The great Canadian suffragette Nellie McClung saw her country as a distinctively different version of the United States. Newcomers to this country, she believed, would not be met by a Statue of Liberty proclaiming “Bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,” but by a Canada standing with arms open wide saying, “Come to me, for I am the Land of the Second Chance. I am the Land of Beginning Again.”
McClung believed her country was “too young a nation to have any distinguishing characteristic.” But it could create one, she thought, and in 1915 offered up her own Vision of Canada: a land of fairness, where race and colour and creed have equal chance at success, where no one can “exert influence,” where no one’s past will hurt them, where no crime goes unpunished, no debt unpaid, where honest toil guarantees an honest living.
“The Land of Beginning Again” indeed. Utopia, by any other name. The popular Canadian concept is that we’re the most tolerant and welcoming country on earth, but history—as Walter Stewart and others have pointed out—is filled with counter-arguments.
The first immigrants Canada tried to restrict were American. Following the War of 1812 laws were passed preventing Americans from holding land unless they had already been in Upper Canada for at least seven years, in effect barring those who might have wished to join the rush to open up good farmland between Lake Ontario and Lake Simcoe and beyond. Instead, the government encouraged the immigration of poor British, many of them Irish fleeing famine and many of them from the English countryside, London officials having perceived the North American colony a good “dumping ground” for the unwanted and the indigent.
“Reduced to pauperism by the results of centuries of plundering, extortion and exploitation of the ruling class at home,” Gustavus Myers wrote in his History of Canadian Wealth, “these emigrants were herded in foul ships and packed off to Canada under the most inhuman and horrible conditions.” Between 1815 and 1839 more than 430,000 immigrants landed at the port of Quebec, and, as Lord Durham once sadly noted, had they known what difficulties awaited them most would have declined to come. Those who survived the voyages often did not long survive the landing. Once The Voyageur landed in early June 1832, its cargo of deadly cholera spread quickly, killing some four thousand people in Quebec City and Montreal. Quebeckers formed an organization that offered new arrivals five shillings just to keep on going. They even had a motto: “Welcome Anywhere—Anywhere But Here.”
Fear of disease is one thing; fear of difference is something quite apart. During Canada’s greatest years for immigration, from roughly 1896 to the beginning of the First World War in 1914, the official most responsible for bringing new blood to this country said he was looking for “peasants in sheepskin coats.” He didn’t have to explain: Central and Eastern Europeans. Whites.
Blacks were especially undesired, it appears. Saturday Night magazine, published in Toronto and supposedly the voice of the more educated and cultured classes, was particularly virulent, claiming in one 1911 issue that the Negro is “indolent, prodigal and shiftless. In other words, he is by nature unfit for carving out for himself a home in the wilderness.” A year later, an article in the same magazine called American boxer Jack Johnson a “black baboon” and “impudent nigger” for marrying a white woman, saying he should be lynched and she was obviously a “pervert.”
Saturday Night, Walter Stewart pointed out, was at least an equal-opportunity hater, running an article entitled “No Jews” and suggesting that Canada would be unwise to allow any into the country. “Without them,” the establishment magazine contended, “there will be no filthy slums, in which they now teem, and without them our courts and our jails would have some measure of relief.” It makes one wonder if a comment that appeared in the Toronto Daily Star during that decade was intended as ironic: “Canada consists of 3,500,523 square miles, mostly landscape. It is apparently intended for the home of a broadminded people.”
The most disturbing test of early Canadian openness came in 1914, when the Komagata Maru sailed into waters off the B.C. coast carrying 376 Sikhs. They had come from another part of the British Empire to start a new life. They were well dressed and stood on the decks waving and smiling to the crowds that gathered along Victoria’s harbour to see what had come in. No one waved back. They might be British subjects, but they weren’t like us.
As Stewart recounted the tale, the ship wasn’t allowed to land and was sent to anchor in Burrard Inlet, where police boarded and placed guards on the deck. It sat for two months while the province steamed. “We must keep this country a white man’s country at any cost,” huffed an editorial in British Columbia magazine, “and a British country if possible.”
At one point the Sikhs had to fight off an army of police and immigration officers—and even a local member of Parliament—who planned to take over the ship, install a Japanese crew, and haul it out to sea. Finally, when a navy ship pulled up alongside and trained its firefighting hoses on the stunned passengers, the Sikhs decided they might just as well give up and set sail again. No one seems to know whatever became of them.
When Bruce Hutchison was writing his famous book on Canada in 1942 he reflected prevailing attitudes in words that would be most politically incorrect today. Hutchison thought the Japanese enjoyed an advantage over regular white B.C. businessmen in that they were willing to live at a standard no white could tolerate. For him “Oriental” immigrants would never be assimilated; whites could hope only that they would eventually “lose some of their fertility and will adopt our standards of life.”
