12.1 Illiberal Practices in Democratic States

Why Illiberal Practices Appear on Social 30-2

Related Issue 3 asks whether the principles of liberalism are still viable — whether a society that prizes individual rights, rule of law, and limited government can keep those principles when it is frightened. A weak answer says "Canada is a democracy, so its actions are liberal." A diploma-level answer says something harder: elections, parliaments, and courts can coexist with practices that do not reflect liberalism.

Illiberalism, in this course, is not a second country and not a synonym for fascism. It is a liberal-democratic state acting against liberal principles — especially individual rights, equality, due process, rule of law, and limited government — usually while claiming to protect security or the common good. The government still looks like a democracy. The action still has to be judged against liberalism.

Quick Answer: Ukrainian Canadian internment in the First World War, Japanese Canadian internment in the Second World War, the October 1970 use of the War Measures Act, and the USA PATRIOT Act after 11 September 2001 are core 30-2 examples. In each case supporters called the measures necessary. In each case a liberal principle was narrowed or denied.

Diploma booklets rarely ask you to cheer or boo a prime minister. They ask you to identify the principle, state the government's necessity claim, and evaluate. That three-step habit is the whole section.

A Four-Part Check for Any Source

When a cartoon, headline, or quotation lands on your desk, run the same check:

1. What threat did officials name? War, sabotage, terrorism, kidnapping, public panic.
2. What tool did they use? A statute, an Order-in-Council, an emergency regulation, a surveillance power.
3. Which liberal principle shrank? Detention without a proper individual case, collective guilt by ancestry, seizure of property, censorship, unequal treatment.
4. What happened later? Repeal, court review, apology, compensation — or silence.

Supporters of harsh measures almost always sound liberal in one narrow sense: they say the state's first duty is to protect life and order so that rights can exist at all. Critics answer with another liberal claim: a right that vanishes the moment it is inconvenient is not a right. High-scoring written responses present both claims with evidence before taking a position. That is evaluation, not indecision.

Ukrainian Canadian Internment, 1914 to 1920

When the First World War began, Parliament passed the War Measures Act (1914). Cabinet could govern by regulation over a huge range of ordinary life during "war, invasion or insurrection, real or apprehended." Immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the German Empire, and other enemy states were classed as enemy aliens. Many Ukrainians then living in Canada had come from Galicia or Bukovyna, territories inside Austria-Hungary. A farming family on the Prairies could be treated as a security file because of an empire they had left, not because a court had found them guilty of sabotage.

About 8,500 people were interned in Canadian camps between 1914 and 1920. Ukrainians were the largest single group. A much larger population — on the order of 80,000 registered enemy aliens — had to carry papers and report to the police. Internees did forced labour in places Alberta students can picture without a map: park and road work near Banff (including Castle Mountain and Cave and Basin) and Jasper, as well as camps farther east such as Kapuskasing. Property and wages were often controlled or lost. This was not a set of mass criminal trials with evidence against each person. It was category-based coercion that continued, for some, even after the 1918 armistice.

Why did many English-speaking Canadians call it necessary? Canada was at war with Austria-Hungary. Officials feared spies, attacks on railways, and unrest among unemployed "foreign" workers after the pre-war recession. Internment looked, to supporters, like common-sense security in a global war.

Why is it a 30-2 illiberalism example? Liberalism insists that the state treat persons as individuals under law. Origin, language, and former citizenship are not a substitute for evidence. Forced labour and detention without a proper finding of personal guilt violate limited government and due process. Collective punishment of a named ethnic community violates equality. The fact that Canada remained a parliamentary democracy does not erase those contradictions. In 2005 the federal government acknowledged the internment; in 2008 it established the Canadian First World War Internment Recognition Fund with community groups. Redress does not rewrite 1914. It is evidence that a liberal society can later admit an illiberal chapter.

Japanese Canadian Internment, Dispossession, and 1988 Redress

After Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, fear and racism on the British Columbia coast fused into policy. On 24 February 1942, Order-in-Council PC 1486 empowered the minister of justice to remove persons from a protected coastal zone. Roughly 22,000 Japanese Canadians — a large majority of them born in Canada or naturalized British subjects — were uprooted. Families were sent to interior "housing centres" such as New Denver, Greenwood, Slocan, and Tashme. Men were pushed into road camps. Others were shipped to sugar-beet work in Alberta and Manitoba, which is why this is not only a B.C. story for Alberta 30-2 students. A smaller number of people labelled uncooperative were held in prisoner-of-war-style camps.

The economic wound was not an accident of war. The Custodian of Enemy Property took homes, fishing boats, farms, and businesses. Much of that property was sold, often cheaply, so that a claimed "temporary" removal became dispossession. After Japan's defeat, officials pressed "repatriation" to Japan — including for people who had never lived there — and forbade return to the West Coast until 1949, four years after the fighting stopped.

