Ukrainian Canadian internment
Another 80,000 were not imprisoned but were registered as "enemy aliens" and obliged to regularly report to the police and were required to carry identifying documents at all times or suffer punitive consequences.
[4] Most of the 8,600 people interned were young men apprehended while trying to cross the border into the United States to look for jobs; attempting to leave Canada was illegal.
Federal and provincial governments and private concerns benefited from the internees' labour and from the confiscation of what little wealth they had, a portion of which was left in the Bank of Canada at the end of the internment operations on June 20, 1920.
Of those interned, 109 died of various diseases and injuries sustained in the camp, six were killed while trying to escape, and some – according to Major-General Sir William Dillon Otter's final report – went insane or committed suicide[15] as a result of their confinement.
A list of the camps follows:[16] Since 1985, the organized Ukrainian-Canadian community has sought official acknowledgment for this World War I internment, conducting a campaign that underscored the moral, legal and political obligation to redress the historical wrong.
[17] The campaign, spearheaded by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (UCCLA), included the memorialization of places of internment as historic sites.
Currently there are twenty plaques and memorials across Canada commemorating the internment, including two at the locations of former concentration camps in Banff National Park.
In 1994, Yurij Luhovy and the National Film Board of Canada released a feature-length documentary about the internment operations entitled Freedom Had a Price.
On September 12, 2009, the CFWWIRF was announced formally with a notice published in The Globe and Mail describing how individuals or groups can apply for funding for commemorative, educational and cultural activities recalling Canada's first national internment operations.
[25] Construction of the Spirit Lake Camp Interpretive Centre was launched in July 2010[26] and on November 26, 2011, opened officially in a ceremony attended by the Honourable Jason Kenney, then Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, who referred to the internment operations as "a blight" on Canadian history.
The CFWWIRF's Endowment Council made the funding of this interpretive centre one of its top granting priorities, budgeting $400,000 over five years for this project.
[27] On August 22, 2014, one hundred bilingual English-French plaques were unveiled to recall the 100th anniversary of the implementation of the 1914 War Measures Act and the start of internment operations across Canada.
