The Unfaithful Custodian: Glenn McPherson and the Dispossession of Japanese Canadians in the 1940s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Taking a biographical approach, this article exposes the double role of Glenn McPherson, the man most responsible for the dispossession of the property of Japanese Canadians during the 1940s. At the same time, we revise scholarly understandings of how federal policy was formed in wartime Canada, emphasizing the importance of little-known bureaucrats. Charged with protecting the property that Japanese Canadians were forced to leave behind during their uprooting, McPherson instead steered policy toward the forced sale of everything they owned. Troublingly, McPherson simultaneously acted as an intelligence agent, promulgating doubt of the loyalty of Japanese Canadians in unsubstantiated reports. Unveiling McPherson as a typical bureaucrat (concerned with administering legally defensible state policy), but also a key lawmaker and, most surprisingly, a clandestine agent, we find the policy both easier and harder to understand: easier because the records of his life and work detail the process by which this consequential policy emerged within the wider context of the internment, but harder because unlike political actors whose animosity toward Japanese Canadians in this era was often plain and public, McPherson’s motives are more obscure, his actions more secretive.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".