Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution
November 12 2025
7 – 8 pm EST. Doors at 6:30 pm
Pellan Room at Library and Archives Canada
395 Wellington Street, Ottawa, ON K1A 0N4
FREE EVENT
Join us for the launch of Challenging Exile: Japanese Canadians and the Wartime Constitution by Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross, presented by Library and Archives Canada. In September 1945, Canadian democracy faced a fundamental question of constitutional law: could citizens be expelled on the basis of race? Canada proposed exiling Japanese Canadians to Japan, a country devastated by war. Thousands who had already experienced uprooting, internment and dispossession were now at risk of banishment. Challenging Exile investigates the origins, administration, litigation and aftermath of this attempt at gross injustice and shares the stories of resilience of those who faced it.
How did Japanese Canadians navigate the challenges arrayed against them? Eric M. Adams and Jordan Stanger-Ross detail the circumstances and personalities behind the proposed exile. They follow the lives of families facing government orders that forced them from their homes, stripped their livelihoods and possessions, and deprived them of fundamental rights. They also analyze the constitutional framework of the court case in which lawyers and judges grappled with the meaning of citizenship, race and rights at a time of change in Canadian law and politics.
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. This meticulous and moving account of a shameful episode in Canada’s past tells a necessary story not only for scholars and historians of law, politics and human rights, but also for lawyers, judges and readers of Canadian history.