By J.L. Granatstein, August 15, 2025
One of my earliest memories is walking with my mother on College Street in downtown Toronto and seeing people celebrating. It was August 15, 1945, and, as my mother told me, the war was over because Japan had surrendered. If she mentioned atom bombs, I would not have understood what it meant, and certainly I knew nothing of the war in the Pacific.
Much has changed in the eight decades since VJ-Day. “Victory over Japan” set Canada on a course toward greater Pacific engagement, both militarily and economically. Indeed, while Canada joined both world wars largely out of allegiance to Great Britain, the final victory over the Axis forces ironically led to a weakening of those familial bonds.
With Japan’s surrender, Canada’s long-standing relationship with Britain slowly began to give way to a new strategic awareness – one increasingly oriented towards the Pacific Rim.
To better understand the transition, it’s important to examine Canada’s contributions in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War and its evolving postwar role.
The war in the Pacific had begun very badly for the Allies: the devastating Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor, the fall of Hong Kong, the losses of Malaya and Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, and Burma. The Japanese seemed unstoppable in December 1941 and for months afterward.
The beginning of the conflict created something approaching panic on the West Coast where some 22,000 Japanese Canadians lived. Most had been born in Canada but some were Japanese citizens; in fact, to Tokyo, all Japanese living abroad were citizens of Japan. Coded telegrams between Japan and its consulates in North America, intercepted by the United States military, ordered Japanese diplomatic staff to recruit spies to get information on military facilities.
After Pearl Harbor, Ottawa seized fishing vessels and began a long painful process of concentrating and moving Japanese Canadians inland. The federal government interned some 700 alleged hardliners in Northern Ontario; the rest were not interned – with permission, they could leave the BC interior if they agreed to move east. Meanwhile, the government seized their property and sold it off at fire sale prices. After the war. Ottawa deported as many Japanese Canadians as it could, some 4,000 men, women and children. The vast majority of Japanese Canadians had done nothing to merit being badly treated, but it was not until 1988 that Prime Minister Brian Mulroney’s government offered an apology and compensation.
For Canada, the defeat at Hong Kong was especially difficult to swallow. The British knew that the tiny Crown colony was indefensible, but prestige and a misjudgement of Japanese capabilities spurred them to send more troops – from Canada – to defend it. Two battalions of infantry and a brigade headquarters, numbering some 2,000 soldiers, arrived in mid-November 1941, just in time to be swallowed up in the disaster. As it turned out (after a Royal Commission investigation), the units had been half-trained, the infantry ranks filled up with even less-trained reinforcements, and their transport had ended up in the Philippines. They fought well nonetheless, suffering 290 killed and many more wounded. The survivors endured nearly four years in dreadful conditions in prison camps. To make matters even worse, a Japanese Canadian interpreter, the so-called Kamloops Kid, took great pleasure in beating and tormenting Canadian POWs. Then after the war, the British general who lost Hong Kong tried to place the blame for his egregious errors on the Canadians.
The only other involvement of Canadian soldiers against the Japanese took place when a 5,300-strong brigade made up primarily of home defence conscripts joined American troops invading Kiska in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands on August 15, 1943. After an earlier vicious battle to secure the nearby island of Attu, the Allied troops expected heavy fighting – but the Japanese had quietly withdrawn from Kiska a few weeks earlier. Friendly fire and booby traps caused the only Canadian and American casualties.
Meanwhile, two squadrons of the Royal Canadian Air Force also took part in the Kiska invasion. Squadron Leader Ken Boomer shot down a Japanese aircraft over the island in September 1942, the only confirmed RCAF kill of the campaign. But hundreds more Canadians served in RCAF and Royal Air Force squadrons in India, Ceylon, and Burma, and two RCAF transport squadrons – Nos. 435 and 436 with almost 2000 personnel – operated in the Burma campaign from the end of 1944. They faced a difficult task thanks to unforgiving terrain and primitive living conditions. Flying C-47 Dakotas, the crews had to drop supplies by parachute to soldiers fighting in the jungle or land at small airstrips.
