“Whatever one’s opinion regarding the people of China as whole or as individuals, and one’s views concerning Oriental immigration, it should be at least a rule of conduct that no offensive remarks or condescending rebukes should be levelled at a race whose culture outdates ours and whose civilization is the cradle of art and philosophy.” — editorial, Ottawa Citizen, March 26, 1923
There were, however, plenty of offensive, condescending actions during the debates over the federal government’s decision to update the Chinese Immigration Act in 1923. When the new regulations went into effect on July 1, the act effectively banned Chinese immigrants from settling in Canada for the next quarter-century. Little wonder that July 1, Canada Day, would be viewed by many Chinese Canadians as “Humiliation Day”: they were the only ethnic group specifically singled out for such treatment under immigration policy.
When large-scale Chinese immigration began in British Columbia during the late 1850s, fear, racism, and xenophobia took root. By the 1880s, with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway nearing completion, the demand for cheap labour declining, and British Columbia facing economic hardship and high unemployment, there was political and public pressure to take action on Chinese immigration. In 1884, Prime minister John A. Macdonald appointed a royal commission. Most of the 51 witnesses who testified provided negative impressions of the Chinese community. While the commissioners felt that many claims were unsupported and that Chinese immigration would help British Columbia grow, they also took note of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which had gone into effect in the United States in 1882, and head taxes imposed by British colonies in Australia and New Zealand.
Registration papers now posted on Canadiana.
The result, the first Chinese Immigration Act, passed on July 20, 1885. A head tax was set at $50, based partly on the calculation that the average Chinese labourer was unable to save that much over a year. More restrictions were introduced over time, including a rise in the head tax to $500 by 1903. That price hike initially had the intended effect, as the number of immigrants who paid the tax during the first year dropped from 4,719 to eight.
The effect was temporary, and numbers rose again as China underwent the chaotic transition from empire to republic and regional warlords. As more people arrived, they began moving east — by the early 1920s, Toronto had Canada’s third-largest Chinatown, while smaller ones emerged in other Ontario cities. Some professionals had to move to Ontario to receive professional certification. K. Dock Yip and Victoria Cheung, for example, studied at the University of Toronto to become Canada’s first male and female Chinese lawyers.
The high cost of the head tax created a massive gender imbalance in the Chinese Canadian community. Families were split apart, as only the main male wage-earner could afford to migrate. A woman successfully passing through customs was such a rarity that when 20-year-old Mrs. Lock Quong arrived in Toronto in October 1909, she appeared on the front page of two consecutive editions of the Toronto Daily Star. Her husband was already working in the city for the Wah Ying Lung Company, which the paper described as “dealers in fancy goods.” The Star focused on her beauty and her manner of dress and noted how quickly she’d adapted to North American manners. “The customs officer did not fail to commend the good taste of Lock Quong,” the paper observed.
Front page photo of Mr. and Mrs. Lock Quong from the October 11, 1909, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.
The spectre of “yellow peril” was employed by whites who claimed the country was in danger of being overrun and those who could use discriminatory laws to eliminate business competitors. The number of Chinese-operated laundries in Toronto had risen to nearly 100 at the start of the 20th century; in response, the white-led Laundry Association pressured the city to implement a substantial licence fee. In 1914, the Ontario legislature banned Chinese people from hiring white women to work in factories, laundries, and restaurants, claiming it was necessary to protect the morality of innocent ladies. Similar laws appeared in Saskatchewan and British Columbia. By 1923, there were more than 100 provincial laws and policies across the country that restricted the rights of Chinese residents.
Following the First World War, many white people feared that Chinese and other Asian people might keep jobs they’d filled during manpower shortages — jobs that should, the logic went, go to war veterans. People also latched onto the image of Chinatowns as poor, squalid places filled with drugs, gambling dens, and urban blight. Labour organizations supported anti-Asian measures through articles and campaigns depicting them as the low end of humanity.
In early 1923, the federal government proposed revising the Chinese Immigration Act. While Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King’s administration had held discussions with the Chinese government over expanding human rights, it decided to abolish the head tax and replace it with tighter immigration restrictions. Parliamentary debates were filled with racist rhetoric, especially from B.C. MPs, who would have been satisfied with a complete ban.
The proposed legislation identified four categories of people who could legally come to Canada from China:
- diplomats
- merchants, preferably involved in the import/export trade (those involved in the food, laundry, or retail trades were prohibited)
- Chinese students studying in Canada (who would have to return to China when their studies were complete)
- Canadian-born Chinese students currently attending school in China
Anyone of Chinese descent, including those born in Canada, had to register for an identity card within a year and submit a significant amount of personal information. Anyone who failed to comply faced fines of up to $500 and imprisonment.
TVO Today Explainer: What was the Chinese head tax?
While the legislation was not widely opposed by the general public, there were efforts to amend or stop it. The Chinese community formed various committees, one of the more prominent of which was the Toronto-based Chinese Association of Canada. After a meeting in downtown Toronto that drew more than 1,000 people from across the country, it sent an eight-member committee to Ottawa. The men presented amendments to the bill that would have recognized as legal residents all Chinese people currently in Canada, reunited families of merchants already here, and allowed families to immigrate together in the future. They were listened to, then ignored.
