Canadian State Trials, Volume IV: Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939 ed. by Barry Wright, Eric Tucker, and Susan Binnie (review)

What inspired the late F. Murray Greenwood, partnered by Barry Wright, to create the “Canadian State Trials” series in 1996 were the five volumes published in 1719, editing single-case impeachment trial proceedings from between the reigns of Henry IV (1399–1413) and Anne (1702–1714). That model offered primary texts of select political cases, minus secondary commentary; the Canadian model, here in its fourth volume, has collected only secondary, topical articles, each targeting a brief (usually one decade) time period and provincial place. The English State Trials secured original case-based evidence; our Canadian series has continued to provide mainly mini-monographs narrating multiples of cases for narrow times and places. The former was entirely the work of one scholar, Thomas Salmon (1679–1767) at Cambridge; our latter project owes editorial existence to Barry Wright, Eric Tucker and Susan Binnie at Toronto, as well as to several dozen of Canada’s best legal historians. Each article tells human stories, analyses institutional systems, maps judicial procedures, assesses courtroom outcomes and attempts to contextualize anecdotal and aggregative data to determine how “typical” any case was.

In this fourth volume, Security, Dissent, and the Limits of Toleration in War and Peace, 1914–1939, we again get traditional political-legal history of the sort promoted by Professor Sir Geoffrey Elton (1921–1994) at the University of Cambridge. Forget about fading deconstruction and post-modernist assaults on positivist, empiricist, even objectivist, reconstruction of each piece of “the past.” These eleven historians narrate what can and cannot be known based solidly and persuasively on primary archival evidence. Doing legal history the old-fashioned way is reinforced by appendices focused on “archival sources and user challenges,” on “access-to-information challenges,” and transcribed “supporting documents.” Seven of the eleven articles address World War I issues; all are deeply suspicious of federal executive actions and are informed by civil libertarian sensitivities.

In the editors’ own words, “the previous volumes (Volume I, 1608–1837; Volume II, 1837–1839; Volume III, 1840–1914) examined trials for the classic political offences of treason and sedition, and looked at related security measures such as suspensions of habeas corpus, deportations, resorts to martial law, and the trials of civilians by military courts.” (3) This new volume’s time period urges a merging of such legal history topics with the “labour/le travail” events of World War I, the roaring twenties, and the Great Depression. It begins and ends with Canada going to Europe’s two wars, between parliamentary passage of the War Measures Act (22 August 1914) and the declaration of war against Germany (10 September 1939).

Eight thousand, five hundred Canadian resident immigrants were interned as prisoners of war during World War I, one in ten of the 85,000 who had to register as “enemy aliens,” reporting regularly to local police. The federal order authorizing this initiative came three weeks before the outbreak of war, followed by Canada’s declaration and Order-in-Council PC 2758 implementing the War Measures Act. Separate articles by Bohdan S. Kordan and Peter McDermott document this policy but do not give an aggregative, social history sense of the numerous work camps and their impacts on local labour and employment realities. Citizens were also subject to forced labour by the state in May 1917 when the Military Service Act created conscription, because recruitment of patriots could not keep pace with the April 1917 carnage of trench warfare at Vimy Ridge. Patricia McMahon succinctly shows how Ottawa’s Justice Department “stacked the deck” to preserve its unlimited power to delegate and avoid procedural protections, in the George Edwin Gray case (1918). Prime Minister Borden had reneged on a promise of exemptions for farmers and Gray had petitioned against Borden’s use of orders-in-council to...