Hutchison was, of course, writing at a time of great fear, the Japanese having attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, the year before his book was published in the United States. After the Allies declared war on Japan, Canada used its War Measures Act to relocate more than twenty thousand Japanese Canadians, many of whom had been in the country for generations, from the coast and into detention camps far from the sea. Though none were ever charged with any count of espionage or sabotage, the orders stood. They lost their businesses, their fishing boats, their farms, their homes. Worse, they were charged $7.50 a month for the privilege of living in what were essentially prisoner-of-war camps. Four years after the war ended, Japanese Canadians still endured severe restrictions, prevented from travelling far from home without a permit and barred from voting or, for that matter, studying to become a lawyer.
TIMES CHANGE, as Bruce Hutchison discovered—and, we have to presume, the author of this book will also discover should this effort prove fortunate enough to survive even a fraction as long as Hutchison’s—but times change very slowly when it comes to attitudes toward immigration. The Canadian government eventually apologized to the Japanese, among others, but apologies don’t erase what happened.
Though more than three million people arrived in Canada over the four decades from 1925 to 1965, a mere seventeen thousand were black. In the mid-1950s Immigration Minister Walter Harris was still saying that those from tropical climates found it next to impossible to adapt to Canadian “climactic conditions.” Around the same time, although twenty thousand applications for visas were completed in India, immigration quotas for Indians were set at only 150 a year.
The immigrants who suffered most at the hands of Canadian intolerance were likely the Chinese. Between 1881 and 1884, fifteen thousand Chinese workers were brought in through British Columbia to dig in the coal mines and build the railway Confederation had promised. And then they were expected to go back to China. No one ever thought, or expected, they might like to stay.
“These coolies were, to all intents and purposes, slaves,” Walter Stewart wrote in But Not in Canada. “They were sold under contract to white railwaymen or miners.” Stewart also cited an 1885 royal commission on the conditions in which these Chinese workers lived. The commission concluded that Canadians would never “feed their dogs upon the food consumed by the ordinary Chinese labourer.”
The Chinese immigrant story is a difficult one. Like Nativ
e Canadians, they were not considered “persons.” They were made to pay a head tax of $50, later raised to $500, just for the right to work. So adamant were some members of British Columbia society to keep them out that a law was passed requiring applications to be written in a “European” language. Little wonder, then, that by the early 1920s Chinese immigration had fallen to practically nothing. In the 1935 general election the Liberals published an advertisement in one of the Vancouver papers that claimed: “A Vote for any CCF candidate is a vote to give the CHINAMAN and the JAPANESE the Same Voting Right that you have! A Vote for a Liberal Candidate is a VOTE AGAINST ORIENTAL ENFRANCHISEMENT.” Canada didn’t get around to apologizing for the head tax until 2006, at which point the vast majority of those who had paid it, or suffered because of it, were long since dead.
While covering the 2004 federal election I spent a day with Shirley Chan, who was then running—unsuccessfully, it would turn out—as the Liberal candidate in Vancouver East. She took me to her ancestral home on the edge of the city’s famous Chinatown and gave me a crash course on how one Chinese immigrant, Lee Wo Soon Chan, came to this strange foreign country and made it her own.
The home is almost exactly as it was when Shirley Chan was growing up in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Same kitchen cupboards, same sink, same green Formica table around which the family would eat. In the basement of this strangely preserved home is a small shrine to Shirley’s mother, Lee Wo Soon Chan, who was known to everyone in the Chinatown district as “Chun Tai” and whom the Vancouver media often referred to as “The Mayor of Chinatown.” Photographs of Chun Tai are everywhere—leading marches, campaigning, being cheered in parades, meeting with dignitaries, helping out the less fortunate, posing in her flamboyant hats and pearls and signature dark sunglasses. There’s even the chair she sat in when she held court.
Chun Tai had died eighteen months earlier at age eighty-six. She had been, as they say, “larger than life,” and now, in this private basement room, she was larger than death. Her daughter had carefully laid out her life story, and Shirley wanted that story preserved. To her, and to a great many other Chinese Canadians, Chun Tai was the one who had saved their distinctive community.
Lee Wo Soon Chan had been a schoolteacher in China and suffered greatly during the long civil war. She was able to get out of the country and made it to Canada, where she found work in a factory. But she was also, her daughter says, “a one-person social agency service.” She was bright. She learned English easily and could read and write it. Family and neighbours turned to her to fill in their papers, to sort out their immigration problems, to help them find jobs. She increasingly became an activist in the Chinatown area and was soon known all over Vancouver as a formidable political force.
When Vancouver city council decided that the only solution to its growing traffic problems—problems that persist to this day—was to level the shabby Chinatown area, it was Chun Tai who took on City Hall and won. She organized the people, led the rallies, and convinced the media of the value in reviving this historic area—an area that today is one of Vancouver’s most popular tourist attractions.
Shirley Chan had been helping her mother fight City Hall since she was eight. She was a young university student when, with her mother’s blessing, she stood in front of a moving bulldozer and refused to budge until it came to a stop inches away. That was the day the city backed down. To no surprise, Shirley grew up to have a successful career in city and provincial politics.
