FOR THE RECORD: Speech at internment plaque unveiling (11/08/98)

FOR THE RECORD: Speech at internment plaque unveiling

Following is the text of an address by Borys Sydoruk of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association at the Internment Plaque unveiling ceremony held on the Manitoba legislative grounds in Winnipeg on October 11.

"The Liberal Party understands your concern ... we support your efforts to secure the redress of Ukrainian Canadians' claims arising from their internment and loss of freedoms during the first world war ... we will continue to monitor the situation closely and seek that the government honors its promise."

Of course, on June 8, 1993, Mr. Chrétien was only the leader of the opposition. Then he became prime minister. I looked forward to Mr. Chrétien keeping his promise about righting the wrong done to Ukrainian Canadians during this country's first national internment operations. He had lots of precedents.

There was Prime Minister Brian Mulroney recognizing our fellow Japanese Canadians claims for redress. And Mr. Mulroney apologizing to the Italian Canadian community for the injustices their community suffered during the second world war. There was even a 1991 motion in the House of Commons by the Liberal MP for Kingston, Peter Milliken, calling upon the government to acknowledge the injustice. Ink Mark, MP for Dauphin-Swan River, stood up in October l997 and also stood in the House of Commons asking the government to do the same. And the two survivors of Canada's first concentration camps are both Montreal-born women, mere children when interned in the Spirit Lake Camp in northern Quebec.

What better way for Mr. Chrétien, I thought, to appeal to ethnic and women voters than with a symbolic gesture, such as placing a marker near the place where these women endured their unwarranted imprisonment? Although the Ukrainian community in Quebec suffered needlessly at the hands of Ottawa during the internment operations, Quebec's Ukrainians proved they would not let legitimate historical grievances undermine their commitment to Canada's future. So, we asked Mr. Chrétien to do something for them. He didn't.

Five years have now passed. The prime minister has not kept his 1993 promise. Various ministers responsible for the multiculturalism portfolio have avoided explaining why. All we are told is the government is interested only in "forward-looking projects" that combat racism, which precludes recalling what happened to Ukrainians and other Europeans during the first world war, however xenophobic. And we were told there are no funds for commemorative projects. Then we watched, amazed, as the very same Liberal administration allocated millions for a Holocaust museum in Ottawa and millions more to recall the suffering, in 1847, of Irish immigrants at Grosse Isle, Quebec. And don't forget the billions spent annually in redress to Canada's native communities for the sins of the past.

We admire Ottawa's generosity in allocating funds to recall incidents in Canadian history that we would all do well not to forget. But why are the claims of the Ukrainian Canadian community routinely ignored? Is the general public against us? If editorial opinion is a measure of public support we should have succeeded years ago. Commentaries in every major Canadian newspaper over the past decade have supported our modest requests. We want an acknowledgment of the injustice and a restitution of that portion of the internees' wealth that was confiscated but never returned.

We are not asking for an apology. And we are not asking for redress. Let Ottawa use the money illegitimately harvested from the internees to fund projects such as developing a permanent exhibit about the internment operations in Banff National Park - where two camps housing these unfortunates provided a ready source of forced labor for the development of that park's facilities and for ensuring that information about this relatively unknown episode in Canadian history becomes part of the country's high school curricula. Are these unreasonable requests? Apparently Mr. Chrétien and his advisors think so.

The Winnipeg plaque to be unveiled today is one of 10 established to date to memorialize the 5,000 Ukrainian Canadians who were unjustly interned as enemy aliens from 1914 to 1920. The first nine, in order of placement, are Fort Henry in Kingston, Ontario; Castle Mountain, Banff National Park, Alberta; Kapuskasing, Ontario; Cave and Basin, Banff National Park, Alberta; Jasper, Alberta; Nanaimo, British Columbia; Vernon, British Columbia; Brandon, Manitoba; and Toronto.

During the time of the first internment operations, the Canadian government established 24 internment camps across the country.

