FOR THE RECORD: Plaque recalls Canadian government's ruthless political abuse of "enemy aliens" (08/08/99)

FOR THE RECORD

Plaque recalls Canadian government's ruthless political abuse of "enemy aliens"

by Dr. Paul F. Thomas

The plaque unveiled in Victoria today is the 11th established to date to recall the ruthless political abuse by the Canadian government of 80,000 Ukrainian Canadians, wrongly labelled as "enemy aliens" at the outbreak of World War I.

Of that number, 5,500 persons were sent to concentration camps (to use the official government term) from the outbreak of the war until 1920 - two years beyond that war.

During that time-interval, the Canadian government established 26 concentration camps across the country. Eight of these camps were in British Columbia, namely at Nanaimo, Vernon, Moro Lake, Revelstoke, Monashee, Edgewood, Fernie/Morrissey and Field. Our Victoria plaque is the third one to be established in British Columbia, the other two having been unveiled in Nanaimo in May 1997 and in Vernon in June 1997.

Today being a Sunday, perhaps you will forgive me if I plagiarize the scriptures and misquote St. Paul when he says: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against powers and principalities, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, and against hidden agendas in high places."

These hidden agendas have already been documented and reported at great length on previous occasions, so I'll just speak of certain selected aspects at this time.

The official problem facing the Ukrainian Canadians during World War I, was that they had had the misfortune of having been technically required to obtain Austrian passports prior to their coming to Canada.

Before I elaborate on what that meant for Ukrainian immigrants, let me give you a personal example of what is meant by a technical passport misfortune. A number of years ago I was involved with some field work in Africa. A portion of my work required that I fly to Morocco from Ghana. To do so required a number of flight changes along the coast of West Africa, namely from Accra to Abijan, Abijan to Dakar, then Dakar to Casablanca. My flights had been prepaid and confirmed. I managed to leave Accra, the capital of Ghana, via West African Airlines as planned; but when I got to Abijan, the capital of Ivory Coast, I was informed that my connecting flight to Dakar had been cancelled. Furthermore, because I had no on-going connecting flight, I could no longer be regarded as being in transit. Not being in transit, and without a visa for the Ivory Coast which I had no intention of visiting, I was therefore declared to be an alien. I was consequently arrested and thrown into jail. After spending two days in jail, I learned from other prisoners that West African Airlines was notorious for running a milking-machine operation. By means of this operation, scheduled flights would be cancelled for the express purpose of redefining travellers as aliens, from whom bribes could then be extracted before travel could be resumed. The situation at Abijan airport was so flagrant that about two years ago, the U.S. government declared it to be off- limits to all American citizens.

By the same token, it should be indicated that the Canadian immigration operation had at heart interests other than those of the immigrants. The actions of the Canadian government in enticing peasants to Canada were actually in violation of an Austrian law passed in 1897 to protect the economic interests of wealthy Austrians who had discovered a good thing, namely the value of dirt-cheap Ukrainian labor.

The Ukrainian immigrants from the 1890s onwards, had not imposed themselves on Canada, but had come at the express invitation of the Canadian government. These Ukrainian immigrants were not Austrians but a subjugated people - exploited and pauperized by their imperial overseers. Their socio-economic reality was such that normally they would not be wasting scarce money on a passport. But such was the requirement for traveling abroad. The only passports available to them were Austrian, simply because they did not have a mother country of their own that could give them Ukrainian passports.

Prior to World War I, Ukrainians were people without a nation. Canada, on the other hand, was a nation without people. Halychyna and Bukovina - the largest and agriculturally best-endowed of the Austrian provinces - were also the poorest provinces of old Austria. They were also the poorest regions in all of Europe, with a per capita income of $38 per year. This poverty was not due to a lack of resources; for the soils were among the best in Europe. The reasons were political and social. Three million Ukrainian peasants toiling as near-serfs, in a seriously overpopulated region, were required to support the decadent and feudal lifestyle of 500,000 Austrian bureaucrats who saw fit to reinvest the square root of zero into local economic development. The Ukrainian ethnographic territories were being bled dry with 50,000 persons a year dying from malnutrition.

The Canadian authorities knew that such people did not consider themselves to be Austrian, and sent out land agents to steal some of this dirt-cheap Ukrainian labor for Canada. Each agent received $5 for every family that he could lure to Canada - a sum that would be $500 to today's. Lured by fantastic stories of streets paved with gold, 171,000 Ukrainians entered Canada between 1896 and 1914. In coming, they left behind most of their worldly belongings, their soil, their friends and their culture. In exchange, they were to be greeted with isolation and social derision.

The Canadian establishment vitally needed their backbreaking labor to develop the national infrastructure in agriculture, mining, logging, industry and transportation. But their presence was not desired; for the sight of illiterate peasants in sheepskin coats, reeking of garlic, was somehow perceived as a threat to English civilization.

Dirt-cheap Ukrainian labor was exploited in different ways across the different regions of Canada.

The way it was exploited in the Nanaimo coal mines of British Columbia is typical of the shadow history of Canadian labor relations. In the first decade of this century, the coal mines that had been established by the Dunsmuir family of robber-barons had become the most dangerous in the world, with a death rate three to four times the average for the British Empire. The refusal of management to adopt safety measures to reduce the risk of gas-explosions, precipitated a two-year strike between 1912 and 1914, when 7,000 Vancouver Island coal miners refused to work.