At one point she asked me if I noticed anything unusual about the many photographs set around the shrine.
I looked carefully. The sunglasses? No. The hats? No, but close. “What then?”
“You won’t find a single one, even when she’s on vacation, where she’s not wearing a high collar.”
I looked, not sure what, if anything, that meant.
“It’s deliberate,” Shirley said.
During the civil-war years little Lee Wo Soon Chan, who was tall and athletic, had been taken out of school and forced to run supplies between villages. She carried them tied to the ends of a strong wooden pole placed over her shoulders. She carried day and night, often under cover of darkness, and she did it so often it changed her appearance.
“It left her with a huge callous that never really went away,” Shirley explained, “and my mother didn’t want anyone to see it.” As she spoke she rubbed the back of her own neck, as if the callous had somehow been passed on.
And of course it had, in the way all children of immigrants carry the past with them.
THERE ARE DISPLAYS at Pier 21, and even a short film featuring performers who enact the tears and joy of those who arrived here and were made welcome … or Willkomman … once their ship reached Halifax. It would be wrong, though, to think of this place as entirely one of happy endings. A great many hopefuls were turned away for reasons that could be as trivial as eyesight. “Imbeciles,” prostitutes, and communists were all denied entry. After the Second World War began, five hundred to a thousand children from France, all with Jewish parents, should have been brought through here to safety, but the Canadian government dithered so long that when final approval came through it was already too late.
There are, indeed, also happy stories of babies being born here and of families being reunited, often with members they had given up for dead. “I saw my first apple in Halifax,” a woman wrote. Others burst into tears at the sight of something as simple as an egg.
It is difficult, no impossible, for a Canadian born and raised here to comprehend what it was like for most of these landed immigrants. Their sense of alienation, of confusion, of fear even, would be so profound as to forever engrave the early days of arrival in memory. “Every act of immigration is like suffering a brain stroke,” Toronto psychiatrist Vivian Rakoff, himself an immigrant, once told Peter Newman. “One has to learn to walk again, to talk again, to move around the world again, and probably most difficult of all, to reestablish a sense of community.”
At Pier 21 you can see the photographed faces of such people; the shock and bewilderment undeniable. You can sit in a facsimile train car and, thanks to fake windows and video feeds, feel as if you’re travelling across the country with those who left the pier for other parts, so uncertain of where they were headed or what would become of them. Their stories are as moving as the train is meant to feel.
Sitting in those small cars, watching video of the countryside flashing by and hearing the recorded thoughts of those who came through these gates only to move on through the rest of Canada, you quickly realize just how immigration has changed over the years. Not only the people, but the destination. The early arrivals all seemed headed into the countryside, but later, even by the time Pier 21 shut its doors in 1971, increasingly to the towns and cities. The business of immigration was shifting away from ports. Today’s immigrants land at Dorval and Pearson and Vancouver international airports. And they head, almost exclusively, straight for the cities.
THE NOTION of the hyphenated Canadian has long been of concern to those who’d rather see the hyphen deleted. Richard Gwyn, one of the country’s most astute political observers over the past forty years, has said that only one identifiable group, the British Canadians of long heritage, immediately considers itself as coming from one country known as Canada. Everyone else, it seems to Gwyn, has allegiance to two or more nations, whether it be the independent Quebec he fears coming or the old countries whose hold never seems to loosen. In his recent book, Nationalism Without Walls: The Unbearable Lightness of Being Canadian, he worries that Canada’s sense of self is so weak it might just “slip away” one day, scarcely noticed.
The Liberal governments of the Trudeau era made multiculturalism a policy that overtly encouraged the sustaining of previous ties. No melting pot for Canada. Back in 1971, when visible minorities made up less than 1 percent of the population, the federal government began pushing bilingualism and multiculturalism in tandem. Prime Minister Trudeau said at the time, “National
unity, if it is to mean anything in the deeply personal sense, must be founded on confidence in one’s own individual society.” A fine sentiment, even if critics often argued that the true purpose of promoting multiculturalism was to build the Liberal base among newcomers. But now that visible minorities make up fully half the population of such large cities as Toronto, Gwyn and others warn that the small walls once encouraged by multiculturalism can quickly become tall and impenetrable, as evidenced by Great Britain and various European countries today. A 2006 report written for Statistics Canada by University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz and doctoral student Rupa Banerjee confirmed that visible-minority immigrants feel more excluded than white immigrants; second-generation visible minorities also feel less identification with Canada than whites do.
And this, Gwyn argues, makes for an increasingly fragile political culture. Unless those walls come down over time, he fears, the “centre cannot hold.” “If we ceased to be a community,” he writes, “others would notice and would regret the passing of a distinctive idea about how different people can live together.”
In my experience, those who most readily see themselves as Canadians first live in the centre: Ontario. There’s more demarcation between, say, those living in Newfoundland who think of themselves as Newfoundlanders first or those in Alberta who think of themselves as only Albertans than there is in generations who see themselves as Italian Canadians or Lebanese Canadians.
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