Fear, Hate, and Xenophobia

This photo, which was taken from across the street from where you now stand, shows soldiers of the 48th Highlanders marching into the fort a few months after the start of the First World War. At the outbreak of war, all Canada was swept up in a patriotic fervour—few places more than Toronto.
Compared to its cosmopolitan image today, the Toronto of 1914 was one of the most British places in Canada—85% of the population claimed British ancestry, and fully r112,000 of the city's residents had immigrated from Britain since 1900.¹ It was also seen by the rest of Canada as a bastion of the prudish and god-fearing social mores that defined the Victorian-era, earning it the derisive nickname 'Toronto the Good'. "In many ways, Toronto was the patriotic hub of the country," says Wayne Reeves, chief curator at the City of Toronto.
As we will see, the outsized patriotism of Torontonians and their enthusiasm for both the British Empire and the world war it was embarking upon, would have terrifying ramifications for those residents of the city who came from countries that Canada was now at war with.

In this image we see a piper leading a company of the 48th Highlanders into the camp. This photo was taken at the height of the war hysteria in October 1914. As soon as war was declared Canadians started seeing spies everywhere. Every fire, assault, or accident was blamed on enemy saboteurs. Just like in the rest of Canada, in Toronto suspicion immediately fell upon the tens of thousands who had been born in the opposed Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary—and starting that October, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria.
The War Measures Act of August 1914 officially redesignated those born in enemy nations as 'enemy aliens', creating a new legal category for them and stripping them of almost all their civil liberties and the right to due process. The government began setting up internment camps to hold those denounced as spies or traitors.

This photo shows dragoons trotting out of one of the gates of the Stanley Barracks past a guard presenting arms. The old gated building in the foreground of this picture has been replaced with a modern glass and steel one built in its footprint. In the background we can see the officers' quarters, the only part of Stanley Barracks that survives today.
As enemy alien paranoia surged across the country, the calls for calm and consideration towards them were drowned out by fear and hatred. Prime Minister Robert Borden apparently bought into these sensationalized reports enough to ask the commissioner of the Dominion Police if they had enough ammunition to protect Toronto from an armed uprising of enemy aliens—or worse, a full-scale military invasion by German and Irish immigrants from the United States.¹
The hysteria quickly turned ugly. Only days after the war started, "an unruly and vicious mob cornered a number of immigrants on the streets of Toronto, forcing them to kneel and kiss the Union Jack."²
Many employers began firing the enemy aliens in their employ; this included everyone from factory workers and hotel waiters to university professors and city administrators. Many of those fired were working class men who were destitute and essentially unemployable. The government responded by beginning to send destitute enemy aliens to internment camps.

Three officers on horseback pose for a photo in front of the Coliseum building at the Canadian National Exhibition. Today that building has been replaced by Exhibition Place.
Stanley Barracks was established here in 1840-1, replacing Fort York as the main military base in Toronto. The surrounding area was made a military reserve and preserved from development as Toronto grew around it. Stanley Barracks only occupied a small part of the reserve, so Toronto began using these grounds to hold the Canadian National Exhibition (CNE) starting in 1879.
The exhibition has been held ever since at the end of August and over the Labour Day weekend. It's the largest fair in Canada and one of the most popular events on Toronto's social calendar. Around the early 1900s, grand permanent exhibition buildings, like the Coliseum you see in this photo, were erected all across these grounds.
During the First World War the military presence at Stanley Barracks grew gigantically, and the military took over the CNE grounds, turning many of its buildings into barracks and training grounds. By the end of 1914 some 4,500 soldiers were quartered at the CNE, rising to 10,000 a year later.¹

This photo shows a gun team of the Royal Canadian Dragoons on the grounds of the Stanley Barracks. In the background you can see the orderly room, which once stood roughly where the gates to Stanley Barracks are today. The huge military base here made it an obvious choice for Toronto's internment station: There was high security, no shortage of guards, and it was easy to supply. Troops began preparing one of the barracks buildings to start accepting internees in September 1914.
The privates' barracks on the fort's west side was chosen for the internment station and set up to hold 90 internees. Preparations took some time as a barbed wire enclosure was erected around the block and an adjacent "Prisoner Yard," and metal bars placed on the block's windows. The first German reservist was sent there on September 7, though the camp would take some time yet to be ready.¹

