You should probably sell your farm, the United Church minister told Tokusaburo and Yoshi Ooto.

The couple had lived in British Columbia for nearly 40 years. They, along with their daughter, son-in-law and grandkids, made their living on their seven-acre farm growing fruit and berries in Haney — present-day Maple Ridge.

That was before the Second World War though, and things were about to change.

Why it matters: Anti-Japanese sentiment in the Second World War led to thousands of Canadian citizens or immigrants of Japanese descent being displaced or put in internment camps.

In February 1942, the Canadian government passed an order-in-council to remove all people of Japanese ancestry from within 100 miles of the B.C. coast.

It was a couple months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and Canada was afraid it was next.

It didn’t matter that the Ootos were naturalized citizens, or that their children and grandchildren were born in Canada. It also didn’t matter that neither the RCMP or top-ranking military officials were concerned about Japanese Canadians’ loyalties.

They had to leave — either for internment and work camps in B.C. and Ontario, or for sugar beet farms in Manitoba and Alberta.

The federal government told Japanese Canadians their land and property would be held in trust, but the church minister told the Ooto family the war would probably last another four or five years. They should sell the farm rather than let it be confiscated, he advised.

There wasn’t much time to put the farm on the market. Tokusaburo settled for $2,500 (about $46,850 in 2025 dollars, according to the Bank of Canada’s calculator) for his business and land, wrote Art Miki in his memoir, Gaman — Perseverance.

The author, who is the Ooto’s grandson, was five-years-old when his family and grandparents boarded a cramped train bound for Manitoba.

Tokusaburo would never see his farm again.

The beet farmers

Manitoba’s sugar industry had a problem in the early 1940s. The federal government, its war economy in full swing, wanted to maximize sugar production but farmers were reluctant. Sugar beet prices were low and labour was short.

“Prior to the advent of mechanization, sugar beet production was a large consumer of hand labour,” wrote John Friesen in his 1962 geographical study of the Manitoba sugar beet industry.

“As much as 70 to 80 hours of hand labour were required to produce one acre of sugar beets.”

That included hoeing, thinning and weeding in spring and chopping the tops off beets and loading them at harvest—though at the beginning of the war, a mechanical loader was available.

The Manitoba Sugar Beet Growers Association approached the B.C. Security Commission (BCSC), which was charged with moving Japanese-Canadians out of the exclusion zone, wrote Louis Dion in a 1991 thesis.

The association suggested that Japanese-Canadian families with agricultural experience could fill the labour gap on Manitoba beet farms.

While the security commission initially suggested a trial run with 20 to 25 families, that strategy soon dissolved in the haste to resettle Japanese-Canadians. The first 20 families arrived in Winnipeg in April of 1942. Within a week, 44 families had been sent, Dion wrote.

For Miki’s family, traveling to Manitoba meant a chance to stay together.

“My mother was pregnant at the time, and if you went to an internment camp, the families were separated,” Miki said in an interview. “The men were usually taken away to work camps in the interior of B.C.”

His parents, siblings and grandparents arrived in Manitoba in May 1942, where they were paired with the Lemoine family, who farmed near Ste. Agathe, a French-Canadian community south of Winnipeg.

“The first we lived in a house out in the field,” Miki said. “Unfortunately, the houses were not very well insulated. There was no water or electricity and it was really cold.”

The next year, the family moved into a house in Ste. Agathe.

While the security commission had told farmers they were required to provide good housing and sanitation, the hasty manner in which the families arrived and the chaotic nature of the entire enterprise meant guidelines were rarely enforced.

At a Headingly farm, four families were housed in a converted cattle barn.

“The barn-house was dirty and insulated with manure piled to the windowsills,” Dion said.

The work was hard — harder than berry farming, Miki said. For their efforts, his family members were paid 25 cents an hour, the equivalent of $4.68 today.

Hard times

Poor weather plagued the harvest of 1942 and by October, 100,000 tons of an expected 130,000-ton harvest were still in the fields, Dion wrote. Growers brought in more labourers from schools and Winnipeg to harvest the crop, but for every acre these workers picked, the Japanese-Canadian families lost wages.

The families were expected to pay for their living expenses from their wages, but it became clear that the seasonal work wasn’t going to be sufficient to live on. The security commission was forced to look for winter employment for the Japanese-Canadians.

By June 1943, 23 per cent of the families required financial aid to meet their daily needs.

