volume 469.

17 See McKenzie and Macmillan to Lieutenant Colonel W.E. Thompson, 7 February 1916, regarding the case of J. Zablackie, described both as a “Luthenian” (sic and “Russian”. On a list of prisoners of war confined at the Valcartier, Quebec internment camp, on 23 July 1915, seven different nationalities are listed. Most of those interned were further described by their occupations either as labourers, carpenters, miners, cooks, sailors, or farmers. See NAC RG 24, Volume 4513, File 4. A “Crime Report” regarding Mr. Iwan Milan, dated 15 January 1915, and filed at Melville, Saskatchewan, described him as a single, 23-year-old “Ruthenian” (sic) Greek Catholic who emigrated to Canada in March 1912 and was thought to be a “bad character” because he had been spending time in a “Ruthenian (sic) Reading Room” where, according to the arresting officer, Sergt. Sergeant, others “hostile against us” allegedly gathered for drill. Furthermore, Milan had “no fixed abode” and “not a cent in the world”. See NAC RG 18, Volume 1770.

18 Otter, Internment Operations, 6. In the 10 December 1914 issue of the Daily British Whig (Kingston, Ontario), the internees were described as “all foreigners of the class that work on the railroads in the summer and in the factories and nowhere in the winter”.

19 H.A. Mackie, MP to Prime Minister R.L. Borden, 16 October 1918, reprinted in B.S. Kordan and L.Y. Luciuk, editors, A Delicate and Difficult Question: Documents in the History of Ukrainians in Canada 1899-1962, (Kingston, 1986), 38.

20 On the case of N. Chornomod see correspondence between Otter and the Officer Commanding, 6th Military Division, Halifax, 1 and 22 April 1915, and Chornomod’s letters, 5 and 11 March 1915. NAC RG 24, 4544.

21 This Act and other relevant government documents are reprinted in Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict, 171-199.

22 See the Daily British Whig, 7 September 1917. For a Ukrainian-Canadian viewpoint, see the statement made by Osyp Megas in Saskatoon, reported in the Regina Morning Leader (Regina, Saskatchewan), 29 December 1917 and reprinted in Swyripa and Thompson, Loyalties in Conflict, 169-170. Megas noted that the Act had dealt a “very unpleasant blow to the naturalized Ruthenian citizens who were always proud of being British subjects”.

23 See D. Morton and G. Wright, Winning the Second Battle: Canadian Veterans and the Return to Civilian Life 1915-1930, (Toronto, 1987), 74-75.

24 By way of example see the letter from Sir Hugh Macdonald to the Hon. A. Meighen, 3 July 1919, reprinted in Kordan and Luciuk, A Delicate and Difficult Question, 43-45. Macdonald, a police magistrate in Winnipeg, wrote to Meighen, then Canada’s Minister of the Interior, about the “desirability of getting rid of as many undesirable aliens as possible” given the “large extent” to which “Bolsheviki ideas” were held by the Ruthenian, Russian, Polish, and Jewish peoples in Canada. Convinced that there was “a very bad and dangerous” elemnt loose within Winnipeg, he urged Meighen to “make an example” of them in a manner that would make it clear to all that the authorities intended to maintain law and order. As Macdonald put it, “fear is the only agency that can successfully employed to keep them within the law and I have no doubt that if the Dominion Government persists in the course that is now adopting the foreign element here will soon be as gentle and as easily controlled as a lot of sheep”.

25 RCMP “Report re: 8th National Convention of Ukrainian National Federation of Canada and the Affiliated Societies”, August 25-31 1941, NAC Manuscript Group 30, E 350, File 14.

26 Cited in Kordan and Luciuk, A Delicate and Difficult Question, 125.

27 J. Drozdowich, as cited by D. Maceluch in “How Ukrainians were exiled to Quebec gulag” The Gazette (Montreal, Quebec), 11 May 1985, B1.

28 P. Yasnowskyj as cited in Piniuta, Land of Pain, Land of Promise, 195.

29 In Toronto, on 7 December 1987, the Civil Liberties Commission of the Ukrainian Canadian Committee presented a brief to the Standing Committee on Multiculturalism of the House of Commons in which it was recommended that: “The Parliament of Canada officially acknowledge the mistreatment suffered by Ukrainians in Canada during and after the First World War and that the government undertake negotiations with the Ukrainian Canadian Committee to redress these injustices”. See House of Commons, Minutes of Proceedings and Evidence of the Standing Committee on Multiculturalism, Issue No. 11, 7-8 December 1987, 44-45; “Ukrainian Canadians seeking redress”, by V. Malarek, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 15 January 1988, A3, and J. Serge, “Ukrainian groups seek wartime redress”, The Toronto Star (Toronto, Ontario), 18 January 1988, A7. On a related issue, see Alexandra Chyczij, Submission to the Legislative Committee On The Emergencies Act And On The Emergency Preparedness Act, 15 March 1988 (Ottawa: Civil Liberties Commission, Ukrainian Canadian Committee), and V. Malarek, “Internment safeguards are sought”, The Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario), 5 March 1988, A4 and P. Gessell, “Two ethnic groups say emergencies act would abuse rights”, Ottawa Citizen (Ottawa, Ontario), 16 March 1988, A4.