One RCAF officer, Squadron Leader Leonard Birchall, became known as the “saviour of Ceylon” when his Catalina flying boat from No. 413 Squadron spotted a powerful Japanese fleet heading toward Ceylon at the beginning of April 1942. The Japanese shot Birchall down, but not before he sent a radio warning, giving time for the Royal Navy to get ready. Birchall spent three and a half years as a POW, suffering repeated beatings as he tried to protect his comrades.
The Royal Canadian Navy, like its sister services, mainly operated in the European theatre of the war. But the cruiser HMCS Uganda joined the British Pacific Fleet in early 1945 and served off Okinawa and Japan. After the German surrender, Ottawa decided that only volunteers could serve against Japan; every sailor on Uganda was a volunteer, but the new rules required them to volunteer once again. This led Uganda’s crew to vote to return to Canada, a major embarrassment to the RCN.
The Canadian government from 1944 initially had plans for a major force commitment to the war against Japan – eight Lancaster bomber squadrons, an infantry division, and a small naval fleet. The army contribution was to be organized, trained, and equipped in the United States and would be assigned a role in the 1946 invasion of Honshu, Japan’s main island. Everyone expected heavy casualties but the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ended the war, and the division was disbanded before its men ever left North America. The Lancasters, too, saw no action.
The final episode of the Pacific war occurred on the US Navy battleship Missouri on September 2, 1945, where the Japanese and the Allies signed the surrender document. The Canadian representative, Colonel Lawrence Moore Cosgrove, mistakenly signed in the wrong place, briefly disrupting the ceremony. A vicious conflict ended in something approaching farce.
For years V-J Day (for “Victory over Japan”) largely ended Canada’s interest in the Pacific and Southeast and Southwest Asia. The war had spurred anti-colonial agitation in the British, Dutch, and French possessions, and by 1948 India and Pakistan had become independent. Because the two countries had remained in the Commonwealth, Canadians retained some affinity for them, and Canada dutifully sent a handful officers for UN service as observers in the bitterly disputed border territory of Kashmir. In June 1950 Communist North Korea invaded South Korea, and the United Nations, taking advantage of a Russian boycott, created an American-led force to repel the North. After American urging, Canada provided naval vessels, some pilots, and an infantry brigade that spent more than two years in action, serving in a Commonwealth division. Had the Korean War not interfered, and had Beijing not intervened, Canada might have recognized Communist China in 1950. Instead, it delayed recognition for two decades.
A year after the Korean armistice and after France’s defeat in Indo-China, Ottawa provided a substantial contingent of Foreign Service and military officers for an International Control Commission, again largely in response to American pressure. The Indo-China commitment, which failed in Vietnam but worked in Cambodia and Laos, lasted through the Vietnam War. Some 200,000 refugees fled Communism in Vietnam to come to Canada, many in the period from 1979 to the early 1980s.
This influx began at last to focus Canada’s attention on Southeast Asia, helped by changes in immigration policy and soon by the arrival of hundreds of thousands of Indians and Chinese. Racial and ethnic barriers had been removed at the beginning of the 1960s and by the points system in 1967. This led to a huge number of immigrants and their offspring that are estimated in 2024 to number 1.85 million Chinese and just under 2 million Indians. Those numbers likely are higher now, but may or may not reflect students of which there have been tens of thousands recruited by colleges and universities. Those overall numbers became so high that the Liberal government began to impose restrictions in 2024 because of the impact on Canada’s housing shortage. The cuts hurt the universities and colleges, which had been charging very high tuition; no one was happy as enrolments and revenues declined.
