text: The forced removal of many Japanese-Canadian men to become labourers elsewhere in Canada created confusion and panic among families, causing some men to refuse orders to ship out to labour camps. On March 23, 1942, a group of Nisei refused to be shipped out and so were sent to prisoner-of-war camps in Ontario to be detained. The Nisei Mass Evacuation Group was formed to protest family break-ups and lobbied government organizations on the topic. However, their attempts were ignored and members of the group began going underground, preferring to be interned or sent to Ontario rather than join labour groups.
  By July 1942, after strikes occurred within the labour camps themselves, the federal government made a policy to keep families together in their removal to internment camps in the BC interior or sugar beet farms across the prairies.
  Camp conditions
  Many Canadians were unaware of the living conditions in the internment camps. The Japanese Canadians who resided within the camp at Hastings Park were placed in stables and barnyards, where they lived without privacy in an unsanitary environment. Kimiko, a former internee, attested to the "intense cold during the winter" and her only source of heat was from a "pot-bellied stove" within the stable. General conditions were poor enough that the Red Cross transferred fundamental food shipments from civilians affected by the war to the internees.