Why were these people interned in the first place?

At the turn of the century, Canada, with its small population, needed settlers. In 1890s the Canadian government enticed immigrants from Eastern Europe to settle the Canadian Prairies. Many of these new immigrants were from the Ukrainian provinces of Halychyna and Bukovyna. These Ukrainian provinces were invaded and occupied by the Austrian Empire in the late 1700s. These new immigrants left the hard life given to them by the Austrian Empire, with the hopes of a better, and sometimes much exaggerated, life promised to them by Canadian immigration agents.

Lured by false promises, 171,000 Ukrainians came to Canada between 1896 and 1914 to comprise the largest non-Anglo, non-French ethnic group in Canada. They left their worldly belongings, the little land they may have owned, their friends and their culture. In exchange, they found isolation and a hard life. The Canadian government needed their labor for the back-breaking work of developing the national infrastructure in agriculture, mining, logging, industry and transportation. Their labor was needed, but their presence was not desired; for the presence of these illiterates in sheepskin coats was somehow perceived as a threat to the Anglo civilization. In 1913, a Methodist minister wrote in the Edmonton Journal that on the social scale, Ukrainians were 10 rungs lower than Indians.

What was the crime?

In 1913, the economic recession resulted in 50,000 railway workers loosing their jobs. Usually, these immigrant workers were the last to be hired, and the first to be fired. The government had fears of labor unrest. With the outbreak of World War I, Canada's first War Measures Act was passed. Eighty-eight thousand Ukrainian Canadians, whether Canadian citizens or not, were forced to register as enemy aliens, to report to the RCMP on a regular basis and pay to have their ID cards stamped. Five thousand were interned in concentration camps (to use the Canadian government's term for these camps) where they were used to do forced labor - building roads, clearing trees, working in mines and so on. In two camps, Vernon and Spirit Lake, Quebec, women and children were interned. Life in the camps was difficult, the work long and hard; accidents were common; some committed suicide; some died of TB; some were shot trying to escape.

Did the Canadian government act lawfully in its treatment of the internees?

By international law, these internees were technically prisoners of war. But the 1907 Hague Convention governing the treatment of POWs prohibited the use of prisoners of war for forced labor. By contrast, POWs of German origin were given first-class treatment (food and shelter) and were not required to do work. Ukrainians were treated worse than the proven enemy. The Ukrainians had no sympathy for Austria, which they regarded as a political and economic oppressor of the Ukrainian people of Europe. In 1915 the British Foreign Office in Ottawa instructed the Canadian government that Ukrainians were not enemy aliens, but friendly aliens. These instructions were ignored.

Between 1914 and 1920 Ukrainian Canadians were not allowed to be Canadians. Nor, as Dr. Paul Thomas from the University of Victoria states, were they allowed to have a Ukrainian identity - even when 10,000 of them enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces. This contribution to the war effort, on a proportional basis, was greater than that of any other ethnic group in Canada at that time. One of them, Filip Konowal, even won the Victoria Cross, but he was called a Russian, not Ukrainian.

The Canadian government knew that Ukrainians were not Austrians, because Austrian consular officers in Canada were very hostile to Ukrainians who left Austria. Ottawa knew that Ukrainians were a stateless people and exploited the situation accordingly.

It is important for a nation to learn from the mistakes in history. Canada is a great nation - a good place to live, to be educated and raise your family. A memorial like this one unveiled today helps us to remember so that we, as Canadians, don't make the same mistakes again; so that we will treat other groups the way we ourselves would like to have been treated. The costs of this learning were borne by the humiliation, suffering and scars of the internees we commemorate today. If we forget that, then their sufferings were in vain.

Borys Sydoruk is director of special projects for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association. For more information on the history of Canada's first national internment operations and the Ukrainian Canadian community's request for acknowledgment and restitution visit http://www.infoukes.com/history/internment/ and http://www.infoukes.com/uccla/

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