March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 5

WWI veterans whoprotested against the

Winnipeg General Strikein 1919, were held

hostage by all the keynarratives of Canada’srampant mass hysteria:

Xenophobia,British Imperialism,

Muscular Christianity,Law and Order, and

antiCommunism.

War Mania, Mass Hysteria and Moral Panic:Rendered Captive by Barbed Wire and Maple Leaves

By Richard Sanders

Acentury ago, in 1915, a youthfulCanada was already waging itssecond imperialist war overseas.1

The colony’s political and economic elites—ably represented in Parliament by SirRobert Borden and his pious AngloProt-estant cabinet—had rallied mainstreamCanada behind the imperial hubris of aphoney “war to end all wars.”

Subjected to every propagandatrick imaginable—from patriotic politicalspeeches, popular novels, classroom tripeand religious sermons, to flag-waving pa-rades and church picnics—Canadians werepropelled into a mass hysteria that justi-fied not only the imperial war abroad butharsh repression on the homefront.

Exploiting the endemic classism,racism and xenophobia that riddled main-stream Canadian society, opinion leadersdemonised their foreign enemies, and ra-tionalised the domestic persecution of avery specific demographic of newcomers.Armed with the wartime pretext thatCanada was under siege by diabolical al-iens who had infiltrated the gates of our“Peaceable Kingdom,” the Conservativegovernment crafted draconian new secu-rity legislation. Passed in 1914—with theloyal support of all Liberal MPs, and thelone Labour Party politician in Parlia-ment—the War Measures Act gave authori-ties a new arsenal of repressive powers forexerting control over Canadian society.Among these powers were tools to moni-tor and detain anyone even suspected ofbecoming a potential enemy of the state.

History has been repeating itselfever since. When Harper’s Conservativegovernment used Bill C-51 to revampCanada’s institutions of repression, the so-called Anti-Terrorism law was approvedwith overwhelming Liberal Party support.Armed with these new weapons, Canada’s

secret police and spy agencies can nowtarget and pre-emptively jail anyone theybelieve might possibly threaten the estab-lished order of business.

The legal boundaries of the word“terrorist” have been redrawn. Expandedto capture activists said to cause “interfer-ence with the economic or financial sta-bility of Canada,” the term “terrorism” nowencloses those “unduly influencing a gov-ernment” by “unlawful means.”2 Thismakes terrorists out of unionists who useillegal strikes, or even pacifists devoted tousing Gandhian acts of nonviolence.

After 100 years, Canadian businesselites, driven by the same endless pursuitof profits, still wrap themselves in the Ma-ple Leaf and use simple narratives to instila fear of fiendish, foreign enemies. And,Canada’s security-fixated, state institutionsare still the gravest threat to our civil rights.

While the foreign enemies du jourare now said to be radicalised Muslims,Canadians of a century ago were caught inan epidemic of fear that was stirred up bydire warnings that east Europeans—mostlyUkrainians—were being radicalised bymilitantly socialist labour activists.

Between 1914 and 1920, Canadawas held captive not just by jingoism, butby a virtual dictatorship. When MPs unani-mously passed the War Measures Act, theygave extraordinary powers to Borden’sclutch of Tories. His Cabinet—workingwith the Governor General, a son of QueenVictoria—used the “emergency” of war tobypass Parliament and issue laws they sawas “necessary...for the security, defence,peace, order and welfare of Canada.”3

By dictating the legal definitionscaptured by these vague grab-all terms, theGovernor in Council also became Cana-da’s semantic gatekeeper. But besides be-ing the despotic guardian and ward of theword of law, this official cabal helped har-

ness prevailing national narratives to cap-ture the hearts, minds and loyalties of main-stream society. This public support wasrequired not only to wage the imperial warabroad, but the one at home as well.

The War Measures Act of 1914 wasa reaction to what its framers called “theexistence of real or apprehended war, in-vasion or insurrection.”4 Gripped by fearof revolts, rebellions and resistance to au-thority, global elites were in crisis. Canadawas not immune to the political anxietydisorder that plagued imperialists aroundthe world. Canadian elites were preoccu-pied and obsessed with phobic worriesabout seditious uprisings by radicalised so-cialists and labour activists. By 1917, theangst among Conservative/Liberal eliteswent viral. Canada was under siege bymass, public hysteria. This moral panicattack is known as the “First Red Scare.”

But the foreboding that afflictedEuropean capitalists began decades beforethe Russian revolutions of 1917. Their fearwas sparked by popular mutinies that up-set imperial and monarchic control on fivecontinents. Popular insurrections and revo-lutions included: Ghana, 1900; Angola,1902; Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, 1903-1908; Armenia, 1904; Namibia, 1904;Paraguay, 1904; Argentina, 1905; GermanEast Africa, 1905-1906; Russia, Poland,Finland, Ukraine, Latvia, Estonia, 1905-1907; Persia, 1905-1909; Romania, 1907;Turkey, 1908; Bali, 1908; Syria, 1909; Mo-rocco, 1909-1910; Monaco, 1910; Portu-gal, 1910; Mexico, 1910-1920; China,1911-1913; Mongolia, 1911-1921; Bal-kans, 1912-1913; Ireland, 1912-1923; Al-bania, 1912-1914; and South Africa, 1914.

So, for decades prior to WWI, Eu-rope’s colonial powers were increasinglyterrified by growing social movements fordemocracy, justice and labour rights thatwere organising mass protests and huge

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 20166

Empire and Sons: From Sir William Otter, to the NDP...By Richard Sanders

Canada’s Major General SirWilliam Otter is revered asthe “father” of Canada’s

Army. His family tree is laden witharchdeacons, bankers, barons, aBritish Governor of Bermuda, achief justice of Nova Scotia, and hisgrandfather was the Anglican LordBishop of Chichester, England.1

With the war’s outbreak in1914, Otter was brought out of re-tirement to be appointed Director ofInternment Operations. His qualifi-cations included collaboration intwo imperial conflicts that involvedthe mass internment of civilians.

In 1913, Otter was made aCompanion of the Most Honourable Mili-tary Order of the Bath.2 For what serviceto Empire did he receive this title? Was ithis role in the North West Rebellion of1885 when he led a battalion of Britishtroops against a Cree and Métis uprisingled by Poundmaker and Big Bear?3 His rolein crushing that revolt led the MontrealDaily Star to urge that “Otterism” be used“as a synonym for merciless repression.”4

Otter had dutifully served as an imperialweapon to smash resistance to Canadianland plunder and the genocidal herding ofIndians into mass captivity on reserves.(See pp.15-21.) But this crime was onlyone step on Otter’s journey to knighthood.

Otter’s next major opportunity toserve imperial conquest came when he led1,000 troops of the Royal Canadian Infan-try Regiment, during the Boer War (1899-1902).5 This war was fought to secure theBritish elite’s access to diamonds and goldcontrolled by the Boer (Dutch/Africaan-er) regime in South Africa. During this

contest of empires, British troops forced116,000 Blacks into concentration camps.6

They also herded 118,000 Boer women,children and elderly men into deadly pris-on camps. Of these civilians, more than42,000 died from preventable diseases inthe camps, including 28,000 Boers7 andover 14,000 Blacks.8 In addition, 26,000Boer men were shipped to British prisoncamps in India and Caribbean colonies.9

In 2014, to honour the Canadiantroops who died while assisting Britain’simperial conquest of South Africa, Cana-da’s government added the Boer War, andAfghanistan, to the conflicts that are nowofficially commemorated at the NationalWar Memorial in Ottawa.10

Considering his commanding rolein squashing the Northwest Rebellion andin leading troops during the Boer War (inwhich more than a 250,000 civilians wereinterned), it is no small wonder that Otterwas knighted and then appointed to leadCanada’s internment camps during WWI.

