Government Internment Policy, l939-l945

Examines the authoritarian implications of Canada's internment policy during WWII. Documents the legal machinery by which internments were authorized, the denial of the right of habeas corpus to internees, the policy's rationale, its legality, the release of interned Nazis during the first nine months of the war, the government's 1940 ban of the Communist Party and other organizations that resulted in the internment of communists including union activists, and the politics of the federal justice minister, Ernest Lapointe. The author also describes his impressions of Lapointe, whom he met in Ottawa as a member of a Canadian Youth Congress delegation in May 1938, and the significance of Lapointe's failure as justice minister to recommend disallowance of Quebec's Padlock Law of 1937.