Chinese In Canada
Although Chinese migrants have been in the regions of North America that are now part of Canada for over 200 years (with the first Chinese arriving with the expedition of Captain John Meares to Nootka Sound in 1788-89), the long continuous history of the Chinese in Canada has been understudied and long ignored within the archival collections of Canada. Partly due to racism and exclusion, this ignoring of the role of Chinese in Canada has been despite the fact that Chinese have lived across the breadth of Canada since Confederation and have been an integral part of local communities across the nation.
History Of Goldrush and Building of the Canadian Pacific Railway to Exclusion
Often left unrecorded or underrepresented in official histories of Canada, Chinese in Canada have had a long history and in fact were the first traders who arrived in 1788 in the Nootka Sound area of British Columbia. A century later, Chinese gold prospectors from San Francisco founded British Columbia's first permanent settlement Barkerville in 1858. Eventually, young men from China migrated to the Canadian West in the 1880s to work on the building of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CRP) which would connect the Eastern part of the country with the West.
From Canadian Pacific Railway to Immigration Restriction
However, by the time the CRP had been completed, authorities and Anglo white labour viewed Chinese as a threat to a labour. Unlike the United States' complete restriction of Chinese migrants, the Government of Canada did not enact outright restrictive measures towards Chinese migration. Instead, it indirectly discouraged immigration from China by passing the Chinese Immigration Act in 1885 which imposed a fifty-dollar head tax to be collected by each ship captain at the point of departure.4 This was later referred to as a "head tax."
The Chinese Head Tax in the Chinese Immigration Act
Under subsequent administrations, the Canadian government increased the tax to $100 under the Chinese Immigration Act, 1900 and $500 under the Chinese Immigration Act, 1903. An extraordinary sum of money in the early 1900s, this value of $500 equated to two years' salary at the time. Money from about 81,000 Head Tax payers went into a Consolidated Revenue Fund, of which were spent by the Canadian government on the Canadian war effort in World War I. The total head tax collected by 1923 has been estimated as equivalent to over $1.2 billion in 1988 dollars.
The Chinese Exclusion Act
Although the Tax was abolished in 1923, it was replaced with the Chinese Exclusion Act, which essentially closed off any Chinese immigration to Canada. The Chinese citizens who had already entered Canada before this date were ordered to register with the government under this legislation. When the Canadian government finally repealed the
The Chinese Immigration Act, 1947
Although the Chinese Immigration Act in 1947 lifted immigration restrictions and allowed Chinese to enter Canada, the impact of forced immigration restrictions for much of the early twentieth century had enormous consequences. Because of the head tax and its following immigration restrictions, their effects ultimately limited Chinese women and children from joining their men, the Chinese community in Canada became a "bachelor society" and effectively segregated as an ethnic enclave in Chinatown.
Other than a handful of academic studies, many of these stories of loneliness and segregation have yet to be told and some will unfortunately never be heard.
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