Public Service Alliance of Canada BC

Source: The Vancouver Courier, May 11, by Cheryl Rossi-Staff writer

When families who were affected by the Chinese Head Tax celebrate 60 years of citizenship Saturday, they’ll be recognizing how far they’ve come in gaining rights and respect for Chinese people in Canada.

But according to Sid Tan, co-chair of the Head Tax Families Society of Canada, they’ll also highlight problems migrant workers face today as echoes of what their families endured.

“The issues of guest workers, the issues of seasonal and temporary employment, live-in caregivers and domestics, all these issues are not that different from what the early Chinese suffered,” said Tan. “These are people that are good enough to come to Canada and do the dirty and menial work or the work that a lot of Canadians won’t or aren’t willing to do, and they have no rights. There’s something wrong with the picture, and a hundred years ago this is what happened to the Chinese.”

The Head Tax Families Society is organizing a rally Saturday at the Chinatown Memorial to Chinese Canadian War Veterans and Railway Workers at the northeast corner of Keefer and Columbia. The society became a registered non-profit last August after Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Chinese-Canadians. The apology included a symbolic payment of $20,000 to those Chinese, or their surviving spouses, who had paid the head tax.

When the Canadian Pacific Railway was constructed between 1881 and 1885, more than 15,000 Chinese came to Canada to help build the railway. But when the track was completed, the federal government moved to restrict Chinese immigration. Starting in 1885, people of Chinese origin entering the country had to pay a $50 head tax, which increased to $100 in 1900. In 1903, it reached $500, the equivalent of two years wages of a Chinese labourer at the time. Chinese people were denied Canadian citizenship while the government collected millions.

On July 1, 1923, Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act excluding all but a few Chinese immigrants from entering Canada. It was repealed in 1947, and Chinese-Canadians were allowed to vote 60 years ago this May.

Tan said the society formed to tell the federal government its settlement is incomplete.

“They are redressing just a little under 600 families, that’s 0.6 per cent of all the families-82,000 families paid the tax,” he said. “But what about the elderly sons and daughters who were separated from their fathers for 25, 30 years? What about elderly seniors who were born in Canada [and had no rights until 1947]?”

Gim Wong, a Canadian-born Second World War veteran who was barred from voting until after the war, says he knows all too well how the head tax hurt families.

His father was 14 when he arrived in Canada in 1906. His mother arrived in 1919. Both of his parents paid the $500 head tax.

In 1937, when his parents had seven children, they couldn’t afford to buy the house they were renting, which in those days cost $700.

In January last year, the Burnaby resident road a motorcycle to Ottawa to appeal to former prime minister Paul Martin for redress, but the RCMP intervened and he never got to meet Martin.

Wong wants villages in China that contributed money to send young men to Canada compensated for the head tax.

Saturday’s event begins at 9 a.m.