In this photo we see soldiers posing in winter uniforms outside the officers' quarters just a year before the war started.
Just a short distance from here the prisoners were housed in the privates' quarters of the West Block, which no longer stands today. The internees slept on cots spaced four feet apart in a large barracks room. They wore whatever clothing they were wearing when they were arrested, and were later given some additional clothes, especially for winter. Their food was supposed to be on par with that served to the soldiers garrisoned at the barracks, meaning they ate reasonably well. At this station they were not expected to work and generally just bided their time until transferred to another station.
As this was a huge military base, guards were not in short supply, and a new unit was rotated in every three weeks. There do not seem to be many reports of prisoner abuse—very much unlike the remote forced labour camps the second-class internees were destined for.
However, the internees had all their money and valuables confiscated upon internment. Around the end of 1915 thousands of dollars' worth of confiscated property was stolen. An investigation was launched but, "no one was charged in the matter as no records could be found."¹ The internees had no recourse for this theft.

We have come to the edge of the "prison yard" established for the internees roughly around this spot. In this image you can see around two dozen men milling about aimlessly behind the barbed wire fence. They appear to be in the clothing they wore when they were picked up off the street: One who is resting his foot on a bench looks like he is wearing a tie.
In most cases, the enemy aliens who found themselves in this camp were just going about their day when they were arrested. All it could take was a piece of bad luck or a chance encounter to lead to their abrupt disappearance into an opaque and uncaring camp system—sometimes for many years.
There were many episodes that illustrated the seemingly arbitrary and random way people came to be imprisoned here.
On a number of embarrassing occasions, citizens from Allied countries were interned by accident. A group of Russian Poles was arrested in Toronto and the court interpreter insisted they were Austrians because he said he could speak Russian and Polish, and he couldn't understand what the Poles were saying.
It turned out the interpreter could not actually speak Russian or Polish—he had been hired because he was British, and most of those who could speak those languages were enemy aliens and had been fired from their jobs. The furious Russian consul upbraided the Canadian foreign office, demanding they hire real translators: "a braying ass would do just as well in the position."¹

In this photo we see a handful of internees in the prison yard staring back at the photographer through the barbed wire. Being imprisoned in Stanley Barracks was a grinding and depressing experience. It was made all the worse because most of these men saw the governments of the enemy nations as oppressive foreign occupiers. Now they were being persecuted for the crime of being born under regimes that they had often come to Canada to flee.
The kinds of people interned were usually described in the press simply as "Germans," or "Austrians," but this flattens distinctions. This was most notably the case with the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which contained a dozen different nationalities that were all so well-established that today each has their own independent nation-state.
This was also true of the Turkish-dominated Ottoman Empire. Though rapidly shrinking, by 1914 the Ottomans didn't just rule modern Turkey, but parts of the European Balkans and most of the Middle East. Under their domination were many different nationalities who chafed under Ottoman rule.
Over the course of the war the Canadian government claimed to have interned 205 people identified as Turkish.¹ However, relatively few were ethnic Turks. Most were actually Armenians or Alevi Kurds who had immigrated from Ottoman territories to Brantford, Ontario. The Ottoman Empire's genocide of the Armenians in 1915 illustrates the profound unfairness of Canada's policy of categorizing all peoples from enemy countries as enemy aliens.

Here we see riders of the Royal Canadian Dragoons doing the "Extended 4s" manoeuvre during a musical ride.
After two years of war, Canada was running out of men. They needed more labourers on the home front to work in strategic industries—jobs that could be done by the internees. Canada also desperately needed the hundreds of soldiers guarding the internees in France, where they could replace the tens of thousands of dead and wounded.
Over the course of 1916 the government began paroling the "non-dangerous" prisoners to go work in strategic industries. Stanley Barracks gradually emptied as arrests declined. Those few prisoners who were deemed "dangerous" were sent to a small number of remote camps.
The freed internees were not welcomed back into society. The patriotic fervour that led so many Torontonians to suspect their foreign neighbours of being spies or saboteurs, became hardened and embittered by the long years of war.
During the Conscription Crisis of 1917, many loudly argued that if Canadian men were being conscripted into the army, then enemy aliens should be conscripted to forced labour camps. The Wartime Elections Act of 1917 stripped voting rights from all enemy aliens—controversially even from naturalized citizens.
For many, this did not go far enough. Angry veterans returned from the war, raided Toronto businesses that employed enemy aliens, rounding them up and demanding they be interned. In August 1918, the military struggled to restore order as 200 veterans and thousands of sympathizers went on a two day rampage, destroying foreign businesses and beating up enemy aliens they found. The City of Toronto, along with many other organizations, passed resolutions demanding the deportation of all enemy aliens after the war.¹