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This oral history is from an interview conducted by the Oral History cluster of the Landscapes of Injustice project.
can I give you a big hug?
please don't say ...
Brewin, can you explain to me what an able young man like you is doing wasting your time in the CCF and on these kinds of issues?He may not have said the latter but it was certainly focused on
why are you wasting your time on the CCF because there's a lot of room for someone like you in the Liberal Party?My father's reaction to the story was polite to Mackenzie King but he basically told the story with the punch-line that Mackenzie King just didn't get it, that he was the one doing the weird things. I mean, joining a political party that didn't stand for the things that you were for was the formula for an unhappy life and to work behind the causes and issues that had a purpose, a purpose that was deep in you, that was what you did. He and others like him were going to change the world so that people like Mackenzie King weren't in government anymore. That was his attitude to the story. So I would say that he didn't suffer because of the perspective he brought to the question. Yes, his income was less but it was still perfectly comfortable. He wasn't a person who accumulated great riches but he certainly had a house and all the other attributes of a middle-class life in Toronto. His practice shifted to, sometimes, people who couldn't pay any money but he still had enough clients who could. But he was more forgetful about billing people than he was deliberately ... and certainly I've heard no stories of my father being physically threatened or verbally threatened or assaulted because of the work he did. Your mother was in support of all of that? Very much, yeah. She was very proud of it and when my father died, he died when they were living out in B.C, but we had a memorial service for him in Toronto a few months later and one of the most moving parts of the whole thing was the last row or two of this big church full of people were filled with, I call them little old Japanese-Canadian ladies. They were all there and then they came up to us afterwards and said how much they appreciated what he had done etcetera etcetera. That was the highlight. I can imagine that. Did they share stories about what, specifically, he had done or was it just a more general appreciation?
I'm not going to vote for you because you're a crazy communistbut at least I thought we were going to get the support when push comes to shove of Japanese-Canadian families but it didn't happen with the next generation partly because they lost the history. It really irritated me
every individual has got a slightly different culture and they got a slightly different ...Even, you start at the simplistic level of some are Scottish and some are English and you start writing class into it and you've got to do all the other bits and pieces that add up. So when you start taking that then what was my father's received culture? Well, it owed a lot to upper middleclass English nineteenth century and early twentieth century norms and those were heavily influenced by a number of things, not the least of which was the Anglican version of Christianity, that was important, and that had in Britain a political expression and was an important element of the formation of the labour party. There's the trade union and a whole bunch of other things. Half the bishops in the Anglican church of England at the turn of the nineteenth century to the twentieth century, half of them were members of something called the Christian Social Union which was a mild socialist organization of Christians.
well, the reason he's a socialist is because he took his religion seriously.Which this guy regarded as a bit bizarre to take religion that seriously but my father would give him points for doing that but that's he was explained to his contemporaries and I think it stands to reason. I think collectively, most of the people who were non-Japanese-Canadians who were involved in the cause that would be the starting point in their motivation. It could be also, you could reach that point in a secular way or you might be second generation religious Jew who, by the time they got there it's secular and now I think we see that all the time. The people who are humanitarian probably are second, third, or fourth generation. People who were progressive religious people and those values and stories get sent down. They may not know where the story comes from or what the Old Testament prophets were preaching about because they had never read it but it's in the genes. I hadn't really thought much about, or probably wasn't aware of that relationship between the church, especially the Anglican Church the United Church and Japanese-Canadians. I recently came across an interview that was done years and years ago that was done with Grace Tucker. It was remarkable. She spoke with such compassion and then I just did a bit more investigating and found more about her life. Did your father ever encounter her?
your father is very proud of you, blah blah blah.I have a friend or an acquaintance to this day will introduce me as Andrew Brewin's son which is now very rare. It's a strong personality in your life but obviously a positive one and one I can be proud of and, yet, the fact that I become proud of those things pulls me along. You said you spent a fair bit of time in your life trying to replicate, or follow a path that your father set. Can you think of any examples of what you did?
