No Place Like Home: Enemy Alien Internment in Canada During the Great War

No Place Like Home chronicles a little-known episode in Canada’s national history: when internment was first employed during the Great War under the War Measures Act. Highlighting the problem of immigrant fit and belonging, Bohdan Kordan shows how legal, political, and cultural frameworks modelled an understanding of the role and place of immigrants originating from enemy lands and how, amid the economic, social, and political uncertainties of war, internment as an instrument of security policy and a political choice altered the lives of thousands of innocent people. No Place Like Home brings to the fore new perspectives on both Canadian internment and the role and responsibility of government in war. Focusing on the status of enemy aliens and the blurring of the military/civilian distinction, the book also takes a broader social view of the period and offers a critical assessment of the various camp experiences. Kordan articulates how internment, truly known only to those who endured it, can still have deeper meaning as shared history and enlists compelling reasons to comprehend and honour it.

Bohdan S. Kordan is professor emeritus in the Department of Political Studies at St Thomas More College, University of Saskatchewan, and the co-author of Canada and the Ukrainian Crisis.