Otter was immortalised in a gentlebiography by his grandson, Desmond Mor-ton, one of Canada’s leading military his-torians. Morton’s narrative on Otter in theDictionary of Canadian Biography, pre-sents him in as favourable a light as possi-ble. Morton’s narrative on the Boer War,while noting that the soldiers under hisgrandfather’s command “became the ide-al symbols of a great victory for the Brit-ish empire,”11 makes no mention of war’sgreat success in killing tens of thousandsof civilians trapped in internment camps.

Morton, whose father was a Briga-dier General in WWII, is perhaps best re-membered for his rendition of WWI as thedefining moment in Canada’s long strug-gle for freedom from its imperial masters.“The Great War,” he said, “gave [PrimeMinister] King and the Liberals argumentsand support enough to take Canada to fulland unquestioned independence.”12

During his tenth year in Canada’sarmy, Captain Morton “was anxious to

1967

Stephen Lewisand his father,David Lewis

Sir William Otter and hisgrandson, Desmond Morton

general strikes. The nearly successful Rus-sian revolution of 1905-1907, pushedmany capitalist power brokers to concludethat they needed to take even more des-perate measures to contain the spread ofsocialism, if not to crush it completely.

During WWI, Canadian authoritiesrallied loyal citizens around the Union Jackto support Britain’s imperial interestsabroad. But the War Measures Act not onlyconsolidated state power to wage a foreignwar, it provided special tools to quell afeared socialist revolt within Canada’sborders. The war thus furnished a conven-ient pretext for targeting domestic enemiesof the state. Authorities imagined that for-eign radicals who had infiltrated Canada’s

gated community, were an infection thathad to be stopped from spreading through-out the body politic. Cabinet used its newpowers of preventative, mass detention tocapture and enslave thousands of single,recently-laid off labourers mostly fromeastern Europe. These young men—thenamassing in Canada’s cities—were fearednot only as a source of anticapitalist ideas,but as the group at highest risk of beingagitated into action by radical socialists.

Capturing HistoryThe WWI-era repression of Canada’s rad-ical left has been all but erased from main-stream narratives about the period. Instead,the war’s centenary has created an on-

slaught of spellbinding stories that pull atour collective heart strings and build na-tionalist feelings that support the armedforces. The government, corporate mediaand mainstream civil-society groups havememorialised Canada with poignant talesof soldiers who lost their lives in WWI.

Official WWI narratives have alsobeen used to justify Canada’s military andforeign policies. “Nothing has changed,”said then-Prime Minister Harper at a 2014ceremony marking WWI. Continuing withwhat the Canadian Press called a “veiledreference to Canada’s tough stands in sup-port of Ukraine and Israel,” he went on tosay that “Canada is still loyal to our friends,unyielding to our foes,” and stands “once

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 7

serve as [the NDP’s] assistant provincialsecretary.” So, the party’s executive agreedto “negotiate” Morton’s “release from thearmed forces.”13 He was soon working forthe Ontario NDP. In the early 1970s, as aclose advisor to NDP leaders, David andStephen Lewis, Morton was instrumentalin helping this father and son team to ousta youthful reform group from the party. In1971, the “Waffle Movement for an Inde-pendent Socialist Canada,” was seen as athreat that the NDP leadershipand theMounties both wanted to contain. A secretRCMP report said the Waffle was hoping

“to change the NDP from within andradicalise the NDP socialist policies....In its present relatively infant form, theWaffle Group is rapidly becoming amelting pot for radicals of all ‘Left’groups....”14

The “Waffle Manifesto” set out asocialist policy of independence from USwars and hegemony. Its platform includ-ed nationalising “the essential resources in-dustries, finance and credit, and industriesstrategic to planning our economy.”15

Morton’s 1972 success in oustingthe Waffle from the NDP, is similar towhen Rev.J.S.Woodsworth led the purgeof radicals from the party’s forerunner, theCooperative Commonwealth Federation inthe 1930s and ‘40s. Ousting the Waffle keptradical economic, antiwar and anti-impe-rialist ideas from infecting the NDP. TheRoyal Commission into RCMP crimes,said that because of their concern “thatTrotskyists and Communists were joiningthe Waffle,” the Mounties “volunteered in-formation to one leader of a provincialNew Democratic Party” to make him“aware of subversives within his Party.”16

Besides being spied on by theRCMP and expelled from the NDP, Waf-fle organisers were also targeted for intern-ment during the Cold War. This top secretCanadian program was called OperationProfunc. (See pp.35, 49.) From 1950 untilthe 1980s, the RCMP created annual listsof thousands of radical leftists who—incase of a war, or some vaguely-definedemergency—were to be interned. In the1950s, the first generation of this programtargeted communists like Edna and Rob-ert Mendel Laxer. The latter was a WWIIveteran who became a paid organiser forthe Communist Party, and later a clinicalpsychologist. Under Profunc, their chil-dren, Jim and Gord, were also to be round-ed up. Jim, now a York University politi-cal science prof, was a leader of the Waf-fle, which he and his father helped to found.

References1. “William Otter” (Bishop of Chichester)

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Otter2. Canadian Troops to South Africa.

albertagenealogy-research.ca3. George Maclean Rose, A Cyclopaedia of

Canadian Biography, Vol. 2, 1888, p.621books.google.ca/books?id=dm0ZAQAAIAAJ

4. Desmond Morton, “William Dillon Otter,”Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 2003.www.biographi.ca

5. 2 SS Bn Royal Canadian Regiment Infan-try, South African War, Facts & Mythswww.angloboerwar.com/forum/8-events/9795-2-ss-bn-royal-canadian-regiment-infantry-south-african-war-facts-myths

6. Concentration Camps - Blackswww.angloboerwar.com/other-information/88-concentration-camps/

7. Women and Children in White Concentra-tion Camps during the Anglo-Boer War,1900-1902.www.sahistory.org.za/topic/women-children-white-concentration-camps-during-anglo-boer-war-1900-1902

8. Methods of Barbarism?www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/pathways/census/events/britain7.htm

9. Prisoner-of-War Camps Overseaswww.anglo-boer.co.za/pow/pow-camps-overseas-2.php

10. Josh Wingrove, “Police presence in Ottawadoubled for sombre ceremony,” Globe andMail, November 11, 2014.www.theglobeandmail.com

11. Morton, Op. cit.12. Desmond Morton, “Was The Great War

Canada’s War of Independence?”www3.nfb.ca/ww1/independence.php

13. J.T. Morley, The CCF/NDP in Ontario, ABiography, 1984, p.82.books.google.ca/books?id=ANavAw AAQBAJ

14. RCMP brief to Soliciter General, Jean-Pierre Goyer, March 1971. Quoted in“Commission of inquiry concerning certainactivities of the RCMP,” 2nd Report, Vol.1,Ch.3, August 1981, p.483.epe.lac-bac.gc.ca

15. The Waffle Manifesto: For an IndependentSocialist Canada, 1969.www.socialisthistory.ca/

16. “Commission...” Op. cit., pp.353-354.

...and the Waffle

again beside allies whose sovereignty,whose territorial integrity—indeed, whosevery freedoms and existence—are still atrisk.”5 (Canada’s “tough” support for theUkrainian and Israeli governments contin-ues apace under the Trudeau Liberals.)

The October 22, 2014, murder ofan army reservist at Ottawa’s National WarMemorial (built to commemorate ourWWI military losses), was used to justifythe deployment of troops and warplanesto Iraq. On the next day, Harper told Par-liament that “laws and police powers...inthe area of surveillance, detention, and ar-rest ...need to be much strengthened.”6 OnOctober 24, then-Public Safety MinisterSteven Blaney said the government was

“eyeing the thresholds established inCanadian law for the preventive arrestsof people thought to be contemplating

attacks that may be linked to terror-ism.”7 (Emphasis added.)

