Chapter 13
Crying in the Wilderness (1984–93)
“The first thing you need to learn as a hunter is patience.”
In September 1987, an astonishing thing happened: the US Congress passed the Civil Liberties Act, which offered US$20,000 to each Japanese American who had been incarcerated during World War II. The Japanese American redress movement had been struggling for internment redress since the sixties, inspired in part by the US civil rights movement. At this point in Canada, the National Association of Japanese Canadians (NAJC) had been campaigning—to no avail—for ten years for reparation for the confiscation of property and internment during the war.177
On October 29, 1987, the NAJC reached out to other Canadians and organized a “Multicultural Rally” in Toronto at which fifteen ethnic organizations, including the Chinese Canadian National Council, demonstrated their solidarity with Japanese Canadians in their redress effort.
On August 10, 1988, US President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act into law. The following month, Reagan’s old friend Prime Minister Brian Mulroney followed suit, announcing a settlement with the NAJC on September 22 after a seventeen-hour negotiating session. The deal provided a payment of $21,000 for each Japanese Canadian affected. The NAJC had demanded individual compensation of $25,000. Descendants of deceased internees were also eligible for financial compensation.
The Chinese community followed the developments in the Japanese Canadian redress struggle with great interest and hoped that the government would use this example to settle with Chinese Canadians. There were good reasons to hope: Not unlike the history of Chinese Canadians’ struggle for redress, the Liberal and then the Progressive Conservative government had previously used every trick in the book to stall any settlement with Japanese Canadians. First they had refused to negotiate with the NAJC, then they played divide and rule by promoting a “Survivors’ Group” that did not want individual compensation redress for fear of a backlash. A Price Waterhouse report of May 1986178 estimated the loss to Japanese Canadians from confiscation of property and internment to be $443 million in 1986 dollars; Conservative Multiculturalism Minister Otto Jelinek rejected the report as irrelevant as well as the consequent NAJC redress proposal.
Head Tax Exclusion Act redress was the perfect campaign to unite the Chinese Canadian community; almost every single Chinese who had family that immigrated to Canada before 1923 was affected. You would think it would be easy to get 100 per cent of Chinese Canadians aboard but it was not.
Between the start of the redress campaign in 1984 and the year 1988, Chinese Canadian activists failed to come up with any real plans beside using the CCNC to get the redress effort going. We held many educational and organizing sessions within the community; networked internally to get organized, and externally with progressive Canadians in social and labour organizations; and we formed an alliance with the Japanese, Ukrainian, Italian and Indo Canadians who were also seeking redress for past injustices by the government. The government remained unresponsive.
But in 1988, buoyed by the sudden Japanese redress, we tried to take advantage of the political talk of the various Canadian parties and their candidates in the lead up to the November 21, 1988, general elections.
In Montreal, we organized the first public meeting on redress at the Kam Fung Restaurant and 250 people, including elderly Chinese head tax payers and their families, attended on November 3 to demand action from the invited politicians. James Wing spoke at the meeting in English and Chinese.179 In Toronto, 500 people rallied at Toronto’s city hall.
A month before the election, a CCNC delegation met with Multiculturalism Minister Gerry Weiner, who promised that the issue would be reported to the prime minister and then brought to the cabinet immediately after the election. Brian Mulroney was re-elected with a majority government. We were galvanized and felt the time had come for head tax redress.
We did the rounds of political lobbying. In Montreal, we met with Opposition MPs from Quebec—Raymonde Folco, Irwin Cotler and Marlene Jennings—and they all voiced their support. We got our old friend, Juanita Westmoreland-Traoré, as president of Conseil des Communautés culturelles et de l’immigration du Québec (Council of Cultural Communities and Immigration of Quebec), to write to Mulroney to expedite the redress. The CCNC initiated a national letter writing campaign to the prime minister, and articles and letters to the editor were sent to newspapers for publication. Many of the large newspapers took editorial stands in support of head tax redress.180
In April 1989, Montreal was one of the first cities to organize an independent Head Tax Exclusion Act Redress Committee outside of the CCNC. This committee was made up of some of the leading activists I had worked with—Jonas Ma, Sandy Yep, Cynthia Lam, Queenie Hum, Kenneth Cheung, Fo Niemi, Yat Lo, and later Walter Tom. We continued to work at the grassroots level and to establish contacts with other cultural communities, such as the Black and Jewish communities, and to consolidate the redress committee with regular information meetings. As an old time agit-prop strategist, I felt the longer the campaign took, the more time we would have to build up the movement and mobilize the community. However, even I didn’t think it would take as long as it did.