well, oh God, we should have talked to granddad about that stuffbut they mostly don't. But if they did, it's more to humour me more than out of real interest. Yeah, they're aware of different degrees of that particular aspect of my father's inheritance and the work that he did. How did they receive it? What are their views? Um, well I think it's told to them in a way that they receive it as a good news story. I mean, that this is something that they should be proud of. This is part of their heritage they should be proud of this, and this is the way what you should do and as a result they're all doing stuff, it isn't just my father's story, in particular with the story of Japanese-Canadians. My eldest daughter is in Ethiopia, she and her husband are working with Save the Children and other organizations to make things better for the people in Ethiopia. My son has done a lot of that kind of work. My next daughter is in theatre, very progressive. My youngest daughter is with West Coast Leaf and worked in the community and so that's who they are and so it's all part of their heritage some of which they picked up directly through stories like this. Most of them, all my kids would be aware of my father's involvement and participation in the war and see and understand that to be, very much, a good thing and see it that way. Something that they should be proud of. When I used to do research in the archives in Ottawa I'd come across the Andrew Brewin papers. Did your mother donate them? How did they get there? That's an interesting question because I looked at them too for purposes of doing my paper. I suspect that the national archives were after them even before my father died but I might be wrong about that. He retired as an MP in '79 and the national archives then was somewhat more vigorous than it is now in terms of pursuing, they may have had more money to do it or maybe their focus was a bit different then. But, getting MPs' papers, and then my father in addition to being an MP had a legal career that was also important, it would have been natural for them to take the initiative of going after them and then precisely how that was done ... I'm sure my mother would have cooperated entirely with it thinking that it was important. So, at what point the papers were actually transferred over she would have undoubtedly had to sign something off at some point.
I saw Betsey had tea with themand whatever, that kind of stuff and how they had to wait around and wait around and wait around but it's a different age. But, yeah, they were there. I probably had a lot of the other references to the case because I think they got hold of some of his law office files, so probably ... I don't know if you looked into the legal papers. Not really, it's been so long since I've been there. It's probably about ten years since I've been to the national archives. I'd have to go back and look through them. There's one final question that I have about the redress settlement. Did they come to you or ... Your father died in ... '83. When was redress? No, they wouldn't come to my father but they might have come to my mother but I don't recall. My sister Martha being in Ottawa acted, to some extent, as custodian of some of those kinds of things. I mean, she would have been a natural contact or my mother would have suggested to somebody
well, go see Martha.But, when I'm talking to her I'll ask her if she has any specific memories of that but I don't. I mean, I watched in the sense that I followed the event but I didn't participate in it or anything. What did you think of the settlement? Well, I guess I would have said if the representatives of the Japanese-Canadian community were okay with it then I would be okay with it. So in that sense I didn't judge them for accepting this level of redress and I would be understanding of it. I guess this is a bit the lawyer in me also, that I'm fully aware that damages can never compensate for what is done and there's a level of injustice that is probably unavoidable in having relatively equal compensation for everybody because everybody's hurt is different. The complexities of trying to figure out how to vary it to meet the case, I mean, we're seeing bit of that in the residential schools stuff. There was a very elaborate process for assessing those things, people make a claim and then somebody hears it and makes a determination. So I guess those are some of my thoughts at the time and that it should have eventually happened. Maybe this is the Anglican in me too, the idea that what in church or religious terms is a sacrament, an outer symbol of an inner truth, the idea of sacrament that there's something sacramental about apology and redress that is real and significant but is it adequate? It's adequate if it does the job I suppose but money can never satisfy what was done and reverse history and when it's done it's done but you have to do something.
what should we do?he might offer some thoughts but basically I think he'd be supportive. Did your mother talk about any of what happened later on in life? Oh, sure. This was a big event and things for her but it was a lot my father's role in it and her role. She knew the major players and the ones who came to the house and she might well sit in from time to time as they are talking and other times she wouldn't so she followed it intensely. She was interested in all these kinds of things and had views, had passion about them. I mean, she might express herself more passionately than my father was prone to do about the thing. She made friends quickly so I think she was, that was her relationship to the issue. Is there anything you'd like to add? No, I think you've provoked me into covering most of it and as you can see I guess I feel a little that, like everything else, like I was just complaining about my grandchildren, but in retrospect I wish I had set my father down and asked a whole bunch of probing questions, but I didn't and I can't and I'm glad you're doing the project. It will probably help me figure out a lot of ... I mean, already some of the reading and bits of pieces I've done over the years and I've learned things from. I mean, it was probably of all the things that my father did one of the most important for him of all the things he did in his career and his life. With the capacities God gave him, and the education he got, and the experience he had as a lawyer, of all of those things, all the opportunities he had to use those for human beings, for human kind, I think the work he did with the Japanese-Canadians was probably the most important of all the things he did, for him.
Did I say that?Yeah. It wasn't even answering her question. Yeah. It's an exercise in humility I think. Yeah, so where did, so was it your grandparents then, that were directly involved? My grandparents and my parents. My father was taken as a prisoner of war, he grew up in Vancouver, he was a young man when it happened. He, my father was a bit of a rebel and decided that he had no reason to go, leave his home, and when he was ordered to go, he stayed and so he was taken to Petawawa, to the prisoner of war camp there. My mother was, her family lived in Haney and they were interned in...