The pre-emptive jailing of those thoughtto be thinking about actions that might be“linked to terrorism,” requires extremeparanoia. Ironically, Canada’s current waragainst IS—framed as a humanitarian at-tack on ultraconservative religious fanat-ics—was begun by evangelical neoconskeen on restraining domestic civil liberties.

Missing from the militarised hu-man-interest stories of WWI are historicalnarratives about Canada’s harsh attacks ondomestic civil rights. In 1914, when To-ries and Liberals passed the War MeasuresAct, Cabinet was given unlimited powersto restrict and control communications,travel, manufacturing, property and trade.The Act also gave them absolute powers

to arrest, detain and deport anyone, with-out trial. Cabinet was soon using thispower to wage war against a specific setof immigrants. Many of them—not coin-cidentally—were sympathetic to anticapi-talist ideas and radical, labour actions.

While official stories of Canada’sWWI internment now critique the ethnicprofiling of Ukrainians, they usually ignorethe role of economics, class and politics intargeting them. Such renditions of historyare common among Canada’s nationalistUkrainians. For example, on Remem-brance Day 2010, the ultraright UkrainianCanadian Congress (UCC) said that:

“Thousands of Ukrainian Canadianswere jailed in Canadian internmentcamps....not because of anything theyhad done, but only because of wherethey had come from.”8

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 20168

Under the bayonet at the Castle MountainConcentration Camp, Banff Alberta

Concentration CampsBetween 1914 and 1920, 8,579 men “ofenemy nationality” were interned in whatauthorities originally called “Concentra-tion Camps.” Of these, 7,762 (90%) werecivilian residents of Canada. Also impris-oned were 81 women and 156 children.While 2,009 of the men were German,5,954 were listed as “Austro-Hungarians,covering Croats, Ruthenians, Slovaks andChzecks.”9 (Serbs were also among thoseinterned.) About 5,000 of these “Austro-Hungarians” were actually Ukrainian.

Canada’s 24 internment facilitieswere commanded by Maj.Gen. Sir WilliamOtter, who is still fondly heralded as the“father” of Canada’s Army. His officialreport, Internment Operations, 1914-1920,says he “suspected that the tendency of mu-nicipalities to ‘unload’ their indigent wasthe cause of the confinement of not afew.”10 By mid-1915, 4,000 of the aliensforced into these prison camps, were be-ing described as “indigent.”11

To abide by the Hague Conventionon POWs, Otter had two classes of intern-ees. Only a few were among what he calledthe military “officer class or its [civilian]equivalent.” Mostly German, these “firstclass” prisoners—held largely in cities—received “better quartering and subsist-ence.”12 And, they were not forced to work.“Second class” internees were mostlyUkrainian civilians. Banished to ruralcamps, they laboured under the gun, en-dured hunger, disease, unsanitary condi-tions, overcrowding and dangerous workenvironments. Some were beaten, proddedwith bayonets, or viciously tortured. Tenwere shot dead trying to flee the camps.

Otter’s narrative claimed that “verylittle friction occurred between troops andprisoners.” His report also said he had “lit-tle complaint” about guards. Otter did ad-mit that Canada’s prison camp conditionsmay have led to “insanity.” Noting that “In-sanity was by no means uncommon amongthe prisoners,” Otter said that in some cas-es, “the disease possibly developed froma nervous condition brought about by theconfinement and restrictions entailed.” In“many other cases,” Otter said he “suspect-ed” that the “insane” were “interned ...torelieve municipalities of their care.”13

The psychotic brutality of Canadiancamp guards was described by US ConsulSamuel Reat. He said in 1915 that someprisoners in the Lethbridge Alberta campwere put in “dark cells and given a diet ofbread and water from 1 to 4 days.” Others,he reported, were “handcuffed and drawn

up so that their toes just touch the floor.”Another US Consul, G.Willrich, said “pettyofficers” inflicted punishments to “gratifytheir brutal instincts,” “as is so often thecase when men of inferior intelligence areinvested with autocratic powers.”14

Slave LabourAlthough “first class” internees, mostlyGerman officers, were not forced to work,“second class” prisoners, mostly Ukrain-ian civilians, were used as slaves. Evenupon release, their slavery did not end. In1916 and 1917, when the British Empire’sincreased demands for Canadian cannonfodder in Europe led to a shortage of work-ers, the government’s corporate friendsasked for welfare assistance. Borden’sgovernment was only too happy to obligeby providing thousands of foreign slavesfrom Canada’s labour camps. In the offi-cial narratives however, these historic re-alities were rendered in more euphemisticterms. Otter’s narrative captures the offi-cial history with these words:

“[W]hen the most strenuous call for re-inforcements was made by the Allies,the depletion of men in many of thelarge corporations of the country wasso keenly felt that application [was]made for the services of our prisonersto supply the want.... This systemproved a great advantage to the organi-zations short of labour.”15

Otter also reported that 6,000 “Aus-trians,” mainly Ukrainians, were “releasedfrom confinement on signing a ‘parole.’”For example, over 1,300 mostly Slavic in-mates were released from a northern On-tario camp in Kapuskasing when it was“decided to parole them to work for theDominion Steel Corporation and other bigmanufacturers.”16 Paroled prisoners werekept on a tight leash. They could be re-turned to captivity if they failed to reportregularly to the police, or lost their jobs.

Col.Anderson-Whyte, a formerguard from the Castle Mountain internmentcamp in Banff, was more blunt: “We had

plenty of labour. Anybody who asked usto do anything, we provided the slaves.”17

Enslaved by federal and provincial gov-ernments and private firms, they hewedtrees, built structures, fences, railways,roads and parks, and sweated on farms or

in factories, steel mills and coal mines.Getting a pittance for their 10-hour

work days, many got only 25 cents a dayfor hard labour, when a standard wage was20 cents an hour. Although not paid untilafter the war, some were not paid eventhen. By mid-1929, the government stillowed $23,000 to prisoners for their work,18

i.e., 92,000 hours of labour. In contrast,on top of his pension, for his part in run-ning Canada’s slave labour camps, Ottergot $30,000, i.e., $5,000 per year from1914 to 1920. (In 1914, $5,000 was theequivalent of $103,000 in 2015.)

Some internment-camp labourerswere denied any allowance. As the Con-sul of Switzerland wrote in 1917, after vis-iting the camp near Fernie, BC:

“They complain that the allowance ofOne dollar per month has been with-drawn in consequence of which someof the men are absolutely destitute.”19

($1 in 1914 was equal to $21 in 2015.)Mark Workman, president of the

Dominion Iron and Steel Corp., was so en-thused with the government’s forced labourprogram that he requested “troublesome”internees. As he put it, “there is no betterway of handling aliens than to keep thememployed in productive labour.” In 1917,Workman asked Borden to request thatBritain transfer their internees to Canadafor work in his Cape Breton mines.20

Even after November 11, 1918,with WWI over, Canada continued its re-pressive internment program. The govern-ment reported that as of December 19,1918, there were still 2,222 prisoners be-ing held in four camps: Munson, AB (63),Vernon, BC (388), Kapuskasing, ON(1,007) and Amherst, NS (764).21

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 9

Sir HughMacDonald

Fear is the only agencythat can [be] successfully employed

to keep them within the law and I have nodoubt that...the foreign element here will

soon be as gentle and as easilycontrolled as a lot of sheep.

Sir John’s son, Hugh, was Winnipeg’s Police Magistrate.During the 1919 General Strike, he said Canada should

“get rid of as many undesirable aliens as possible,”especially east Europeans and Jews who were, he said,

prone to“Bolsheviki ideas.” After he sent radical aliens tothe Kapuskasing internment camp, many were deported.

