Frank Shears

F.G. Shears (born March 3, 1885 in London, England) was a bureaucrat who took on a prominent administrative role in the dispossession of Japanese Canadians in World War II. Shears was hired by the Secretary of State in 1940, and served as the director of the Vancouver Office of the Custodian of Enemy Property from 1942 until the closure of the office in 1952. As director, he oversaw the forced sale of Japanese Canadian assets and the payment of claims arising from Justice Henry Bird’s Royal Commission. As one of the longest-serving employees of the Custodian, Shears experienced this history from a unique perspective, privy to the decision-making of his political and bureaucratic masters, but also constantly receiving letters and appeals from the Japanese Canadians he helped to dispossess. (Source: Kimura Appendix)