The War Measures Act (French: Loi sur les mesures de guerre; 5 George V, Chap.
[5] Noting that the British House of Lords, in R v Halliday,[6] had held in 1917 that the Defence of the Realm Act 1914 possessed similar wide powers with respect to the United Kingdom, Chief Justice of Canada Sir Charles Fitzpatrick declared: It seems to me obvious that parliament intended, as the language used implies, to clothe the executive with the widest powers in time of danger.
The enlightened men who framed that section, and the members of parliament who adopted it, were providing for a very great emergency, and they must be understood to have employed words in their natural sense, and to have intended what they have said.
There is no doubt, in my opinion, that the regulation in question was passed to provide for the security and welfare of Canada and it is therefore intra vires of the statute under which it purports to be made.Canada's first national internment operations of 1914–1920 involved the internment of both genuine POWs and thousands of civilians, most of them Ukrainians who had come from western Ukrainian lands (Galicia and Northern Bukovina) then held by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Branded as "enemy aliens", they were stripped of what little wealth they had, forced to work for the profit of their jailers and subjected to other state-sanctioned censures, including disenfranchisement under the Wartime Elections Act.
A campaign begun by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association in 1985 aimed at securing official acknowledgement and symbolic restitution for what happened succeeded in 2005, following passage of the Internment of Persons of Ukrainian Origin Recognition Act,[7] which resulted in the establishment of the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund.
These enemy aliens were required to always carry identification with them and forbidden from possessing firearms, leaving the country without permission, or publishing or reading anything in a language other than English or French.
It was not until the labour shortage in Canada became dire that these interned individuals were released into the workforce again in an attempt to boost the economy and the war effort.
The rights of the provinces are not of course permanently suppressed, and their jurisdiction temporarily suspended during the federal invasion, flows afresh when the field is finally abandoned.
Although the Supreme Court of Canada gave a mixed ruling on the matter, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council declared all of them to be valid.
In 1942, its responsibilities were expanded to include the reduction of non-essential industrial activities in order to maintain minimum requirements only for civilian goods.
While the regulations were initially restricted to industries under federal jurisdictions and companies directly involved in the war effort, provision was made for the provinces to co-opt into the scheme (which all eventually did).
In 1960, the Act was amended by the Canadian Bill of Rights, in order to ensure that: In 1970, members of the Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnapped British diplomat James Cross and Quebec provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte, who was later murdered.
There was a large amount of concern about the act being used, as it was a considered to be a direct threat to civil liberties, removing rights such as habeas corpus from all Canadians.
Critics, such as Laurier LaPierre, accused Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau's move to suspend habeas corpus as more of a reaction to the separatist movement in Quebec by criminalizing it.
[31] In October 2020, Bloc Quebecois leader Yves-François Blanchet asked PM Justin Trudeau to apologize for the Canadian Government's invocation of the Act.