Conflicting NarrativesTo explain why some Canadian prisoncamps stayed in operation until 1920, BClawyer Diana Breti argued that the

“forced labour program was such a ben-efit to Canadian corporations that in-ternment was continued for two yearsafter the end of the War.”22

In 2005, Liberal MP Borys Wrze-snewskyj gave Parliament the same narra-tive when he lauded efforts by the Ukrain-ian Canadian Congress (UCC). He said:

“This infrastructure development pro-gram benefited Canadian corporationsto such a degree that even after the endof World War I, for two more years theCanadian government carried on theinternment.”23

This official story is still found onthe UCC website. “This infrastructure de-velopment program,” says the UCC, “wasso beneficial to Canadian corporations thatthe internment program lasted for two yearsafter the end of the war.”24

The UCC has worked closely withgovernment ever since Prime MinisterKing’s Liberals facilitating its creation in1940. Their shared goal was to unifyUkrainian anticommunists and to margin-alise their common socialist enemies. (See“Consolidating the Ukrainian Right,” p.46)

While it is useful to expose the con-fluence of government and corporate in-terests in exploiting WWI-era slave labourcamps, this narrative ignores the politicalfunction of internment. Camps were alsoused to contain the spread of radical so-cialism. This was particularly obvious af-ter the Russian revolution of 1917.

In 1917, Canadian censors bannedmany leftwing publications, making hun-dreds of books and periodicals illegal toprint, import, distribute or even possess.By September 1918, Borden’s regime out-lawed all publications in languages spo-ken within enemy states, including Ger-man, Hungarian, Bulgarian, Turkish, Ro-manian, Ukrainian, Russian, Finnish, Syr-ian, SerboCroatian and Latvian. This eth-nic profiling did not apply to religious textsor other materials that officials found un-objectionable.25 Describing this crack-down, labour activist Michael Martinwrote that although

“[t]he pretext was the war; the real goalwas to limit and control the effects ofthe Russian Revolution. At the sametime, fourteen political organisationswere banned, as were publications oftrade unions and socialist and anarchistorganisations. On October 11, 1918, ex-actly one month before the armistice,the government prohibited all strikes,

and made conciliation obligatory andbinding in industrial disputes. [A] pat-tern of action was installed which was...putatively aimed at wartime security,but actually aimed at controlling anddisciplining the working class.”26

Canada’s antiRed psychosisreached a frenzied peak in the 1919 Win-nipeg General Strike. The madness wasinflamed by elites at every level, from thefederal Cabinet to a local “Citizens’ Com-mittee” of Winnipeg’s richest industrial-ists, lawyers, bankers and politicians. Join-ing the fray were media moguls whosepapers branded radical labour activistswith slurs like “Bolsheviks,” “Bohunks”and “alien scum,” or depicted them in car-toons as crazed, bomb-throwing anarchists.

Despite such vivid propaganda tac-tics, when police rounded up strike lead-ers at gunpoint in late-night raids, 30,000supporters rallied on June 21, braving thecity’s ban on all public gatherings. WhenMounties got orders to fire into the crowd,they killed two people. They then chargedin on horseback, injuring dozens. Fleeingprotesters were beaten with bats and wag-on spokes wielded by “special police” andabout 100 “Reds” were arrested.27

In summing up this “Bloody Satur-day” police riot, Sir George Foster, MP,remarked that: “Some blood was shed butlaw and order was maintained….”28

Winnipeg was an occupied city pa-trolled by army trucks mounted with ma-chine guns.29 When the strike was calledoff, radical labour activists were fired orblack listed and the media continued topromote antiRed narratives. The madnesssoon spread as Mounties “from Victoriato Montreal raided the homes and officesof socialist and labour leaders.”30 Thatsummer, about 200 radicals were roundedup. “Many of those arrested,” reports his-torian Don Avery, “were moved to the in-

ternment camp at Kapuskasing, Ontario,and subsequently deported in secret.”31

This treatment was pushed by SirHugh MacDonald,32 Winnipeg’s PoliceMagistrate and the son of Sir John A. Mac-Donald. In 1919, Sir Hugh wrote to Cana-da’s Interior Minister Arthur Meighenabout “getting rid of as many undesirablealiens as possible” because of the “largeextent Bolsheviki ideas are held” by Ukrai-nians, Russians, Poles, and especiallyJews. He urged Meighen to “make an ex-ample” of these radicals, by saying that

“fear is the only agency that can [be]successfully employed to keep themwithin the law and I have no doubt thatif the Dominion Government persists inthe course that [it] is now adopting theforeign element here will soon be asgentle and as easily controlled as a lotof sheep.”33

To see why Canadian prison campskept operating until 1920, we must look atthe global context. While Russia’s revolu-tion inspired many poor workers aroundthe world, it alarmed elites in Canada, theUS, Europe and elsewhere. Panic strick-en by Russian events, and fearful of home-grown radicals, desperate powerbrokersscared their societies into a mass psycho-sis of antiRed hysteria. The paranoia of this“First Red Scare” was fired up by statepropagandists, media owners, church lead-ers, and progressive civil-society activistsheld captive by xenophobic narratives.

The Canadian government’s mad-ness to contain the Red Menace at homewas paralleled by a mounting frenzy tocollar if not wipe out communism abroad.Following WWI, Canada joined the US,Britain, France, Greece, Italy, Japan andothers, in a military invasion of SovietRussia to turn back their revolution.

In March 1919, France’s PMGeorges Clemenceau launched the Cold

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 201610

‘The Lord Provides’ by Jacob Burck

In May 1914, 2,000 unemployed,mostly Ukrainians, rallied in Winnipeg

to demand “Work or Bread!”They were met by club-wielding police.

War’s “Containment Policy.” He calledfor an international cordon sanitaire toencircle and quarantine Bolshevism, asif it were a communicable disease. Brit-ain’s War Secretary, Winston Church-ill, shared this vicious pathology. Hisrhetoric used a graphic metaphor to de-mand the deadly encirclement of an in-fant’s neck. Using the murderously psy-chopathic trope of throttling a newborn,Churchill said Bolshevism was a babythat “must be strangled in its cradle.”

So it was that in 1919 more than150,000 troops—including 4,200 Ca-nadians—invaded the newborn Sovietstate. “Canadian troops joined soldiersfrom thirteen countries,” said historianBenjamin Isitt, “in a multi-front strat-egy of encirclement designed to isolateand defeat the Bolshevik regime.”34

Despite this, the prevailing viewis that political profiling was not usedto target aliens for internment. Even pro-gressive political scientist Reg Whitak-er said in 1986 that in WWI “manyUkrainians had been interned in Cana-da, but not, it would seem, with any po-litical or ideological selectivity.”35

4Rs: Recession, Radicalism,Rebellion and Repression

Between 1910 and 1914 alone, about70,000 Ukrainians—mostly single men —migrated to Canada. Most were exploitedin low-salary jobs building railways androads, or working in mines, mills or foun-dries. Because they dominated some of thehardest-hit job sectors, Ukrainians weredisproportionately affected by the majorrecession that hit Canada between 1913and 1915. For example, of the 54,000 rail-way workers who lost their jobs in that re-cession,36 a large percent were Ukrainian.

After the Liberal government im-posed its severe “head-tax” on Asian im-migrants in 1907, Chinese railway “coo-lies” were replaced largely by Italians andUkrainians. Most immigrant men enteringCanada in the decade before WWI wereforced into brute manual labour. Many en-dured oppressive and dangerous conditionsin remote, company-run work camps. Dur-ing the early decades of the 20th century,these bunkhouse camps were home andworkplace to hundreds of thousands of im-migrant men. These poorly-paid loggers,miners and railway workers did much ofCanada’s most backbreaking work.

