The wartime measures took their toll on civil liberties, with widespread censorship of the media and written publications and the arrest and detention of individuals without due process.
Others hailed from other parts of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires and were similarly detained. Conditions during the Second World War were no better. Their property was confiscated, expelled from their homes and forcibly relocated to internment camps. Despite being Canadian citizens, a significant number were deported to Japan.
The exercise of a number of these wartime powers was challenged in the courts. In the Chemicals Reference, the Court considered that the War Measures Act effectively provided the executive branch of government with law-making powers equivalent to the authority vested in Parliament.
Therefore, in the view of their Lordships, the government, to whom Parliament had delegated its powers, had significantly wide latitude in the measures it chose to take and, as a matter of statutory construction of the Act , this included the power to deport individuals even of Canadian or British nationality or strip them of their status.
Notably, Japanese immigrants became a particular target with the breakout of war on the Pacific front. The final use of the War Measures Act was also highly controversial, not least because it was invoked during peacetime.
A few days later on October 10, Pierre Laporte, the Deputy Premier of Quebec was also kidnapped and subsequently killed.
Through the board, the government eventually took full control of the Canadian economy. It established wage and price controls and set limits on rental and housing costs. It also set limits on the price of goods such as steel , timber , coal , milk and sugar. At first, the Board applied only partial limits. But this changed after , when the cost of living had increased dramatically.
The cost of living increased by It increased by only 2. Although these measures were successful in controlling wage and price increases, they also resulted in shortages of certain goods and put immense pressure on farmers and business owners.
The Defence of Canada Regulations were implemented on 3 September Any person critical of government positions could be interned without charge or trial. In one high profile case, Montreal mayor Camillien Houde was arrested at city hall in He was interned in Ontario for four years for denouncing government policies that led to conscription. About Italian Canadians and German Canadians were interned during the war.
Jewish refugees from Europe and pacifist Mennonites were also interned in Canada. See also Canada and the Holocaust. In , approximately 22, Japanese Canadians on the West Coast were interned in remote areas of interior British Columbia and east of the Rocky Mountains. The government also stripped Japanese Canadians of their property and pressured them to accept mass deportation when the war ended. All of this was made possible by the powers given to Cabinet under the War Measures Act. See also Internment of Japanese Canadians.
When the nation refused, the government appropriated the land under the War Measures Act. Despite promises that the relocation would be temporary, the reserve remained a military camp into the s. See also Ipperwash Crisis. However, emergency and transitional power legislation was in place between the end of the Second World War and the end of the Korean War. From to , for example, certain more limited powers were granted to Cabinet under an offshoot of the legislation called the Emergency Powers Act.
This was done only once, during the October Crisis. Laporte was found dead on 17 October. As authorities grappled with the crisis, the FLQ was outlawed and membership in the group became a criminal act.
Over the course of the crisis, police conducted more than 3, searches and detained people; were later released without the laying or hearing of charges, and 62 were charged. One of those arrested in Halifax was Leon Trotsky, an unknown Russian who was about to go down in history as one of the fathers of the Russian Revolution of After his month in Nova Scotia, he returned to join with Lenin and lead the Communist overthrow of the old Russian regime.
The only time it was enacted during peacetime was October when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau used it to make searches and arrests during the FLQ crisis. Under the War Measures Act, many people were arrested and held without charges on suspicion of sympathizing with the terrorists. A Country by Consent is a national history of Canada which studies the major political events that have shaped the country, presented in a cohesive, chronological narrative.
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