Heritage Minute-Ukrainian Internment in Canada During WWI

Undergraduate students in Laurentian University’s history program created a Heritage Minute that focused on the Ukrainian internment in Canada during the First World War. There are a few errors that should be noted with the video. The narrator incorrectly states that the number of Ukrainian internees was 8,579. This was actually the total number of individuals interned by the Canadian government, which included 3,100 German reservists and 800 prisoners-of-war. The remaining 4,679 were enemy aliens, the majority of them being Ukrainian. The Heritage Minute also later, inaccurately, refers to these camps as “concentration camps“ when they should be referred to as internment camps in this context. During the course of the First World War, Canada operated twenty-four internment camps from British Columbia to Nova Scotia.