Railway workers were among theworst off. Official records conservativelyshow that between 1901 and 1918, 12,816

“navvies” were killed in job-related acci-dents, while 99,668 were injured. “A greatmany of these,” said University of Mani-toba historian Orest Martynowych, “wereUkrainian immigrants.” He went on to saythat in 1912,

“a foreign consul familiar with condi-tions in Europe and South Americanstated that he knew of ‘no other coun-try where the rights of workmen havebeen so flagrantly abused as on railwayconstruction in Canada.’”37

Even convicts doing railway work had bet-ter housing, and shorter hours, than Cana-da’s alien “navvies,” said an observer wholikened their conditions to “lesser formsof serfdom” and “peonage.”38

Despite being the backbone of Can-ada’s economy, mainstream unions turneda blind eye to the workers in these camps.Two main factors affected large unions’disinterest in organising them, said EricaMartin, “the racism which beset early Ca-nadian labour activism” and “the fact thatmost manual workers on the frontier wereimmigrants.” Only in the early 1920s didbig unions begin to take an interest in Can-ada’s work camps because they “felt threat-ened by ‘radical’ groups like the Interna-tional Workers of the World (IWW) whichwere attempting to organize camp men.”39

By 1911, the anarcho-socialistIWW had about 10,000 Canadian mem-

bers, mainly in mining, logging and rail-way construction camps. They gainedstrength by uniting thousands in strikesand walkouts to achieve better wagesand safer work conditions in the camps.

By the summer of 1913, thousandsof Ukrainians, many laid off from death-defying railway work where they wereradicalised by the IWW, moved intowestern Canadian cities. The policeused vagrancy laws to arrest them forloitering, and some were deported.40

Speaking of indigent labourers inwestern Canada at that time, UkrainianCanadian academics, Bohdan Kordanand Peter Melnycky, wrote that:“these people...were interned when ur-ban municipal councils, concernedabout this additional burden on the taxrolls and unwilling or unable to providerelief for them, insisted they were ‘athreat to civil order.’ The policy of in-ternment offered local authorities themeans with which to deal with the thou-sands of destitute who were millingabout the streets of urban centres.”41

(Emphasis added.)But radicalised Ukrainians were not

merely “milling about the streets,” theywere protesting in the streets. In May

1914, 2,000 unemployed, mostly Ukraini-ans, rallied in Winnipeg. Carrying shov-els, they called for “work or bread!” Whenpolice tried to arrest one of their speakers,an officer was beaten. The crowd was driv-en back by 20 club-wielding constables.

Business leaders supported Cana-da’s roundup of indigent aliens. In August1914, CPR president Sir Thomas Shaugh-nessy urged friends in government to cre-ate detention camps for laid-off Germansand “Austrians.”42 Later that month, theWar Measures Act was passed and intern-ment stations opened in Montreal andKingston. Six prison camps opened thatSeptember, with five in western Canada.43

To solve the growing crisis, Bor-den’s government considered conscriptingforeigners into the military. Another ideawas to encourage unemployed aliens toleave Canada for the US. When Bordencabled Canada’s colonial masters in Brit-ain for advice, he noted that the

“[s]ituation with regard to Germans andAustrians, particularly Austrians [is]very difficult. From fifty to one hundredthousand will be out of employmentduring coming winter as employers aredismissing them everywhere undercompulsion of public opinion.”44 (Em-phasis added.)

It was essential, Borden said, to either “letthem go, provide them with work or feed

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 11

them, otherwise they will become desper-ate and resort to crime.” The “crime” thatscared Canadian elites was not loitering,it was insurrection. The colonial office inLondon suggested that Canada enslavethese troublesome, unemployed aliens.Imperial authorities couched this in euphe-misms saying that if Canada provided en-emy aliens with food and shelter, “it wouldbe quite proper under war conditions tomake them labour at public works.”45

Even after the War Measures Actwas enacted and internment had begun,protests by unemployed foreigners contin-ued to grow. In April 1915, 5,000 “unem-ployed non-unionized ‘foreigners’” hitWinnipeg’s streets demanding “bread andwork.” Police met them with clubs. An-other Winnipeg protest of 15,000, tookplace three days later. In mid-May, hun-dreds of aliens, many Ukrainian, left Win-nipeg. In search of work, they walked tothe US border. Once there, 200 were ar-rested and sent to internment camps.46

The government and its friends inbusiness, shared a growing fear that radi-cal immigrants, ravished by poverty andwith nothing to lose, posed a threat to whatthe War Measures Act called the “peace,order and welfare of Canada.” Destituteeast Europeans, roused by hunger and so-cialist ideals, were menacing. With the eco-nomic crisis at home and war abroad, au-thorities had a convenient excuse to roundup and thus contain those unemployed al-iens who were seen as radicals prone todisruptive street protests and labour unrest.

Meanwhile, the official story wasthat indigent aliens were interned for theirown good. In 1918, then-Minister of Jus-tice, Charles Doherty, an army veteran ofthe 1885 Northwest Rebellion, told Par-liament that poor aliens were interned outof Anglo-Canadian kind-heartedness. Be-cause “thousands of these aliens werestarving,” he said, they were interned “un-der the inspiration of the sentiment of com-passion.” Justifying the mass layoffs ofnonAnglos, he said “the labour market wasglutted and there was a natural dispositionto give the preference in the matter of em-ployment to our own people.”47

AngloProtestant authorities werecertainly concerned about poverty amongunemployed “aliens.” However, their con-cern was not for the poor’s welfare. Theirgoal was to protect capitalism from afeared socialist upheaval led by radical-ised foreign workers. Slave labour campsalso helped shelter corporations from theeconomic hardships of Canada’s recession.

Opposing Capitalist,Religious and Military SlaveryWhy did Canadian power brokers see eastEuropeans as such a threat to the estab-lished order? The anticapitalist, liberationmovements that swept through central andeastern Europe between 1905 and 1907,captured the imagination of many Ukrai-nians in Canada. This community was thenbolstered by politicised émigrés fleeingCzarist repression. (See pp.38-39.) By1906, socialist Ukrainians were printinganticapitalist tracts and building radical,multi-ethnic organisations like the Indus-trial Workers of the World and the Social-ist Party of Canada (SPC).

The SPC’s largely Anglo-Saxonleadership rigidly rejected all efforts togradually reform capitalism. Instead, theyhad an “impossibilist” ideology that de-manded total and immediate revolution.Underlying this struggle, the SPC saw “oneissue...as the basis for all political organi-zation,” namely, the “abolition of thepresent system of wage slavery.”48

Slavery tropes were also central tothe rhetoric of Ukrainian socialists. In1907, the first issue of Chevron Prapor(“The Red Flag”)—a Winnipeg-basednewspaper for Ukrainians within theSPC—described its purpose as leading astruggle against “injustice, exploitation andslavery.”49 By 1914, Ukrainian socialistsin Winnipeg, although by then freed fromthe confining ideology of the SPC, werestill bound by antislavery rhetoric, saying“only he who works for the emancipationof the enslaved masses is a true patriot.”50

Socialist Ukrainians saw their eth-nic group as an enslaved segment of Cana-da’s working class, held in place by theinherently exploitative capitalist system.As Martynowych has noted, by 1913 radi-cal Ukrainian socialists were saying that

“Ukrainian immigrant labourers, espe-cially those who worked on railwayconstruction, in the forests and in themines, were little more than ‘free whiteslaves’ and ‘white niggers’...in the capi-talist system.”51

These references to “free whiteslaves” and “white niggers” are from Ro-botchyi Narod (Working People), theUkrainian Social Democratic Party’s pa-per in Winnipeg. So, even before east Eu-ropeans were literally enslaved in Cana-dian internment camps, radical Ukrainianswere using metaphoric links that tied cor-porate-run work camps to slavery.

