In September 1945, Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had experienced internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment.

In Challenging Exile, Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that uprooted them from their homes, stripped them of their livelihoods and possessions, and proposed to exile them from Canada. And they analyze the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights in times of war and its aftermath.

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.

Challenging Exile delves into the origins, experience, and aftermath of a shameful moment in Canada’s past: the government’s attempt to exile thousands of Japanese Canadians after the Second World War.

Preface / Audrey Kobayashi

Introduction

1 Making Home

2 Contested Citizenship

3 The Cascade of Injustice

4 Choosing Wrongs

5 Fighting Dispossession

6 Conceiving Exile

7 Signing Day

8 Ordering Exile

9 At the Supreme Court of Canada

10 Shifting Ground

11 Experiencing Exile

12 Traditions in the Twilight

13 At the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council

14 Exile and the Constitution

Epilogue

Notes; Selected Bibliography; Index

Challenging Exile [is] essential reading for anyone who cares about our country’s past … The everlasting, deep mark that so many Japanese Canadian souls suffered at the hands of the government and of the Canadian people remains one of the darkest chapters in the story of this land. Eric Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross have given us a superb chronicle of those times.

The pages of this book remind us that citizenship can never be taken for granted, that racialization may raise itself above the veneer of civility at the slightest provocation, and that we need to be ever vigilant as a society of the conditions under which we may lose the very things that make our nation.

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.

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.

The culmination of the authors’ lengthy engagement with the treatment of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War, Challenging Exile is both highly empathetic and sharply analytical ... A superb contribution.

Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution is a remarkable story, beautifully and sensitively told … a monumental achievement.

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.