Canada’s newcomers often greeted poorly
One of the more lamentable initiatives in recent Canadian affairs was surely the bid by duly spanked Conservative leadership aspirant Kellie Leitch to impose a “values test” on those wishing to make this country their home.
If the history of the last 150 years makes anything clear — and even painful facts about who we are and what we’ve done should be reckoned with during anniversary years — it’s that the values that have stirred Canadians have often been less than praiseworthy.
This country has had its own history of bigotry, institutional racism and border walls by different names.
As the sesquicentennial of Confederation is marked, it’s worth recalling — above and beyond the attempted cultural genocide of Indigenous peoples — that for the first century of its existence, Canada was essentially a “white settler state” and that newcomers were typically unwelcome at our gates.
Often, these failures of humanity were played out on Canadian coasts, where ships bearing newcomers tried to make port.
On the West Coast, as Asians of various points of origin arrived, British Columbia saw more than its share of what would become national embarrassments.
In 1885, the federal government imposed a head tax on Chinese immigration to Canada, seeking to prevent the more than 15,000 immigrant labourers who had arrived to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway from staying after the great nation-building project was completed.
In 2006, acknowledging “the racist actions of our past,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized for the head tax (which began at $50, rose to $100, then $500, and lasted until 1923).
More than 1,000 Chinese labourers died during construction of the CPR, but “from the moment the railway was completed, Canada turned its back on these men,” Harper said.
“We acknowledge the high cost of the head tax meant that many family members were left behind in China, never to be reunited, or that families lived apart and in some cases in extreme poverty for years,” he said.
“We also recognize that our failure to truly acknowledge these historical injustices has prevented many in the community from seeing themselves as fully Canadian.”
It was neither the first nor the last such act of contrition.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau apologized last year in Parliament for Canada’s rejection in 1914 of hundreds of would-be immigrants from South Asia aboard the Komagata Maru.
In May that year, the ship carrying 376 passengers, most of them Sikhs from Punjab in British India, arrived in Vancouver, but was turned away by uncompromising Canadian officials on the grounds of so-called “continuous passage” regulations conceived to curb immigration by peoples deemed undesirable.
The showdown illustrated the belief — freely stated by political leaders — that Canada was “a white man’s country.”
It is evidence of how widely these racist attitudes prevailed that the progressive socialist preacher J.S. Woodsworth, regarded as the founder of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (forerunner to the NDP), co-authored a remarkable volume in 1909, titled Strangers Within Our Gates.
“What does the ordinary Canadian know about our immigrants? He classifies all men as white men and foreigners. The foreigners he thinks of as the men who dig the sewers and get into trouble at the police court. They are all supposed to dress in outlandish garb, to speak a barbarian tongue, and to smell abominably,” Woodsworth wrote in the preface.
“This little book is an attempt to introduce the motley crowd of immigrants to our Canadian people . . .”
During the Second World War, Canada had a sorry record when it came to providing refuge to Jews fleeing the Holocaust in Europe. The most notorious example was the refusal in 1939 to admit the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying more than 900 German Jews.
From that event came the infamous words of a Canadian immigration official who, when asked how many Jewish refugees Canada should accept, said “none is too many.”
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, Japanese Canadians — both citi- zens and residents — were removed from their homes and detained in internment camps, including more than 20,000 people moved from the B.C. coast to the interior for fear they were enemy spies.
Branding Japanese Canadians as enemy aliens under the War Measures Act, the government shut down Japaneselanguage newspapers and confiscated and seized property.
In 1944, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King ordered Japanese Canadians to move east out of B.C.
A British Columbia MP said the plan was “to get these people out of B.C. as fast as possible. It is my personal intention, as long as I remain in public life, to see they never come back here. Let our slogan be for British Columbia: ‘No Japs from the Rockies to the seas’.”
Only in 1949 could Japanese Canadians return to the coast.
In 1988, Prime Minister Brian Mulroney apologized on behalf of the country and announced compensation for the internments.
“In retrospect, government policies of disenfranchisement, detention, confiscation and sale of private and community property, expulsion, deportation and restriction of movement, which continued after the war, were influenced by discriminatory attitudes,” Mulroney said.
“Japanese Canadians who were interned had their property liquidated and the proceeds of sales were used to pay for their own internment.
“The acknowledgment of these injustices serves notice to all Canadians that the excesses of the past are condemned and the principles of justice and equality are reaffirmed.”
As every wave of immigrant has known — from Irish Catholics encountering the domination of the Orange Order on arriving in “The Belfast of Canada” that was Toronto in the early 20th century, to the South Asians uniformly scorned as “Pakis” in its later decades — they are principles that can never be reaffirmed too often.
This week, with just 14 days to go to the official celebration on Parliament Hill of the sesquicentennial, Statistics Canada announced that hate crimes rose by 5 per cent across the country in 2015.
Muslim, Jewish, Indigenous and Black community leaders called on all levels of government “to work together to help eradicate this phenomenon.”