Many socialist Ukrainian Canadi-ans, swayed by Ukraine’s Radical Party,

saw religion as a powerful form of captiv-ity. These activists, Martynowych said“were free of the cultural fetters imposedon the individual in traditional peasant so-cieties.” They “articulated a social and po-litical orientation based on anticlerical, so-cialist and populist principles” because

“the higher clergy in Galicia (Catholic)and in Bukovyna (Orthodox) acted asthe instrument of foreign ruling classes,while most members of the lower clergyremained indifferent to the plight of thepeasantry.”52

In 1911, Ukrainian socialists in Win-nipeg held a “Free School” with talks on“female emancipation, the Inquisition, therelation of churches to the institution ofslavery, [and] the theories of Darwin....”53

These Ukrainians were no doubtinspired by Marxist metaphors that decriedreligion as “the opium of the people,” aswell as by slavery tropes in the Commu-nist Manifesto of 1848, which infamouslysaid that “proletarians have nothing to losebut their chains.” Marx and Engels alsomixed metaphors and similes about work-ers, soldiers and slaves, saying

“Masses of labourers, crowded into thefactory, are organised like soldiers....Not only are they slaves of the bour-geois class, and of the bourgeois State;they are daily and hourly enslaved bythe machine.”54

Ukrainian Canadian radicals tookthese tropes to heart. In 1917, RobotchyiNarod asked: “Do you realize that Ukrain-ian workers occupy the lowest position inthis capitalist prison?”55 While “prison”captures the idea of a structure for inmates,it also encloses, metaphorically, the ideaof “wage slaves” trapped by class struc-tures. The Czar’s empire was also de-scribed in terms of captivity. After theevents of February 1917, Ukrainian social-ists held a mass meeting at the WinnipegOpera House and sent their “fraternalgreetings” to “Russian worker-revolution-aries” to celebrate “world victory... overautocratic tsarism and the break-up of theprison-house of nations.”56

But Ukrainian Canadian socialistswere not content to merely use rhetoricaldevices about prisons and slavery as anescape valve to express liberating, anti-capitalist ideas. They took action by push-ing for specific changes to Canadian gov-ernment policies. For instance, radicalUkrainian leftists called for such enlight-ened goals as an eight-hour work day, aminimum daily wage, voting rights for allmen and women over 21, social insurancefor seniors and the disabled, and the abo-

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 201612

Alberta-bound Ukrainianslition of child labour.57 Thesedemands were shocking toCanada’s capitalist elites, whoframed such socialist ideals asunthinkably dangerous, if notcriminally insane.

Ahead of their time,Ukrainian social democratsstrove for a more equitable so-ciety. They wanted a worldwhere manufacturing wouldmeet everyone’s needs, notjust amass huge profits for theprivileged few. It was, andstill is, a revolutionary ideal.But, as Martynowych pointsout, although “their ultimategoal...was revolutionary, theirmethods were moderate.” The reforms thatthey demanded were meant to further “theevolution of capitalism” and create “pre-conditions for a smooth and orderly tran-sition to socialism.”58 They pursuedgradual social change through education,peaceful protest, labour actions and elec-toral politics, not by any kind of violentoverthrow of the Canadian government.

During WWI, Ukrainian radicalsjoined other socialists in opposing theforced labour that was imposed by mili-tary conscription. They did not do this tosupport the imperial Austro-Hungarian re-gime that controlled Ukraine. They op-posed the draft because WWI—which wasbeing pushed by governments, churchesand other captive civil-society organisa-tions—was killing working class peoplearound the world. Seeing that competingimperialist powers were using workers aspawns in a “Great Game” to profit elites,Ukrainian socialists rejected conscription.

They paid sorely for such views.Even after internees were released on pa-role from prison camps, they could be ar-rested again just for attending events to talkabout military conscription. For example,in June 1917, when the Ukrainian branchof the Social Democratic Party in Torontomet to discuss the draft, police stormed inand arrested 80 of them for violating theirparole conditions. Just a week earlier, anangry mob of several hundred WWI vet-erans had attacked a similar event, beat-ing organisers and then marching off inmilitary formation. Toronto police stoodby and did nothing to stop the violence.59

This was typical. Canadian authorities ex-erted control not only by rendering dissi-dents captive in forced labour camps, butby turning a blind eye when vigilante thugsassaulted peaceful, antiwar activists.

Caged by the Fear of CaptivityWhile Canada’s elite used mass internmentto extract cheap labour and to contain thespread of radicalism, whole communitieswere effectively held in place by fear.

During WWI, Canada had 88,000registered “enemy aliens,” mostly Ukrai-nians. If caught without their official, iden-tity papers, they could be interned imme-diately. “Police conducted regular round-ups in immigrant neighbourhoods,” saidIan Angus, founder of Canada’s SocialistHistory Project, “arresting every man whocould not produce a registration card.”60

But, not all “enemy aliens” had toregister with authorities. There were morethan 393,000 Germans and at least 129,000Austro-Hungarians in Canada.61 This wassix times more than all of those who wereforced to register, which included Turks,Bulgarians and others. When registrationcentres were set up under RCMP supervi-sion in Canada’s largest cities, only thoseenemy aliens living within 20 miles had toregister. After all, the state only wanted tocontrol urban “aliens,” especially single,jobless, working-class Ukrainian men.

Even before WWI, it was a well-established myth that urban Ukrainianswere a grave threat to Christian Canadianvalues. This meme in the paranoid folk-lore of Protestant elites was, for instance,spread at the five-day “National Mission-ary Congress” which drew 4,000 to Toron-to’s Massey Hall in 1909.62 Addressingthe threat of nonAnglo-Saxon “foreigners,”that he said “really constitute our problem,”was militant Social Gospeller Rev. CharlesGordon, Canada’s most popular novelist.Referring to Ukrainians as Galicians (forGalicia was held captive by Austria-Hun-gary), he said that while “the Galician onthe land is a good citizen, and his children

will grow up good Canadians; the Galicianin the city is a dangerous element.”63

After warning that “many of the set-tlers who drift into the cities become a men-ace to our country,” Gordon asked, “Whatare we as Christian Canadians and as Chris-tian Churches to do?”64 The problem, hesaid, was that

“we need them for our work. They dowork for us that Canadians will not do...and were it not for the Galicians and...[other] foreign peoples...we could notpush our enterprises in railroad build-ing and in lumbering and manufactur-ing to a finish.”65

Historian Adam Crerar noted thatthe “threat of internment—and the senseof rejection by Canadian society...—wasfelt by all who were at risk.”66 This wasrecognised in a 1916 BC police report onthe reduced labour militancy among min-ers. “From a police point of view, there hasbeen less trouble amongst them since thebeginning of the war than previously,” saida chief constable. “[T]he fact that severalof them were sent to internment camps atthe beginning of the war seemed to have agood effect on the remainder.”67

Despite its targeted approach, in-ternment had a chilling effect on wholecommunities. The registry of “enemy al-iens” was also a turning point in Canada’ssurveillance of radicals. Once registered,aliens had to report to authorities at leastonce a month. As Arthur Meighen, Minis-ter of the Interior and Superintendent ofIndian Affairs, reported in March 1919, thegovernment’s Dominion-wide register

“increased in completeness...untilwe...had practically a record of all thealien enemies in the country. A closewatch was kept, and is kept, of their oc-cupations, and activities, and they areall pretty well followed.”68

Alberta-bound Ukrainians

Quebec City 1897

“A stalwart peasant in a sheep-skincoat,born on the soil, whose forefathershave been farmers for ten genera-tions, with a stout wife and a half-

dozen children, is good quality.”Sir Clifford Sifton, LiberalInterior Minister (1896-1905)

“The Galician [Ukrainian] on theland is a good citizen, and his

children will grow up good Cana-dians; the Galician in the city is a

dangerous element ... [and] many... become a menace to our country.”