Even more important, as the diasporas became numerous, most especially in the Toronto and Vancouver suburbs, all political parties sought candidates who could appeal to their brethren in general elections. At the same time inevitably, both China and India sought support from their immigrant groupings and sharp divisions between Chinese Communists and anti-Communists and Hindu and Sikh Indians developed. Governments in Ottawa, no matter their political stripe, looked on with remarkable passivity, permitting Beijing’s supporters to exert growing influence over almost all Chinese language media in Canada and interfere in elections to support pro-Chinese candidates. When in 2018 Canada held Meng Wanzhou of Huawei, wanted for extradition to the United States, Beijing responded by jailing two Canadians on trumped up charges. This prolonged affair soured Canada-China relations. The relationship worsened thanks to China’s continuous sabre-rattling directed at Taiwan and Beijing’s militarization of islands and sandbars in the South China Sea. Canadian security agencies view China as the nation’s “greatest counter-intelligence threat,” and Prime Minister Mark Carney painted China as a major threat both geopolitically and to the Arctic. Both nations nonetheless seem to be making efforts to restore tolerable relations.
Meanwhile, the Canada-India relationship has been marked by significant tensions in recent years.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service’s most recent annual report, released in June 2025, noted that “Canada must remain vigilant about continued foreign interference conducted by the government of India, not only within ethnic, religious and cultural communities, but also in Canada’s political system.” Carney’s gesture of inviting Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 meetings in Alberta this year might help mend the Canada–India relationship.
Diaspora politics disturb otherwise civil international relations, and it is not only Beijing and New Delhi that are to blame. Ottawa has completely failed to rein in zealots who import foreign conflicts into Canada. Similarly, it has been weak in controlling election interference by China and to exercise any control over the Chinese-language media. The rights of candidates from diaspora groups to seek election to Parliament are important and the views of diasporas deserve to be considered. Nonetheless, Canada’s interests need to prevail. They have not thus far.
Then there is trade. China and India are the most populous nations on Earth, and Canada’s trade with both is currently very small. Exports to China in 2024 were just under $30 billion and to India, $5 billion, while imports from China were approximately $88 billion and from India, just over $8 billion. Canadians do not need to agree with the politics of India or China to want to see trade increase, and our agricultural products, minerals, natural gas, and petroleum should find markets there – ensuring due consideration to risks to security and sovereignty. It will be difficult to expand trade with China so long as the Trump administration is playing its on-off tariff games with Beijing and expecting Canada to follow suit on automobiles and steel. To increase trade with India, Ottawa must work to mute Sikh extremism. Only persistence and strong efforts from government and private businesses can break into these potentially rich markets. In a real sense, much of Canada’s future economic development depends on India and China.
In late 2022, Ottawa announced its first Indo-Pacific strategy, a well-meaning but largely anodyne policy statement. It focused on competition between China and the United States and the risks it posed. At the same time, it pointed at opportunities for trade and investment in a quickly developing part of the world, and called for partnerships with other nations and to build on Canada’s membership since 2018 in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. We can only hope.
What must be noted is that while the strategy spoke sharply about the aggressiveness of Chinese policy, the condition of the Canadian Armed Forces is so poor that Canada is unable – and will be so for years – to offer anything much to allied efforts should military action become necessary to constrain Beijing. That is a sad reflection on Canada’s failure to recognize the realities of the world in the 2020s.
With the end of the Second World War on VJ-Day, Canada turned its attention to Indo-Pacific and Southeast Asia. Peacekeeping in Kashmir and Indo-China, war in Korea, and the recognition of China by Pierre Trudeau’s government all made the region’s importance clear. So too did growing concern in the 21st century about Red China’s aggressiveness toward Taiwan.
Then there is trade. With President Trump’s fixation on raising tariffs, with concern that the free trade agreement with Mexico and the United States may be changed or even cancelled, Canada must find ways to diversify its exports. Nations such as India, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, and Australia can become bigger markets for Canadian agricultural, mineral, and manufactured products and for services. But this will require a stronger diplomatic presence and a much greater effort to showcase Canadian products. Canada will not ever eliminate its American market but it can, by looking to the Indo-Pacific, diversify its trade. It must do so. We have no other choice.
J.L. Granatstein taught Canadian history for 30 years, has published many books, and was director and CEO of the Canadian War Museum. He sits on the Macdonald-Laurier Institute’s Research Advisory Board.
