Expert Q&A on post-war legal battle that changed Canadian citizenship

Eighty years ago, Canada enacted executive orders to banish more than 10,000 Canadians of Japanese descent, stripping thousands of citizenship in the process. Named a Top 100 Book of 2025 by The Hill Times and described as “essential reading for history buffs” by The Globe and Mail, a new book from University of Victoria (UVic) historian Jordan Stanger-Ross and University of Alberta legal scholar Eric M. Adams tells the untold story of Japanese Canadians facing banishment after the war and the legal battle that challenged notions of citizenship, race and rights.  

Q. You note that “the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians during the Second World War is often portrayed as one of unjust, but temporary, mass confinement.” Why has the post-war period been less studied by academics and seemed less important to the public? 

A. It makes a lot of sense, right? Dramatic events propel Canada’s entry into the Pacific War: attacks on Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong, Canadian troops taken captive, fears of attack on the Pacific coast. Canada’s response includes the uprooting, incarceration and internment of innocent people. Those are big events that deserve sustained attention. They give rise to questions that we should never stop asking. 

How do we respond to moments of crisis and fear? What forms of respect and dignity can we expect of one another in such moments? 

But the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians raises another critical question: how we unwind from conflict? The unwinding of a war or the end of crisis generates less attention than its beginnings, but in this particular history, and maybe in other similar contexts, the process of moving toward peace prompts actions of deep and enduring consequence. 

Q. How is this history particularly important to British Columbians?  

A. Talking about this history to audiences in BC, I almost always meet people with connections to the history, including non-Japanese Canadians. I’ll hear from someone who is living in a house that was owned by a Japanese Canadian in the 1930s, someone whose uncle acquired a fishing vessel, someone whose grandfather rented his ranch to be an internment site. And of course, every Japanese Canadian who lived here before the 1940s, and their descendants too, express the reverberations of these events in their lives. 

I didn’t grow up in BC and I don't have a close family connection with the uprooting. So, it's something I hadn't anticipated, but it has been remarkable seeing how close this history is to so many people here. 

Q. Can you speak to the importance of the legal challenge to exile and what we might learn from them today? 

A. Japanese Canadians challenged their dispossession and exile in court. The case reveals a legal world barely recognizable to us today. Looking back, we might imagine that it would centre upon the rights of Japanese Canadians not to be discriminated against. That is not what it is about. In the 1940s, racial discrimination was an accepted aspect of law.  

Instead, the legal battle revolved around the boundaries of executive power. What limits, if any, would the courts place on a government that claimed it was acting out of crisis? This is a question of enduring constitutional importance. Governments must have the power to protect the country. But, at the same time, we must have some rights that are not subject to compromise. 

In the 1940s, Japanese Canadians argued that citizenship had to mean something, something more than Canadian law was then willing to recognize. Decades later, their vision won out. They ultimately made profound contributions to the protections enshrined within the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the laws in place for emergencies in this country today. 

Q. Your book includes widely divergent perspectives from the 1940s—people who believed that Japanese Canadians should be expelled, and those who defended their rights to remain in Canada. How did you braid them together? 

A. We saw the history unfolding in three rooms: one, a committee room in Ottawa, where bureaucrats and politicians made critical decisions about the lives of Japanese Canadians. Meanwhile, families met around kitchen tables in internment shacks, barns and in all of the places to which Japanese Canadians were scattered. In these private spaces they weighed the futures of their families. And, finally, we considered courtrooms, where judges decided whether they would restrain the government in the aftermath of war. 

Each of these rooms was tremendously consequential for the events of exile. Eric and I were deeply invested in understanding what had had gone on in each of them. I think that the fullest picture of the era emerges from engagement across all three of those settings. 

Q. What do you hope readers take away from the book?  

A. I hope scholars come away with a new story of the 1940s and the mistreatment of Japanese Canadians, recognizing it as a history of law, of the administrative state, and of people making choices that were constrained and yet not preordained.  

I hope that members of the wider public get a sense of the lives of people uprooted from their homes. I hope that they come away from the book convinced of the importance of continuing to engage with the question of what we as Canadians owe one another, especially in times of conflict or crisis. I want the book to reinforce our commitment to the equal dignity and worth of all people. 

I hope that Japanese Canadians reading the book feel that it honours and respects their community, its complexity and diversity, and its contributions to Canadian history. Eric and I wrote Challenging Exile in the context of a research project supported by important organizations that Japanese Canadians have created since the 1940s, connecting us with hundreds of members of the community. Our gratitude for that support shapes every page of the book.

Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is available from UBC Press.