Book Description

In September 1945, Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had experienced internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment.

In Challenging Exile, Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that uprooted them from their homes, stripped them of their livelihoods and possessions, and proposed to exile them from Canada. And they analyze the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race, and rights in times of war and its aftermath.

Unfolding in a context of global conflict, sharpened borders, and racist suspicion, the story told in Challenging Exile has enduring relevance for our own troubled times.

About the Author

Eric M. Adams is a professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and has written widely on constitutional law, legal history, employment law, human rights, and legal education. He lives in Edmonton. Jordan Stanger-Ross is a professor of history at the University of Victoria and is the author of numerous works on the history of migration and race in North America. He lives in Victoria. Together, they were awarded the John T. Saywell Prize for Canadian Constitutional Legal History for their joint scholarship with the Landscapes of Injustice partnership, examining the uprooting and dispossession of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s.