text: Glenn Willoughby McPherson was a young bureaucrat who established and directed the Vancouver Office of the Custodian during the time of the forced property sales. As was common in his time, he held racial bias and believed skin colour determined loyalty, he once said "the only way the Yellow Race can obtain their place in the Sun is by winning the war." In addition to acting as director of the Office of Custodian in Vancouver, McPherson acted as an intelligence agent for the British government. McPherson's role as a British agent was to send letters to update them on what was occurring in British Columbia. In these letters, he expressed prejudice against Japanese Canadians and his view that the RCMP was not doing enough to control them: "police intelligence is greatly understaffed and...the Japanese have developed a high inferiority complex." Historians have speculated that he was the author of a 161-page document that was sent anonymously to the RCMP in June 1942. It identified suspects of Japanese heritage who were alleged to be a threat to the community. The document specified three different levels of danger:
  CLASS A: identified 5 suspects who were to be immediately arrested and questioned
  CLASS B: identified 173 suspects as dangerous
  CLASS C: identified 74 suspects who were deemed as safety issues for the community
  The document also claimed that Japanese sex workers were spies for the Japanese government. This role and McPherson's personal views were concealed from Japanese Canadians, while he orchestrated the sale of their property. Starting in September 1942, after most Japanese Canadians had been uprooted from coastal British Columbia, McPherson turned his attention to the forced sale of remaining Japanese Canadian-owned property.
  Decision to sell
  On January 11, 1943, a meeting of cabinet ministers (attended by Ian Alistair Mackenzie, Norman McLarty, Thomas Crerar, and Humphrey Mitchell) made the decision to permit the sale of Japanese Canadian owned property, which had been previously seized. It was argued that it would be in the Japanese Canadian owners' best interest to sell because the value of their properties would go down over time.