“Expenditures beyond food, shelter, heating and clothing bankrupted many families,” Dion wrote.

Faced with poor living conditions and financial ruin, Japanese-Canadians began to filter into Winnipeg, despite many lacking permission to do so, looking for better work and housing.

This was the eventual fate of Miki’s family. Proceeds from the sale of their farm were spent keeping the family afloat. Eventually, his father got permission to work in Winnipeg and took a job as a machinist.

“The Japanese had to pay for their own internment,” Miki said.

When the government eventually sold the Japanese-Canadians’ land, any expenses for the families’ removal from the province were deducted from the revenue.

“You ended up paying for being incarcerated in a sense,” said Miki. “Most Japanese ended up with nothing.”

The aftermath

Japanese-Canadians hadn’t been treated as equals before the war. The population, which was concentrated on Canada’s West Coast, was largely barred from voting by B.C. law, a rule upheld by the federal government.

When they were relocated from B.C., Japanese-Canadians technically gained the right to vote, but the federal government quickly closed that loophole, according to an Elections Canada article. They did not unconditionally gain the right to vote until 1948.

In Manitoba, while a group of Japanese-Canadian community advocates negotiated better wages for those working on beet farms, families continued to trickle into Winnipeg in search of better living conditions, but were often met with suspicion.

“Getting a job was difficult,” Miki said. “You have to remember that the Japanese, a lot of them, couldn’t go into the professions.”

Pre-war, he noted, they couldn’t become engineers, lawyers or teachers in B.C., and most had work in the fishing, farming or lumber industry.

In Manitoba to stay

Most Japanese-Canadians weren’t able to go back to B.C. after the war.

The Miki family settled in East Kildonan, then a predominantly Mennonite community and not part of the City of Winnipeg. They got busy getting back on their feet. Miki’s mother, who had never worked outside the home before, got a job in a tannery, and both parents worked long hours. Neither spoke about their forcible relocation or being treated as traitors in their own country, he recalled.

“I think it was humiliation they had to face,” he said.

“I know that in my community, many of the younger people found out after, once we got into the redress movement and the apology and so on. But up to then, they didn’t know.”

Japanese-Canadians kept their heads down and tried to blend in, Miki said.

“I mean, I don’t speak Japanese. That was discouraged, after to even be Japanese, never mind speak it,” he said. “We grew up thinking we’ve got to be like other people, and so you begin to lose the feeling of culture and who you are.”

Redress

In a September 1988 news photo, Art Miki sits beside Brian Mulroney, looking on as the then-prime minister signs an agreement apologizing for the wrong done to Japanese-Canadians and providing $300 million in financial redress.

Miki called it “a settlement that heals,” CBC reported in a 2018 article.

He’d become an elementary school teacher and principal, a community leader, and as president of the National Association of Japanese Canadians a leader of the movement to seek redress.

He pointed to the sacrifices his parents’ generation had made to ensure their kids went to school and to instill the importance of education in their kids. A very high proportion of Japanese-Canadians are now university graduates, he noted.

“The Japanese community has done well,” Miki said.

The end of Manitoba sugar beets

In 1997, Rogers Sugar announced the closure of its Winnipeg plant, which had been in operation since 1940. The Winnipeg plant had sold more than half of its 50,000-tonne production into the lucrative U.S. market until that country set a 22,000-tonne quota on sugar imports. The company was also facing greater domestic condition.

Manitoba hasn’t produced sugar in more than 20 years.

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“This tentative agreement is subject to a ratification vote that will be held next week,” Rogers Sugar Inc. said in a statement today.

The workers walked off the job on Sept. 28 after, “the Company was proposing a Collective Agreement, with items that were brought up by the membership, as non-starters,” said union Public and Private Workers of Canada Local 8, which represents the workers, in a Sept. 29 news release.

The statement from Rogers contained no details as to what the tentative agreement contained.

In September, the union said it would not entertain “continuous shifting” and running the refinery 24 hours a day, seven days a week. A Sept. 25 news release said the union was also seeking increases in benefits and protection from inflation and rising costs of living among other demands.

The strike, which sparked sugar shortages for businesses like bakeries western Canadian grocery stores, led the Alberta Sugar Beet Growers to call for a national domestic sugar policy to shift focus to home-grown sugar beet production.

