Ukrainian Canadian internment

The Ukrainian Canadian internment was part of the confinement of "enemy aliens" in Canada during and for two years after the end of the First World War. It lasted from 1914 to 1920, under the terms of the War Measures Act.

Canada was at war with Austria-Hungary. Along with Austrian-Hungarian prisoners of war, about 8,000 Ukrainian men, women, and children – those of Ukrainian citizenship as well as naturalized Canadians of Ukrainian descent – were kept in twenty-four internment camps and related work sites (also known, at the time, as concentration camps).^[1] Their savings were confiscated and many had land taken while imprisoned as the land was "abandoned". Some were "paroled" from camps in 1916–17, many were put to work as unpaid workers on farms, mines, and railways, where labour was scarce. Much existing Canadian infrastructure from 1916-1917 was built by this unpaid labour.

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.

The embarrassment and trauma of internment caused many Ukrainians to change their family names, hide their imprisonment and abandon traditions due to fear of negative repercussions – causing PTSD and intergenerational trauma. In addition, some maintain that the Canadian government approved key records to be destroyed in the 1950s, leaving documentation to be based on individual family records and pleas to the local communities where the camps were located.^[2]