National Internment Day commemorated at Vernon camp site

National Internment Day commemorated at Vernon camp site

Published 12:02 pm Monday, October 19, 2026

A memorial service will remember the victims of a dark day in Vernon’s history.

National Internment Commemoration Day, Oct. 28, will be observed by the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Thompson Okanagan Branch at the Vernon Internment Camp monument located at MacDonald Park on 27th Street. The event at 6 p.m. will feature Lawrna Myers, Project Roll Call researcher.

The camp opened on Sept. 18, 1914 and closed six years later on Feb. 20, 1920.

“This was one of the largest and longest internment camps in operation which also held civilian men, women and children,” the local Ukrainian Congress said.

The War Measures Act, enacted on Aug. 22, 1914, gave the Canadian government sweeping powers to conduct the First World War. On Oct. 28, 1914, an order-in-council provided the government with the authority to intern civilians as prisoners of war.

Categorized as “enemy aliens,” the Congress says 8,579 immigrants from the multinational Austro-Hungarian, German, and Ottoman empires and from the Kingdom of Bulgaria were held in 24 “receiving stations” and internment camps across the country.

Most of the civilian internees came from the western Ukrainian regions of Halychyna, Bukovyna and Zakarpatia and were labeled as “second class” prisoners of war.

“By acknowledging that as Canadians we sometimes fail to adhere to our highest principles, we remind ourselves that we have a shared responsibility to ensure justice for all the citizens of Canada and all the world’s peoples,” said Congress branch president Andrea Malysh.

In 2014, the UCC Internment Committee’s resolution to have Oct. 28 of every year be National Internment Commemoration Day was passed.

“If we do not educate and commemorate Canada’s first national internment operations to our Ukrainian Canadian communities, then we cannot expect the general Canadian community to know this unfortunate period of Canadian history,” the congress said.

Reflecting on how the civil liberties of so many Canadians were revoked on two subsequent occasions — during the Second World War and the 1970 October Crisis — a child survivor of the Spirit Lake internment camp in northern Quebec, Mary Manko Haskett, reflected: “What was done to us was wrong. Because no one bothered to remember or learn about the wrong that was done to us it was done to others again, and yet again. Maybe there is an even greater wrong in that.”