Canada’s exile of Japanese Canadian citizens: A shameful 80-year anniversary few remember

Canada’s exile of Japanese Canadian citizens: A shameful 80-year anniversary few remember

In the closing weeks of 1945, months after the Second World War had ended, the Canadian cabinet enacted executive orders to banish more than 10,000 Canadians of Japanese descent to Japan, stripping many of them of Canadian citizenship in the process. At the same moment that Canada began to turn its attention to the importance of human rights in the post-war world, it contemplated a brazen rights violation at home of enormous scale and cruelty. C…