Online Lecture: Political Ethics and the Policy and Practice of WWI Internment in Canada

An online talk by Dr. Bohdan Kordan, Professor Emeritus, Political Studies, St. Thomas More College / University of Saskatchewan.

During WWI, some 8,579 individuals identified as enemy aliens were incarcerated in camps and forcibly put to work on Canada’s frontier. An additional 80,000 were required to register and report to authorities as a part of monitoring/surveillance system. How did this happen is only superseded by the question of why this happened, which enjoins us to consider the moral dimension of the policy and decisions that framed the experience of WWI internment in Canada.

Bio:

Dr. Bohdan Kordan is Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Studies, St. Thomas More College. Prior to his appointment at STM in 1993 he held research and teaching positions at the University of Alberta (1982-85), University of Toronto (1990-91) and MacEwan University (1988-93). The Founding Director of the Prairie Centre for the Study of Ukrainian Heritage, Professor Kordan’s current research interests include nationalism and ethnic conflict, the politics of state/minority relations, and Canadian foreign policy. His monographs include Canada and the Ukrainian Question, 1939-45: A Study in Statecraft (2001); Enemy Aliens, Prisoners of War: Internment in Canada during the Great War (2002); A Bare and Impolitic Right: Internment and Ukrainian-Canadian Redress (2004); No Free Man: Canada, the Great War and the Enemy Alien Experience (2016); and Strategic Friends: Canada-Ukraine Relations from Independence to the Euromaidan (2018).

Recorded on Wednesday, February 22, 2023, 7 PM CST.