Supporters at the time pointed to the Pacific war, rumours of a fifth column, and intense pressure from British Columbia politicians and newspapers. They argued that even loyal families had to move because the state could not tell "safe" from "unsafe" in a hurry. The policy did not rest on public prosecutions that proved a sabotage network among Japanese Canadians. That gap between claimed necessity and individualized evidence is exactly what 30-2 means by an illiberal practice inside a democracy.

On 22 September 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney's government concluded a redress agreement: an apology, about $21,000 to each surviving internee, a community fund, and measures affecting citizenship status for some who had been pushed out of the country. Use 1988 as an evaluation tool, not as a fairy-tale ending that cancels 1942. Redress is a liberal attempt to repair a rights violation. It does not mean the original Orders-in-Council were liberal.

If a source booklet shows a wartime headline beside a photo of a seized fishing boat, do not stop at "racism happened." Name equality before the law, property, and due process. Then steel-man the 1942 security claim in one sentence so your evaluation looks like thinking rather than a slogan.

The October Crisis and the War Measures Act, 1970

The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) had used bombs through the 1960s in a campaign for an independent, socialist Quebec. On 5 October 1970 cells kidnapped British diplomat James Cross. On 10 October they kidnapped Quebec labour minister Pierre Laporte. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, after requests from Quebec premier Robert Bourassa and Montreal mayor Jean Drapeau, proclaimed the War Measures Act on 16 October — its first peacetime use. The next day Laporte was found murdered. Troops patrolled Ottawa and Montreal. Regulations allowed arrest without the usual safeguards. About 500 people were detained; the great majority were never shown to be FLQ kidnappers and were released without charge. Cross was freed in December when several kidnappers were sent to Cuba.

Trudeau's televised "just watch me" remark, given shortly before the proclamation, is a favourite source. Supporters hear a liberal-democratic leader refusing to let terrorists dictate the state's response. They note a murdered cabinet minister, a still-captive diplomat, and what the statute called an apprehended insurrection. Critics hear a blank cheque: union organizers, artists, and separatist sympathizers swept up because emergency law replaced the need to prove an individual case.

For 30-2, both readings belong in the same paragraph. The FLQ's violence was real and was itself a denial of victims' rights. The state's reply can still be judged illiberal if it suspends due process for hundreds of people who were not the kidnappers. Peacetime Cabinet power plus mass detention is the lock-in fact. Do not import the 1982 Charter into 1970 — it did not yet exist — and do not call the episode fascist. Fascism is a distinct ideology. This unit's word is illiberal practice in a democracy.

The October Crisis is also why later governments replaced the War Measures Act with a statute that tries to keep emergency power inside tighter rails. That replacement is taught in section 12.3. Here, keep 1970 clean: real terrorism, extraordinary peacetime power, and a due-process cost paid mostly by people never tied to the kidnappings.

The USA PATRIOT Act as a Comparative Case

Social 30-2 is not a U.S. civics course, but it does expect contemporary examples from other liberal democracies. After the 11 September 2001 attacks, the U.S. Congress passed the USA PATRIOT Act (signed 26 October 2001). The statute expanded surveillance tools, delayed-notice searches, access to business records, and the reach of "material support" investigations. Supporters argued that the hijackers had exploited open societies and that intelligence agencies had failed to share information. The necessity claim was prevention: another mass-casualty attack on civilians.

From a 30-2 liberalism lens, the PATRIOT Act is illiberal to the extent that it lets the executive watch, search, or constrain people with weaker independent checks than peacetime criminal law would demand. Privacy, the idea that the state must justify intrusion before a judge, and the risk that whole communities would be treated as suspect categories are the liberal principles in play. You do not need every section number. You need the comparison: like Canadian internment and the War Measures Act, a liberal-democratic legislature chose security instruments that critics say treated rights as optional during fear.

Do not flatten the comparison. The PATRIOT Act did not recreate 1942 camps. Illiberalism is a spectrum of practices, not a single image of barbed wire. A source that shows airport screening, a no-fly list, or a national-security letter is still asking about limits on state power.

How Diploma Questions Usually Frame This

Expect three item types.

Identify: Which action failed to reflect liberalism? Look for detention without charge, ancestry-based removal, or censorship.

Perspective: Which speaker would defend the War Measures Act? Usually someone prioritizing order, survival of the state, or the rights of the kidnapped over immediate civil liberties.

Evaluate: To what extent were the measures justified? Strong answers concede the threat, name the exact right that was limited, and then judge using another example — for instance, contrasting 1970 mass arrests with later, narrower anti-terror law, or contrasting 1942 dispossession with 1988 redress.

Two common errors wreck otherwise decent papers. One is to call every strong security policy "fascist." The other is to say rights simply do not apply in wartime. Wartime does not delete liberalism as an evaluative standard. It is when the standard is hardest to keep — which is why Related Issue 3 exists.