Internment Camps In Canada

What if you were stripped of all your rights in the a blink of an eye? The Japanese-Canadians experienced the horrid and life changing events of internment camps which were targeted specifically towards them. All Canadians of Japanese heritage residing only on the West coast of British Columbia had their homes, farms, businesses and personal property sold and completely liquidated. This was all due to the government 's quick actions against the Japanese. These actions were fuelled by the events of Pearl Harbour during WW2. After the bombings occurred the Canadian government assumed that the Japanese living in Canada were loyal to Japan, which could can negatively affect Canada. If this event would have happened in the in the past 35 years it

On February 24 1942 Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King issued Order-in-Council P.C.1486 to remove and detain “any and all persons” from any “protective area” in the country. This order was specifically targeted towards the Japanese- Canadians living on the West Coast of British Columbia. In a matter of weeks the the first Japanese-Canadians were forced to move to an area called Hastings park, which was considered a “protected area”. More than 8,000 detainees were moved to Hastings Park, where women and children were housed in livestock homes. They were later transported to ghost towns in BC or move to Alberta or Manitoba in order to work on sugar beet farms, where they would have been able to keep their families together. The others who resisted were sent to internment camps, which were overcrowded and had very poor conditions. This social injustice comes from actions stemming from Order-in-Council P.C.1486, which broke the Charter of Rights section 6, subsection (2), which states that “ Every citizen of Canada and every person who has the status of a permanent resident of Canada has the right to move to and take up residence in any province; and to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province”. The exclusion of the Japanese along the West Coast was an obvious breach of their rights as Canadians who have lived there for decades. They forced them to move out of British Columbia and were dispatched into other parts of Canada in which living conditions were not suitable. Neither were they allowed to move out of those rural conditions because all their belongings were gone and they were just left with what the government forced them into. Subsections (3) and (4) focus on discrimination really show how the Japanese were targeted because of their race. Not only did the government control where the Japanese were going to reside, but also the discrimination that they had to