Mr. Speaker, I am honoured today to rise to speak to the motion on the floor of the House, a motion that touches so many Canadians across the coast, myself included, Canadians who trace their roots back to Asia.
If we are going toward a future free of anti-Asian racism and discrimination, we need to learn from the past. One in five Canadians, 20%, including my family and many members of the House, traces their roots back to Asia. Asian Canadians have made a significant contribution to Canada, going back to the mid-19th century. For example, Chinese immigrants began to enter Canada in the mid-1800s. Many of these Chinese immigrants were labourers. The opium wars had just ended, and many were looking for work. Some of them came in the British Columbia gold rush of 1858. Some of them ended up working on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, playing a major role in Confederation.
In fact, Confederation would not have happened if not for the thousands of Chinese labourers who came over to the west to build the railway. Their back-breaking labour literally laid the steel foundation that laid the constitutional foundation of our 1867 Constitution. The Canadian Pacific company was formed in 1881 for the express purpose of fulfilling a promise made to the colony of British Columbia. This was the promise: If British Columbia joined Canada and Confederation, then the Canadian government would build a railway connecting eastern Canada to the Pacific Ocean. B.C. joined Canada and Confederation on July 20, 1871. The Canadian Pacific Railway was established subsequently, in 1881, and the railway was completed in 1885.
The construction of this railway was incredibly dangerous; through the Rockies, the Pacific coast mountain ranges and the vast Prairies, it was very dangerous work. Tens of thousands of labourers worked to construct the railway, including 15,000 Chinese railway workers. They worked in the harshest conditions year-round, with little pay. Historians have estimated that at least 600 Chinese railway workers died constructing the railway. That is an incredible human toll of suffering and misery to complete what laid the base of this country's Confederation. Despite all that work and sacrifice, they were discriminated against during and after.
The Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 was passed and put in place by Parliament to discourage Chinese immigration to Canada. Under that act of 1885, a $50 head tax, a great sum of money at the time, was levied on all Chinese immigrants. That tax was then increased to $100 per head in 1900. It was increased to $500 per head in 1903. Even this punishing head tax did not deter Chinese immigration to Canada as the act had intended. In fact, the Chinese population in Canada tripled during the time of the head tax, from 13,000 people in 1885 to 39,587 people in 1921. Therefore, the government decided to put in place an even harsher solution: full exclusion, a full ban. Parliament passed the Chinese Immigration Act, with the exact same title as the initial Chinese immigration act. It was also known as the “Chinese Exclusion Act”. The act, which was in place from 1923 to 1947, banned virtually all Chinese immigration to Canada for those 24 years.
Although immigration to Canada from other countries was restricted during those years as it is today, unlike today, only Chinese people were singled out and banned entirely from immigrating to Canada and entirely on the basis of their race and race alone. It took until 1947 for the Parliament of Canada to repeal this law and it took until 1967 for all immigration rules based on national origin and race to be fully eliminated.
My father was one of the Chinese immigrants who immigrated to Canada. He immigrated from Hong Kong in 1952 to Winnipeg, just five years after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed by this very House.
He arrived as a young student at the University of Manitoba, but even though the act had been repealed five years earlier, the sentiments behind the act still lingered on. He faced racism and discrimination that our generation can only imagine. He was also, I have to say, met with the incredible generosity and fair-mindedness of ordinary Canadians who invited him, as a single student thousands of miles away from home and very much alone, to a Sunday roast beef dinner or to a Thanksgiving dinner or to spend a weekend with a fellow student's family. Nevertheless, it was tough times in those 1950s for Chinese immigrants.
He had to support himself. At one point he could not find work here in Canada as a student, during the summer, and so he decided to go down to New York City to work in Manhattan's famed Chinatown. He worked in a Chinese laundry and in a Chinese restaurant washing dishes, as thousands of Chinese immigrants in decades past have done coming to Canada, in order to save the dollars he needed to put himself through school. Eventually, my father found a position as a summer student working as a lumberjack in northern Ontario in Kenora, which is something I cannot think of as more Canadian to do during a hot summer in northern Ontario. All along, he saved, saved and saved.
As the 1950s transitioned to the 1960s and 1970s, Canada began to change. In 1967, we got rid of our race-based requirements for our immigration system. Since then, much further progress has been made, such as the 1982 Patriation of the Constitution along with the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms and such as Prime Minister Stephen Harper's apology on June 22, 2006, for the head tax that had been levied on some 81,000 Chinese immigrants to Canada.
However, despite all this progress in creating a society free of racism and discrimination, a society where one's race, religion or creed do not determine one's standing in Canadian society, we still face racism and discrimination. The pandemic revealed the ugly side of that in the last several years and so has the rise of the PRC's threats, both here and abroad. People have exploited those issues to foment racism and discrimination against their fellow Asian Canadians.
Today, the Asian community is a cherished part of our Canadian society. Whether from places like the People's Republic of China or the Philippines or the Republic of India or so many other places in Asia, the Asian community, which includes one in five Canadians, has made a vibrant contribution to this country. From business to politics and from the academy to arts and charity, Asian Canadians play leading roles in Canadian society.
Therefore, as we debate and hopefully adopt this motion and as the committee begins its work, let us remember all the contributions and sacrifices that Asian Canadians have made to this country for well over 150 years. Let us stand in solidarity with Asian Canadians when they face racism and discrimination and let us celebrate Asian Canadians for the contributions they have made and that they continue to make to this our home and native land.
