American Justice on Canadian Soil

De Brou Memorial Lecture:
American Justice on Canadian Soil
A lecture by Benjamin Hoy (Department of History)

Hosted by the Department of History and the History Graduate Students Committee in memoriam of Dave de Brou (1950 – 2004)

Thursday, April 13, 2017
7:00 p.m.
Neatby-Timlin Lecture Theatre (Arts 241)
University of Saskatchewan

In 1899, Levi Edwin Dudley, the American consul at Vancouver, spoke with a Canadian police officer about the ways officers on both sides of the border approached their jobs. The officer, speaking under conditions of anonymity, noted that “on the border here we must do things in an irregular way in order to preserve the peace.” The ability of criminals to move back and forth across the line forced American and Canadian officers to “‘stand in’ with each other, [or] we should have the country filled with desperadoes.” During the 19th century, American officers transferred criminals over to Canadian agents without proper clearance and Canadian officers later returned the favor creating a reciprocal system of exchange that operated in the grey areas of legality. By the 20th century, American police officers continued to use informal prisoner exchanges and state sponsored kidnappings to extract criminals from Canada, but increasingly did so without reciprocation. Legal process became a tool not only of international justice, but also a tool of international control.