Horgan and his government have an opportunity to acknowledge and set right this historical blight. We hope Horgan’s omission, which has deeply offended Japanese Canadians, does not indicate that he doesn’t take their concerns seriously. BC premier Byron Johnson refused to allow Japanese Canadians to return to the coast until April 1949. Today, 60 per cent of the community resides outside the province. They also enabled the mass dispossession of all property of Japanese Canadians without compensation.Īfter the war, BC legislators demanded that Japanese Canadians be sent to Japan, a country most had never seen, or dispersed across the country. They separated men from their wives, splitting up families, refused to pay for the education of Japanese Canadian children in the camps and caused trauma that echoes across generations. Security Commission that supervised the uprooting of Japanese Canadians and ordered the provincial police to round up the community and to patrol the incarceration camps throughout the province. The BC government appointed Winch, Pearson and Maitland to the advisory committee to the B.C. This despite the fact that the army and RCMP did not believe that Japanese Canadians were a security risk. Many in the federal government didn’t buy the government’s claims that Japanese Canadian were spies, but the BC delegation persisted and ultimately succeeded.īC opposition leader Harold Winch and Hart together called MP Ian Mackenzie, a well-known racist, in February, 1942, to demand that all Japanese Canadians be detained. Pearson was sent to Ottawa in January 1942 to demand Japanese Canadians be uprooted. premier John Hart, along with his attorney general Royal Maitland, a notorious racist who deemed Japanese Canadians “a menace to Canada”, were among the first to go to Ottawa to demand that Japanese Canadians be removed from their homes and forcibly relocated. Those recommendations included the creation of an independent body to combat racism.īritish Columbian governments and officials played a major role in the incarceration and dispossession of Japanese Canadians, and in other racist actions over the years, including passing 170 anti-Asian laws from 1895-1950 that seriously impacted the Japanese Canadian community. Horgan’s omission is puzzling when his government is currently in reparation discussions with the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) based on a brief (partially funded by the BC government) submitted last November. Horgan mentioned the Chinese head tax and the Komagata Maru incident that highlighted discrimination against immigrantion from India.īut he failed to mention Japanese Canadians or the central role of the BC government in uprooting, incarcerating and exiling 22,000 Japanese Canadians between 19, stripping them of their homes, possessions and businesses.Ĭanadians have already deemed this episode, initiated and carried out by the province together with the federal government, one of the most blatant examples of state-initiated racism in our history. Premier John Horgan began a June 3rd media conference with a statement about racism and the “blemishes” on BC’s history.
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