The group said its growers produce only eight per cent of the sugar sold in Canada, while the remainder is imported cane sugar. The goal of a domestic sugar policy, as laid out by the Alberta group and its national counterpart, the Canadian Sugar Beet Growers Association, would be to double sugar beets’ market foothold to 16 per cent of national sugar consumption. This would drive investment in refineries and open new grower opportunities.

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The Alberta Sugar Beet Growers want a national domestic sugar policy, which the organization says could lay the foundation for resurgence in the sector.

Such a policy would regulate the amount of sugar imported into Canada from cane sugar-producing countries like Brazil and India. That would shift focus to home-grown sugar beet production and processing.

“We’re the only G7 country that does not have a domestic sugar policy,” said Jennifer Crowson, the grower group’s executive director. “A sugar policy would protect the sugar beet market and the ability for us to expand the industry.”

The group says its growers produce only eight per cent of the sugar sold in Canada, while the remainder is imported cane sugar. The immediate goal of a domestic sugar policy, as laid out by the Alberta group and its national counterpart, the Canadian Sugar Beet Growers Association, would be to double sugar beets’ market foothold to 16 per cent of national sugar consumption. This would drive investment in refineries and open new grower opportunities.

“Other provinces like Manitoba used to produce sugar beets. If there was a sugar policy, we would be able to expand the market and potentially have other provinces start growing sugar beets again,” said Crowson.

Corporations have expressed interest in building beet sugar infrastructure if there was a policy in place, she added.

“Other industry people and corporations say that, in the event that there was a policy, they would come and build another processing plant.”

There’s at least one major hurdle: federal approval of a policy. That process is coming along slowly, but surely, Crowson said.

“It’s been a work in progress for a while, but we have recently been able to have a few meetings with Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada,” she said. “We’re creating a working group going forward to look at some of the pieces of what domestic sugar policy could look like.”

Sugar shortage

Canadian sugar has featured in the news recently due to the ongoing strike at a Vancouver sugar processing facility that created a sugar shortage on store shelves.

Although a national sugar policy wouldn’t affect the chances of similar strike action, the expected industry growth could create more supply chain options in the event of disruption, proponents say.

“With the strike right now, the biggest factor is they’re just not operating, not that their source of sugar is not there,” said Crowson. “So as far as domestic sugar policy, it would secure that Canada has a more sustainable product right here that’s 100 per cent Canadian.”

The sugar beets under irrigation in southern Alberta and processed at the Lantic plant in Taber, Alta., represent almost the entirety of sugar production in Canada, said Crowson.

Rogers Sugar is the holding company of Lantic Inc., formed when Rogers Sugar Ltd. and Lantic Sugar Limited merged in 2008.

“There are beets that are grown in Ontario, but they’re exported to Michigan to be processed, so that doesn’t stay within Canada,” says Crowson. “So, we are the only source of 100 per cent Canadian sugar in Canada.”

Alberta’s sugar beet production comprises about 200 farm families who harvest about 840,000 tonnes of sugar beets every year.
There are three other sugar refineries under the company’s banner (Montreal, Vancouver and Toronto) but they process cane sugar sourced from India, Brazil and Vietnam.

Today, the Canadian sugar beet industry operates under a supply managed, quota-based system, said Crowson.

The ASBG manages these producer quotas from its permanent quota of 28,000-33,895 acres per year, depending on capacity of the Taber refinery. Contracted acreage can be reduced if the refinery is unable to process the permanent quota in a given year.

“The processor tells us how much we can grow each year and usually what happens is we end up with a 17 to 20 per cent reduction from our permanent quota,” she said.

“What that means, going into next year’s system, is out of that 33,895 acres, we’re going to have a 17 per cent reduction. That will be the maximum amount of acres our growers are able to grow.”

Any beets that don’t make it to the plant become a storage challenge for producers, she added. They have no other marketing options.

“The beets are stored in piles outside so as winter carries on, the beets do get frozen. That’s OK, but they can only stay frozen and still be a good product for so long. So come the end of February or beginning of March … those beets will start to deteriorate.”

In addition, it’s not uncommon in southern Alberta to get sudden stretches of warm weather that hasten beet deterioration. The latest harvest in November brought in 856,636 tonnes at an extractable sugar rate of just over 17 per cent.

Yield was high, considering that the number of planted acres was down. Due to weather and the lateness of the processor contract, producers grew 26,000 acres as opposed to the typical 28,000, Crowson noted.

— Jeff Melchior reports for Alberta Farmer Express from Edmonton.

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