(at Canada’s Missionary Congress, 1909)Rev. Charles Gordon (aka Ralph Connor)

Missionary, Imperialist, Novelist, Social Gospeller

March 2016 (Issue # 68) Press for Conversion! 13

Within two weeks of this chillingstatement, Toronto police rounded up threesocialists—two Germans and a Russian—who authorities publicly claimed were “thenucleus of a Communist Party” in Canada.After holding them incommunicado for awhole month, one was sent to an intern-ment camp, and another was held in jail.Both were later deported to the US. In dis-cussing this case with the Toronto Times,the city’s Inspector of Detectives, GeorgeGuthrie, stated that police had obtained

“a list of possibly 1000 men andwomen, the majority...of foreign birth,who were actively participating in thisBolshevist agitation. We know also theirnames and where they are employed.At any moment they can be picked up,and from now on they will be closelywatched.”69

Publicising this blacklist’s exist-ence, with the threat of arrest, sent a “RedChill” through activist communities. Thefear of being listed must have scared ac-tivists and nonactivists away from radicals,their literature and events. Knowing thatpolice had data on jobs, worsened the in-timidation. Livelihoods could be takenaway, not just freedoms of movement, as-sociation, assembly and expression.

The biggest threat hanging overpeople’s heads was that they could be“picked up” “at any moment” and cagedat a remote slave labour camp. By wield-ing this blunt instrument of terror, the gov-ernment created fear not only among radi-cal foreign activists, and their politicalgroups, but throughout their ethnic com-munities. As one RCMP constable ofUkrainian origins informed his Ottawabosses in 1941, the community had longlived “in fear of the barbed wire fence.”70

But the threat of captivity went farbeyond the boundaries of ethnicity. Peo-ple across Canada got the message thatauthorities would not tolerate those whodared to entertain radical socialist ideas.Internment was therefore part of a cost-effective social-control program to renderCanadians captive by fear. Threatened theloss of jobs, civil rights and/or physicalfreedoms was an effective weapon for scar-ing people away from even exploring ideasthat elites considered a potential threat to“peace, order and welfare” of Canada.

Crazed by the fear of a threat to thestatus quo and the loss of their privilegedposition within the established order, Cana-da’s political, economic and religious lead-ers developed a phobic response to radi-cal socialism. They reacted by using WWIas a pretext for wars of containment both

at home and abroad. Domestically, intern-ment was used to contain supposed en-emies of Canada, largely from eastern Eu-rope. On the foreign front, Canada joinedthe 1919-1921 war to stop the Russianrevolution, contain its spread and threatensimilar uprisings around the world.

In spreading their antiRed paranoia,Canadian elites built upon existing socialnarratives of racist superiority and culturalnarcissism that had long captured the pre-vailing Eurocentric mindset of the Peace-able Kingdom. As a result, mainstream so-ciety remained entranced by a mass delu-sion that perceived Canada’s imperialbrand of warmongering xenophobia as ifit were a liberating effort to promote pro-gressive Christian values.

References/Notes1. Liberal governments followed the British

Empire into the Boer War (1899), and WWI(1914). (See “Empire & Sons,” p.6).

2. Bill C-51, June 18, 2015.3. War Measures Act, August 22, 1914.4. Ibid.5. Lee-Anne Goodman, “Harper marks 100th

anniversary of WWI,” Aug. 4, 2014.www.vicnews.com/national/269839631.html

6. Hansard, October 23, 2014.www.parl.gc.ca/content/hoc/House/412/Debates/130/HAN130-E.PDF

7. Cited by Louise Elliott, “Ottawa shooting:Harper government wants to make terror ar-rests easier,” CBC, Oct. 24, 2014.

8. “Ukrainian Community Honours Veteranson Remembrance Day,” Nov.11, 2010.www.ucc.ca/2010/11/11/ukrainian-community -honours-veterans-on-remembrance-day/

9. William Otter, Internment Operations,1914-20, Sept. 30, 1920. In LubomyrLuciuk, In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence,2001, Appendix A, p.128.uccla.ca/In_Fear_of_the_Barbed_Wire_Fence.pdf

10. Ibid., p.129.11. Diana Breti, Canada’s Concentration

Camps - The War Measures Act, The LawConnection, 1998.alethonews.wordpress.com/tag/war-measures-act

12. Otter, Op. cit., p.129.13. Ibid., p.131.14. Cited in Luciuk, Op. cit., p.85.15. Ibid., p.139.16. Watson Kirkconnell, Kapuskasing, an his-

torical sketch, 1921, p.6.openlibrary.org

17. Colonel Anderson-Wilson, May 4, 1973.Cited by Bohdan Kordan and Peter Mel-nycky, Introduction, In the Shadow of theRockies: Diary of the Castle Mountain In-ternment Camp, 1915-1917, 1991, p.18.books.google.ca/books?id=0H-PMNunqCwC

18. Letter, Accountant for Internment Opera-tions, July 25, 1929, and Otter 1920. Citedin Luciuk, Op. cit., pp.22, 124.

19. S.Gintzburger, Report of Complaints, Sept.7, 1917. In Luciuk, Op. cit., p.27.

20. Mark Workman to Robert Borden, Dec. 19,

1918. Cited by Donald Avery, “EuropeanImmigrant Workers and Labour Protest inPeace and War, 1896-1919,” in Bar- ringtonWalker, The History of Immigration andRacism in Canada, 2008, p.132.books.google.ca/books?id=W1YQ73A_if8C

21. Hansard, March 24, 1919, p.757.parl.canadiana.ca/view/oop.debates_HOC1302_01/769

22. Breti, Op cit.23. Hansard, March 24, 2005.

www.parl.gc.ca24.Internment of Ukrainians in Canada

www.ucc.ca/positions/internment/25. R.Martin and S.Adam (eds.), Sourcebook

of Canadian Media Law, 1994, p.187.books.google.ca/books?id=VO_0AwAAQBAJ

26. Michael Martin, The Red Patch: PoliticalImprisonment in Hull, Quebec during WorldWar II, 2007, p.15.www.socialisthistory.ca

27. Labour’s Revolt: Winnipeg General Strikewww.civilization.ca

28. Douglas Francis, National Dreams: Myth,Memory and Canadian History, 1997, p.44.

29. M.DuPuis, Winnipeg’s General Strike: Re-ports from the Front Lines, 2014, p.112.books.google.ca/books?id=hC7wAwAAQBAJ

30. Benjamin Isitt, “Mutiny from Victoria toVladivostok, Dec. 1918,” Canadian His-torical Review, June 2006, p.260.www.isitt.ca/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/mutiny-from-victoria-to-vladivostok-december-1918.pdf

31. Donald Avery, “European Immigrant Work-ers and Labour Protest in Peace and War,1896-1919,” Walker Op. cit., p.136.books.google.ca/books?id=W1YQ73A_if8C

32. Sir Hugh served in the military to suppressLouis Riel’s 1870 Red River Rebellion andthe 1885 Northwest Rebellion.

33. Cited by Lubomyr Luciuk, A Time forAtonement: Canada’s First National Intern-ment Operations and the Ukrainian Cana-dians 1914-1920, 1988.www.infoukes.com/history/internment/

34. Benjamin Isitt, From Victoria toVladivostok: Canada’s Siberian Expedition,1917-19, 2010, p.4.books.google.ca/books?id=9PF_lwOL5f4C

35. Reg Whitaker, “Official Repression ofCommunism during World War II,” Labour,Spring 1986, p.156.journals.hil.unb.ca

36. Canada Yearbook 1921, 1922, p.629. InOrest Martynowych, Village radicals andpeasant immigrants, 1978, p.75. (MA the-sis, Grad. Studies, Univ. of Manitoba.)www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/MQ36804.pdf

