In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence - Ukrainian Canadian Civil ...

In Fear of the Barbed Wire Fence
sent to work camps in Canada’s hinterlands, to places like Kapuskasing,
Ontario, Spirit Lake, Quebec [25], Castle Mountain or Jasper, Alberta and
Fernie or Morrissey, British Columbia. [26]
Canada’s New Detention Camp
The four hundred alien enemies who were transferred from
Fort Henry are now safely installed in their new quarters.
Kapuskasing Camp is the largest of any of the Canadian detention
camps and is said to be like a band of steel, escape being the next
thing to an impossibility. The camp is located on the National
Transcontinental line, beyond McPherson, but the train service is
for those carrying proper credentials only. As to anyone riding the
bumpers that is also impossible and as to anyone walking away
there is no place to go, as there are no settlements east, west, north
or south for many miles, and a man would have little chance of
getting to a far-away settlement. The camp has its schools, stores,
home and its own churches, which fact shows the gigantic nature
of it.
- Pembroke Standard, 30 May 1917, page 1
Obliged to work, exploited labour
Internees were obliged not only to construct the very camps in which
they were immured but also to work on road-building, land-clearing,
woodcutting and railway construction projects (see Document X, page 159).
[27] By November 1915 it was being reported that some 5,000 “enemy
aliens” were interned at different camps across Canada, working for the state
and performing labour “which is computed at $1,500,000 a year,” principally
consisting of clearing land for experimental farms in northern Ontario and
Quebec and in western Canada’s national parks. [28]
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