No Free Man: Canada, the Great War, and the Enemy Alien Experience by Bohdan S. Kordan (review)

During the First World War thousands of enemy aliens were interned across the British Empire. In this book Kordan revisits the history of those enemy aliens interned in Canada which he previously explored in his 2002 book Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great War. Kordan begins his new book by noting that human rights are a passion of his. It is clear from his account of Canadian First World War internment that respect for the human rights of the internees was not always given a high priority by the Canadian government. Kordan observes that internment in Canada was a response to a fear that resident subjects of Germany and its allies were conspiring to sabotage the Canadian home front. He notes that this fear was unfounded. While this may be true, south of the border in the initially neutral United States, agents of the German government did engage in acts of sabotage against the export of military supplies to Britain and its allies. So it could be argued, contrary to Kordan, that the Canadian government was reacting to a well-founded albeit unrealised fear.

Nonetheless, Kordan shows that the actual implementation of internment in Canada often bore very little relationship to the potential threat posed by the enemy aliens. The majority were civilian non-combatants: immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Germany, and the Ottoman Empire who had neglected to acquire Canadian citizenship by naturalisation. Unnaturalised Austro-Hungarian and German males of military age were nominally military reservists. The Canadian government acted to prevent such men from leaving Canada while at the same time certain politicians, with the support of much of the press, encouraged employers to dismiss these men and replace them with unemployed Canadian nationals. Kordan shows that internment morphed from a policy focused on national security to one directed at removing thousands of destitute unemployed enemy alien men from the streets in an era when where there was no government financial support available to the unemployed. Canada was signatory to the Hague Convention which stated nonconsenting interned enemy aliens could not be forced to work. However, Kordan shows that in reality the labour of internees, regardless of their consent, was used to help fund the cost of their incarceration.

It is unfortunate that Kordan does not place the Canadian experience of First World War internment in the wider context of the British Empire. Civilian enemy aliens were also interned in Britain and elsewhere in the British Empire. Examples of inadequate living conditions and mistreatment by camp guards similar to Canada can be found in some of the Australian internment camps, while in New Zealand, as in Canada, unnaturalised Austro-Hungarian residents, albeit Dalmatians rather than Ukrainians and Poles, were forced to work in violation of the Hague Convention. So Canada was not an outlier.