37. Ibid., p.7338. Ibid.39. Erica Martin, “Action and Advocacy: Al-

fred Fitzpatrick and the Early History ofFrontier College,” MA, OISE, 2000, p.44.tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/14424/1/MQ53317.pdf

40. Orest Martynowych, Nadia Kazymyra,“Political Activity in Western Canada, 1896-1923,” in Manoly R. Lupul (ed.), A Herit-age in Transition: Essays in the History ofUkrainians in Canada, 1982, p.87.umanitoba.ca

41. Kordan and Melnycky, Op.cit., p.15.

Press for Conversion! (Issue # 68) March 201614

By Richard Sanders

Captivated by the hype of adschurned out by Canada’s govern-ment and profit-seeking shipping

firms, many Ukrainians left the politicaland economic confines of their homeland,only to have their dreams of freedomdashed on the prairies. As historian OrestMartynowych noted, Ukrainians were

“economically exploited, socially op-pressed, culturally neglected, colonizedpeople, preyed upon by foreign land-owners, bureaucrats and merchants, andfrequently patronized and humiliatedby...privileged members of their ownnationality.”1

But, “for many of these Ukrainianpeasants, immigration to Canada did notprove to be a liberating experience.” Infact, “isolated from modern sectors of Ca-nadian society and left without basic so-cial services,” said Martynowych, “lifecontinued to be no less hazardous and in-secure than...in the Old World.”2

Likewise, Canada’s political systemwas anything but liberating. As Ukrainianresearcher Wasyl Swystun wrote inJ.S.Woodsworth’s government report,Ukrainian Rural Communities (1917):“Ukrainians in Canada...are disgusted withthe political corruption, which is worse

than anything they have known in the OldCountry,” and “see no great difference be-tween platforms of the two parties [Lib-eral and Conservative].”3

In December 1917, a former Mani-toba Liberal MP, Robert L.Richardson—while campaigning for the Conservative’sUnionist Party—called for the outright en-slavement of “enemy aliens.” “[W]e won’tneed many guards,” he said. “It will be easyenough when a few foreigners are shot; theothers will work eagerly.”4 Ukrainian so-cialists replied to this by writing that the

“Ukrainian immigrant did not flee fromthe Kaiser’s knout [whip] in order to fallunder another knout in Canada. Herefuses to tolerate Kaiserism regardlessof who tries to impose it.”

In postCzarist Ukraine, they asserted, “lib-erty and democracy are held in higher es-teem than here in Canada.”5

Despite, or likely aided by, hishyped-up xenophobia, Richardson—thenovelist, journalist and owner/editor of theWinnipeg Tribune—was easily re-electedto Parliament in 1917. Like “many otherbusinessmen,” he was “swept up in the hys-teria of the ‘Red Scare.’” In 1919, Rich-ardson warned Borden that a “‘Bolshevik’uprising” was brewing in Manitoba. Later,his paper’s hate-filled, phobic rants blamed

Winnipeg’s 1919 General Strike on vio-lent “reds” and “irresponsible, lawless, an-archistic agitators”6 who were riling upCanada’s “undesirable” east Europeans.

After fleeing the tyrannies of east-ern Europe, many radicalised newcomersto Canada were thrown headlong into chal-lenging new struggles for freedom, and—in thousands of cases—they were thrownstraight into Canada’s slave labour camps.

References1. Orest Martynowych, Village radicals and

peasant immigrants: The social roots offactionalism among Ukrainian immigrantsin Canada, 1896-1918, 1978, p.3. (MA the-sis, Graduate Studies, Manitoba.)www.collectionscanada.gc.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/ftp04/MQ36804.pdf

2. Ibid., p.286.3. Wasyl Swystun, “Political Organization &

Activities,” in J.S.Woodsworth, UkrainianRural Communities, January 25, 1917,p.117-118. J.S.Woodsworth fonds: H-2278,Vol.11 #38heritage.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.lac_reel _h2278/175?r=0&s=4

4. Robotchyi Narod, December 12, 1917,cited by Martynowych, Op. cit., p.261.

5. Ibid.6. M.G.Dupuis, The Response of the Toronto

Daily Press to the Winnipeg General Strike,1973. (MA thesis, History, Ottawa)ruor.uottawa.ca/bitstream/10393/22600/1/EC55684.PDF

From Frying Pan to Prairie Fire: One Captivation after Another

Sir John A. MacDonald, quoted in the Law-rence [Kansas] Daily Journal, Oct. 23, 1890.

“Look at the mass of foreignignorance and vice which has floodedthat country [the US] with communism,socialism, atheism and all other isms.”

42. Orest Martynowych, Ukrainians inCanada: The Formative Years, 1891-1924,1991, p.325.books.google.ca/books?id=71Wnflm9lYgC

43. Otter, Op. cit., p.126.44. Cited by Martynowych 1991, Op. cit.,

pp.325-326.45. Ibid., p.326.46. Orest Martynowych, “The Ukrainian So-

cialist Movement in Canada, 1900-1918,”Journal of Ukrainian (Graduate) Studies,Fall 1976, p.33.diasporiana.org.ua

47. Hansard, April 22, 1918, p.1018.parl.canadiana.ca

48. Western Clarion, September 11, 1903.Cited in J.M.Milne, “History of the Social-ist Party of Canada,” 1973.www.worldsocialism.org/canada/historym.htm

49. Chevron Prapor. In Jaroslav Petryshyn andLuba Dzubak, Peasants in the PromisedLand: Canada and the Ukrainians, 1891-1914, 1985, p.164.books.google.ca/books?id=XfKkhhHa1tgC

50. Robotchyi Narod, February 18, 1914, inMartynowych 1978, Op. cit., p.254.

51. Robotchyi Narod, October 18, 1913. Citedby Martynowych, Ibid., p.252.

52. Ibid., p.553. Martynowych 1976, Op. cit., p.44.54. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Manifesto

of the Communist Party, 1888.www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/61/pg61.html

55. Robotchyi Narod, April 6, 1917. Cited byMartynowych, 1978, Op. cit., p.260.

56. Hromadskyi holos, April 5, 1917. Cited byPeter Krawchuk, Our History: The Ukrain-ian Labour-Farmer Movement in Canada,1907-1991, 1996.www.socialisthistory.ca

57. Orest Martynowych, Ukrainian Section ofthe Socialist Party of Canada / Social Demo-cratic Party of Canada, p.2.umanitoba.ca

58. Ibid.59. Ian Angus, Canadian Bolsheviks: The

Early Years of the Communist Party ofCanada, 1981, p.13.books.google.ca/books?id=CVgGlHp9sO0C

60. Ibid.61. Internment Exhibit: The Barbed Wire So-

lution, p.2.www.ucrdc.org/Exhibits-Internment-p2.html

62. Canada’s Missionary Congress, March 31-April 1, 1909, p.vi.archive.org/stream/canadasmission00unknuoft

63. Ibid., pp.105, 106.64. Ibid., p.103.65. Ibid., p.106.66. Adam Crerar, “Ontario and the Great War,”

in David MacKenzie (ed.), Canada and theFirst World War, 2005.books.google.ca/books?id=iqtjsLl292oC

67. BC Provincial Police file, January 26, 1916.Cited by Avery, Op. cit., p.131.books.google.ca/books?id=W1YQ73A_if8C

68. Hansard, March 24, 1919, p.757.parl.canadiana.ca

69. Angus, Op. cit., p.39.70. RCMP, “Report re: 8th National Conven-

tion of Ukrainian National Federation ofCanada and Affiliated Societies,” Aug. 25-31, 1941. Cited by Luciuk 2001, Op. cit.