After these coal miners lost that strike, management continued its policy of hiring East European immigrants, including Ukrainians from Austria, as such persons, being illiterate, were easier to cheat when payday rolled around. They were also less likely to protest dangerous working conditions and would work for less, so that wages could be driven down by management. Most importantly, not knowing English they would be less likely to get involved with unionization and the drive for safer working conditions.

In other words, the Ukrainian immigrants were perfect tools for management's use of divide-and-conquer tactics against the labor force at large. [And it was similar, anti-union tactics in the Sudbury region of Ontario and elsewhere, that later induced thousands of Ukrainians to become communist supporters during the Great Depression - as we well know from the memoirs of the late John Kolasky.] The other miners, of course, vociferously resented the East Europeans - and that was exactly what management wanted.

Once the war had broken out, management actually attained a small measure of popularity with the Anglophone workers by first setting up and then supporting demands that the East Europeans be imprisoned as aliens. As a result, mining costs could be reduced, because management was now able to use alien prisoners to work for free - or, at most, at 5 percent of their former wages. This idea of using free slave-labor, at a time of wartime labor shortages rapidly spread across the country.

With the passage of Canada's first War Measures Act in 1914, 80,000 Ukrainian Canadians, whether naturalized or not, were forced to register themselves as "enemy aliens," to report to the Dominion Police on a regular basis and to pay money to have their ID cards stamped (so as to provide revenue to Ottawa).

Five and a half thousand of them - many of them potential labor radicals and therefore potential troublemakers - were interned in concentration camps for use as forced labor. Ottawa had already confiscated their personal property. Now, the government was in effect confiscating their earnings. To this very day, no redress for either confiscation has ever been obtained from the Canadian government despite repeated, pre-election promises to the contrary, Nor has any official apology even been forthcoming.

The Canadian government, knew of course, that Ukrainians were not Austrians, because the Austrian consular officers in Canada were very hostile to Ukrainians who had left Austria. Ottawa knew that Ukrainians were a stateless people and exploited the situation accordingly; therefore it felt free to treat them like stray dogs without an owner.

In essence, Ukrainians were not allowed to be Canadians. Nor were they allowed to have a Ukrainian identity- even when 10,000 of them enlisted in the Canadian Armed Forces.

This double-bind, in my view, was the most serious crime committed against the early Ukrainian diaspora in Canada; for in effect it constituted a form of cultural genocide that was to have very tragic consequences from 1914 onwards.

This shameful episode in Canadian history is also an important historical symbol; for it represents perhaps the first fatal sip taken from the chalice of tragedy, from which Ukrainians were forced to drink in the 20th century.

For in the present century, the region of Ukraine has been a principal killing field in two world wars. It has also experienced two civil wars, three genocidal famines and the purging hand of Joseph Stalin. As a consequence, 25 million Ukrainians have died unnatural deaths in this century alone.

And what about the epic catastrophes of earlier centuries? What shall we say of the Mongol destruction of Kyivan Rus', the Polish-Kozak wars, the Swedish deluge, and the eradication of the Kozak Hetmanate in 1784. All of these events occurred at times when more western nations were taking great strides in freedom and economic development. What is the point to all this tragic history? Or is there any point?

I would submit that this question can not be answered without reference to metahistory. Metahistory refers to processes as yet outside the field of vision, interest and methods of materialistic science. These processes exist in other dimensions and time-streams that are sometimes discernible as history when they intersect with our own limited plane of consciousness. Time does not permit me to elaborate, but I would refer you to the work of Daniel Andreev. Andreev was trained as a die-hard Russian Marxist-Leninist, but was thrown into the gulag for 25 years, for reporting his spiritual visions of "Heavenly Rus'," where he saw the hidden workings of the collective Ukrainian folk-soul and its place in the world-culture of the future.

We are all members of that folk-soul and will partake of its destiny, which will not always be tragic. The past tragedies having been necessary so that other parts of the divine plan for this planet might be fulfilled.

In the meantime, we must always be appreciative of the tangible historical record that is already in our possession. But for the sacrifices of others in the past, we would not have what we have or BE what we are today.

In preparing this talk about the internment operations of 1914, the word "interment" always kept popping into my mind. Interment means burial. Ukrainian Canadian culture and consciousness was not interred by the 1914 internment operation. And it never will be interred as long as we try - through our thoughts, words and actions - to redeem the humiliation, suffering and scars of the internees we commemorate today. The Ukrainian Canadian experience is a necessary petal in the flower of the greater, collective Ukrainian folk-soul. If we forget that, then the sufferings of the internees will have been in vain.

But as long as we remember, the Ukrainian folk-soul will continue to blossom, until its destiny for the present epoch is fulfilled, and its fragrance once again penetrates world culture. In the words of Taras Shevchenko, "Ukraine [and he meant spiritual rather than political Ukraine] is the stone that the builders rejected, but the time is coming when it will become the head of the corner."

God bless you all and thank you!

Dr. Paul F. Thomas is professor of both political geography and education at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. He has recently authored: "The Trial of J.V. Stalin: Exercises in Critical Reasoning," published by the Ukrainian Academy of Arts and Sciences (Canada). The text above was delivered as the keynote speech at the unveiling of a commemorative plaque in Victoria on July 11.

| Home Page |