Mr. Speaker, it is truly a great honour to rise today to debate Bill C-333.
I am a proud Canadian of Chinese descent. I am a third generation immigrant to Canada. First I want to thank the member for Durham for introducing Bill C-333. The bill has been tabled in the House at least three times. I also thank all the members of the House for their support of this bill.
For over 20 years, that is, over two decades, the Chinese community has been seeking redress. Bill C-333 has been in the works for seven years. It reflects the will of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians and other national organizations. I want to acknowledge the executive members who have led the charge over the last two decades: the president of NCCC, Ping Tan from Toronto; the chairman of the GTA Chinese Community Association, Hugh Eng; secretary David Lim; Jack Lee from Montreal; Dr. Joseph Du from Winnipeg; Gordon Joe from Toronto; Frank Chui from Toronto; Fred Mah of Vancouver; Dr. David Lai from Victoria; and Albert Tang of Ottawa. I also want to thank Hansen Lau for all his work in Vancouver over the head tax issue.
The purpose of Bill C-333 is to acknowledge the past history which includes the head tax and the exclusion act. No apology is being asked for. We do not believe that an apology is necessary, but we certainly need to recognize the past. Also we need to establish an educational foundation for the purpose of telling the history of the Chinese immigrants to this country.
The Chinese landed on Vancouver Island long before Captain Cook did. In fact, as the member for Durham indicated in her speech, in 1788 British explorer John Meares landed at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island with 70 Chinese carpenters he had brought from the Portuguese colony of Macau. They built him a boat and then it is thought that those 70 Chinese married into native communities on the island and their cultural traces were soon lost. They were the first Chinese to set foot in Canada and the last for the 70 years following.
Much has been said this morning about the head tax. Both my grandfather and my father paid the head tax. In fact, I still have my father's head tax certificate at home. It is time for me to tell my story.
My grandfather came to this country to work on the CP Rail in the late 1800s. Members may know that 17,000 Chinese were imported to build the railway which, as Canadians agree, united this country. Over 700 lost their lives principally around the Fraser Canyon area. They were paid half the wages the white workers received. This was the norm until well into the 1930s. The Chinese were tolerated in Canada only because they were a cheap source of labour.
After 1885 the head tax was imposed for the purpose of discouraging immigration. That was the very purpose. They were finished using them to build the railroad and did not need them any more so they found a way to keep them out.
About three years ago I went to Europe with the hon. Sheila Copps, the then minister of heritage. We visited a number of Canadian cemeteries. Sheila was looking for her lost uncle who had fought in World War I. Lo and behold we did find her uncle's headstone, but Sheila also noticed that not far from her uncle's headstone was a headstone with Chinese characters written on it. We both wondered how that Chinese person had ended up in Europe in the battlefields of World War I.
Canadians do not know that Chinese labourers were at the centre of a little known chapter during the first world war. For a year beginning in April 1917, close to 80,000 men were shipped from China to British Columbia, transported across the country by rail, and dispatched from east coast ports to the trenches in France. One of the governments ruling China at the time had joined the war on the side of the western allies and offered some of the labourers it had in spades to the war effort.
After the armistice the Chinese labour battalions were repatriated along the same route in both directions. They were transported in sealed railway cars lest they try to jump the train and avoid the $500 head tax levied at the time against Chinese immigrants. Very few Canadians know that part of Canadian history.
This country was very discriminatory against the Chinese after 1885. Discriminatory laws were passed in many of the provinces, particularly British Columbia. This demonstrates that at that time Canada had an apartheid system, one for regular Canadians and one for Canadians of Asian descent, whom Canada was trying to get rid of.
It is hard to believe that as recently as 1950 the Chinese were prohibited from shopping in the Eaton store in Winnipeg. That is an astounding piece of Canadian history.
The Chinese had been disenfranchised. They had no vote. They basically had no status in this country, even though 500 Chinese had enlisted in the second world war and fought for this country. Upon returning to Canada they had no vote and no jobs. They were discriminated against. I am sure they wondered which country they had really fought for.
My father was 12 years old when he arrived in Canada in 1922. He arrived here by luck because in 1923 the exclusion act was put in place. He came to join his father in a place called Russell, Manitoba, where my grandfather had started a laundry, and ended up working in a restaurant.
The exclusion act created great hardships for Chinese families in this country. There were virtually no female Chinese in Canada at the time. The only way Chinese men could get married, raise a family and have kids was to go back to China. That is what they did. Every few years they would make a long journey by ship back to China. In essence, that is what happened to my family. I could say I have two families, one pre-World War II and the other post-World War II. I am a post-World War II baby.
My mother, my younger sister and I did not join my father until after the repeal of the exclusion act in 1947. In 1955 the immigration doors opened up. I was six at the time. I have been very fortunate ever since. My sister and I grew up in a little village called Gilbert Plains, where the whole community was concerned and involved in raising us two little Chinese kids. That is how I ended up in this place.
I want to thank the member for Durham and all members of the House for their support in this matter. We need to deal with this Chinese redress. It is long overdue. Bill C-333 simply asks for an acknowledgement of the past. Surely Canada is not afraid of its past history. We as a country must learn from our past.
There are possibly one million Chinese Canadians in Canada today. As we have read and heard, Chinese is the third language spoken here. There can be absolutely no excuse to delay the resolution of the Chinese redress. The government has to sit down with the Chinese community and work things out. We are not asking for a huge amount of money, just enough to set up a foundation to tell the story about the Chinese immigrants who came to this country. It is time for the government to sit down with the community and work this out.
A year ago the Government of New Zealand recognized this injustice and formed a charitable trust and took other initiatives. That country apologized to the Chinese community. That country knew it was long overdue and that it had to deal with the redress issue.
I thank all members for their support. I am sure that the Liberal government will act on this bill.