This text is part of the special Christmas book at the museum
As the health crisis led to the erosion of individual freedoms, the Canadian Museum of History looks back on three crises of the 20th century.e century that shook the country and led to the taking of measures considered today disproportionate and liberticidal. The exhibition Sacrificed Freedoms – The War Measures Act, which will start on December 17, thus recalls the risks of slippage that there is in making decisions in the name of law and order.
In December 1941, Japan attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor. A few weeks later, the Canadian government viewed residents of Japanese descent as enemies from within, even though most were Canadian citizens. Invoking the War Measures Act, the government expropriates Japanese Canadians and forces them to leave the West Coast. More than 22,000 of them are sent to internment camps, where they have to do hard labor.
Mary Kitagawa was very young when her family lost their home and farm, and had to move a dozen times to camps in British Columbia and beet fields in Alberta. “My family was kicked out of our home in this whirlwind of hate. Our experience of imprisonment has been brutal and dehumanizing ”, testifies the one who is now involved in the fight against racism and discrimination.
Japanese Canadians, however, were not the only ones to suffer disproportionately from the War Measures Act. Members of several communities, whose origin was associated with the opposing camp in the overseas conflict, were also interned. This was particularly the case with Ukrainians during the First World War and Italian-Canadians during the Second. To build internment camps, the Canadian government even forcibly displaced Indigenous communities, such as the Kettle Point and Stony Point First Nations in Ontario in 1942.
The War Measures Act was invoked a third time during the October 1970 crisis. Public figures and artists, such as Pauline Julien and Gérald Godin, were imprisoned for a few days.
The exhibition Sacrificed freedoms, on display from December 17 at the Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau, examines the political context, fears and racism surrounding these national crises, as well as their collateral damage. But the institution’s curators had to face a major challenge: to reconstruct the events of the two wars, deliberately erased from the landscape and memories.
Erased traces
A few years ago, an archaeologist was commissioned to excavate two former internment camps. She found some fifty objects belonging to former detainees: a piece of pipe, buttons of overalls, razors, tobacco boxes.
“Those who were interned were people of profound banality and they wondered in the name of what they were there”, observes Xavier Gélinas, curator of political history who created the exhibition with the historian Mélanie Morin- Pelletier, attached to the War Museum.
“The material testimonies that we exhibit are small gems,” continues the curator. Canada deliberately destroyed the archival sources that dealt with these internments. The paper sources that remain are fragmented sources that have escaped destruction. The Canadian government also physically destroyed all the internment camps in the 1920s. The idea was to bury the traces and pretend nothing had happened. “
“Several ex-internees have remained very discreet about their fate, some have changed their family name to Anglicize them and they have done everything to eliminate what was perceived as an ethnic stigma, hoping not to pass on this difference to future generations. that had hurt them so much. “
From history to current events
“Since 1970, there have been a lot of procedures and laws which mean that we could no longer fall back into the kind of situations which have occurred three times in history”, assures Xavier Gélinas, referring in particular to the creation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982 and the abolition of the War Measures Act in 1988.
“There is a comparison to be made between the coercive measures that the exhibition deals with and the measures taken during the COVID-19 crisis, however, the curator points out. The stake is the same: how to preserve order and national security or the common good in a crisis situation, while preserving individual and civil liberties. There are sacrifices to be made in our individual rights and freedoms in the event of greater danger. However, there is a very present slippery slope which consists in taking advantage of situations to embrace the restriction of rights and freedoms a little too broadly. “