Among the white community, Christian missionaries spoke out. They believed the separation of families created the ideal conditions for vice to flourish. They also felt the bill would make it difficult for Chinese Christian ministers and church workers to enter Canada and for Canadian Protestant churches to continue their missionary activities in China. Some business leaders, such as Canadian Bank of Commerce president Byron Edmund Walker, characterized the legislation as unjust and warned that it would harm commerce and the ability to spread Christianity.
While a few politicians, such as future CCF leader J.S. Woodsworth and Senator Wellington Willoughby, pitched amendments, the legislation faced no substantial opposition and went into effect on July 1, 1923. It soon became known in the Chinese Canadian community as the “Chinese Exclusion Act.” It caused a 25 per cent decrease in the Chinese Canadian population, which hit a low of just over 32,000 in the 1951 census. Each July 1, the community closed its businesses and refused to participate in patriotic activities.
Federal officials continued to seek ways to further reduce the Chinese population. During the Great Depression, they offered one-way tickets back to China to avoid paying social assistance. To save on government aid, the length of time one could stay out of the country was extended from two to four years. Efforts continued within the community to try to amend the law, especially regarding families. Wong Foon Sien, the president of the Vancouver Chinese Benevolent Association, used annual visits to the nation’s capital to press for change. “What we ask is not an open door to all Chinese who wish to come,” he once observed. “Our appeal is that the Chinese Canadian may have his family with him — a complete family, not one part in Canada and the other part in Hong Kong or China.
When China became an ally in the battle against Japan during the Second World War, momentum slowly built to change the act. King admitted to the House of Commons in July 1943 that Canada’s Chinese-immigration policy was a mistake that required correction. The United States abandoned its exclusion act that year, replacing it with a quota system. Some government officials believed that the promise Canada — a signatory to the charter of the United Nations — had made to support human rights rang hollow with the act still in place.
Serious discussions around repealing the act began in late 1946, just as the civil war between Nationalists and Communists intensified in China. There was also wider white support for more general immigration reform. Of the 71 names on the letterhead for the Committee for the Repeal of the Chinese Immigration Act, 80 per cent were not Chinese. Support for repeal came from the CCF and Progressive Conservatives, as well as from many major newspapers. Polling showed Canadians favoured selective immigration; only 24 per cent wished to keep the bans. Though the law was repealed in May 1947, some lingering restrictions remained to placate hard-liners, and it wasn’t until 1967 that Chinese immigrants were finally put on equal footing with those from other countries.
Editorial cartoon on the effort to repeal the Chinese Immigration Act in 1947. (Windsor Star, January 28, 1947)
Efforts seeking redress for the impact of the act gained momentum during the 1980s, after two men who had paid the head tax saw their request for a refund denied by the federal government. National lobby organizations pressured successive governments for apologies and compensation ranging from symbolic payments to survivors and their families to educational funds. A class-action lawsuit filed in 2000 was struck down by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice. In 2004, the United Nations recommended redress; Manitoba MP Inky Mark introduced a private-member’s bill that died when Parliament dissolved. During the 2006 federal-election campaign, Prime Minister Paul Martin issued a personal (but not official) apology, while Conservative leader Stephen Harper promised redress if elected.
On June 22, 2006, Harper, now prime minister, made a formal apology for the head tax and the Chinese Immigration Act. “For over six decades,” Harper said, “these malicious measures, aimed solely at the Chinese, were implemented with deliberation by the Canadian state. This was a grave injustice, and one we are morally obligated to acknowledge." Symbolic payments, made three years later, awarded $20,000 to 785 people. There was also a promise to establish funding for community projects that acknowledged the impact of past restrictions.
Chinese head-tax survivor Ralph Lee looks at a copy of the government's official apology, signed by Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as he looks on at a ceremony acknowledging the apology in Ottawa on June 22, 2006. CP PHOTO/Tom Hanson)
Recognition efforts continue into the present. In May 2023, the federal government announced that the Exclusion of Chinese Immigrants would be recognized as an event of national historic significance under Parks Canada’s National Program of Historical Commemoration. Registration records stemming from the act have been digitized and made available online.
“The point of reminding ourselves of the errors or Chinese exclusion 100 years ago, is to say that there can be contemporary exclusion against any targeted group,” Senator Yuen Pau Woo told the Toronto Star in 2023. “The fact that we’ve seen a spike in anti-Asian racism since COVID begs the question of whether we’ve learned very much since the Exclusion Act.”
Sources: The Canadian Encyclopedia; Righting Canada’s Wrongs: The Chinese Head Tax and Anti-Chinese Immigration Policies in the Twentieth Century by Arlene Chan (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company, 2013); The Triumph of Citizenship: The Japanese and Chinese, 1941-67 by Patricia E. Roy (Toronto: UBC Press, 2007); From China to Canada: A History of the Chinese Communities in Canada, edited by Edgar Wickberg (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1982); the May 2, 1923, edition of the Globe; the March 26, 1923, edition of the Ottawa Citizen; and the October 9, 1909, edition of the Toronto Daily Star.