Challenging Exile
Challenging Exile
Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution
In September 1945, Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question of constitutional law: Could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had already experienced uprooting, internment, and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. Challenging Exile investigates the origins, administration, litigation, and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice, and shares the stories of resilience of those who faced it.
How did Japanese Canadians navigate the challenges arrayed against them? Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the proposed exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that forced them from their homes, stripped their livelihoods and possessions, and deprived them of fundamental rights. And they analyze the constitutional framework of the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights at a time of change in Canadian law and politics.
Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders, and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times.
This meticulous and moving account of a shameful episode in Canada’s past tells a necessary story not only for scholars and historians of law, politics, and human rights, but also for lawyers, judges, and readers of Canadian history.
The culmination of the authors’ lengthy engagement with the treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after WWII, Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is both highly empathetic and sharply analytical; moving without ever being maudlin, sensationalist, or excessive. A superb contribution.
Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is a remarkable story, beautifully and sensitively told…a monumental achievement.
Eric M. Adams is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and has written widely on constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights, and legal education. He lives in Edmonton. Jordan Stanger-Ross is a professor of history at the University of Victoria and is the author of numerous works on the history of migration and race in North America. He lives in Victoria. Together, they were awarded the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for their joint scholarship with the Landscapes of Injustice partnership, examining the uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s.
After Redress
Japanese Canadian and Indigenous Struggles for Justice
Edited by Kirsten Emiko McAllister and Mona Oikawa