To put things in context, 1989 was when I started work on Moving the Mountain. A month before the redress benefit concert (mentioned in Chapter 12) was held in Montreal in November 1989, Charlie Chin performed in front of an appreciative audience in Ottawa. This was at the CCNC National Conference of October 6–9, which was full of hope and optimism that redress was just around the corner. Two of the largest member organizations sent powerful delegates: Bill Yee, president of the Vancouver Chinese Benevolent Association, spoke, as did Lillian To and Wilfred Wan from SUCCESS, 181 a Vancouver community service organization. The keynote speaker was Noel Kinsella, the top bureaucrat from the federal Ministry of Multiculturalism. Cynthia Lam and I also spoke, representing the Montreal Chinese Family Service and the Montreal Redress Committee. We were still speaking in generalities about the head tax redress campaign, without getting any closer to developing our demands and strategies. We had the naive notion that the government would do the right thing on its own.
By now, though, the word on redress was spreading throughout community organizations across Canada and the issue was being talked about both at the grassroots level and in the family associations and Chinese benevolent associations.
We also reached out to other Canadians.
“It seems inconceivable that we are not prepared to admit that this was a dark racist chapter in our nation’s history and commence negotiations for compensation,” Bob White, president of the Canadian Auto Workers, said in a letter to Mulroney in December 1988. And in July 1989, George Erasmus, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, told the prime minister: “On behalf of the Assembly of First Nations, I am writing to you and your government in support of the Chinese Canadian National Council and their demands for redress.”
Others who came out in support included the Canadian Council of Churches, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops, the Nova Scotia Human Rights Commission, and well-known individuals such as Pierre Berton, Margaret Atwood and June Callwood. Coverage in the mainstream media was sympathetic, with supportive editorials in the major newspapers, including The Globe and Mail, Toronto Star, Vancouver Sun and Montreal Gazette.
Despite all the support, the CCNC’s work on the redress campaign was interrupted following the clampdown of student protests in Tiananmen Square182 in Beijing, June 1989. The Chinese Canadian National Council previously had not dealt with issues outside of Canada and Gary Yee, president at the time, didn’t want to deal with “home country politics” or tell the Chinese government what to do.183 I shared Gary’s point of view. The CCNC had been founded as an anti-racist immigration and human rights organization focusing on Canadian struggles. However, the CCNC board included members who immigrated from Hong Kong and held the pre-1997 anti-China political views of the British colony and they wanted to take a strong stand against the Chinese government.
The CCNC came out criticizing the Chinese government and became the main clearinghouse for Ottawa’s funding and assistance for visa students from China who had been stranded in Canada due to the events back home.
The turn the CCNC took from concentrating on Canadian human rights issues to commenting on international human rights politics would have far more repercussions on the Chinese Canadian community than it would ever have on the Chinese government.
Committees to support the democracy movement in China sprang up in many cities across Canada. One of the more vocal ones, in Vancouver, was where Raymond Chan, later a minister in the Paul Martin government, cut his political teeth. I first met Chan in Vancouver in 1991. As I was trying to win him over to the redress campaign, he was trying to win me over to the democracy movement in China.
Flush with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to support the Chinese students, the CCNC produced a monthly Bulletin. In its inaugural issue of July 11, 1989, the CCNC publicized the services that it was providing for the Chinese students—services that they had never been able to get for Canadian human rights issues. The Bulletin said the CCNC had established “information, counseling and referral services for Chinese Visa students on their needs of immigration, employment, health and education.” Further:
The CCNC set up hot lines in five cities, Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton, and Vancouver. A Chinese Secretariat of CCNC was formed to coordinate this emergency project. An Advisory Committee from the national executive was formed to monitor and evaluate the program.184
Overall, CIDA budgeted $1.2 million to assist Chinese students in Canada through a contract with the Canadian Bureau for International Education, which subcontracted $354,106 to the CCNC to provide the services listed above and hire twelve intake contract staff. The CCNC, in the end, spent only $272,363 in helping 8,600 students by providing information, advice, referral, interpretation, workshops, and so on.185
Four days after the Tiananmen incident, Gary Yee and a delegation from the CCNC met Prime Minister Joe Clark in Ottawa to ask him to seek a motion in the United Nations Security Council that would condemn the “massacre” in China. On June 9, the CCNC was included in a full-page ad in The Globe and Mail that had been placed by a number of international human rights organizations and urged: (1) the UN to hold an emergency debate on the crisis in China; (2) the recall of Canada’s ambassador to China; and (3) the temporary suspension of trade initiatives, credits, cultural exchange, and technical and education ties with China. The inclusion of the CCNC in this ad campaign would later draw derision from some sectors of the Chinese community.
Grumblings were emanating from Canada’s Chinatowns about the role the CCNC was playing as an agent of the federal government. While there was support for the Chinese students in the community, there were many—especially those who had economic and cultural interests with the Chinese—who criticized the CCNC for taking an anti-China position. Cracks were starting to appear in the façade of the only national organization supposedly representing the Chinese Canadian community.
This excursion into “home country politics” fomented the divisions within the redress movement that successive Canadian governments would exploit.
Note that the CCNC traced its official start back to 1980, when it announced itself as the Chinese Canadian National Council for Equality. (It was created by the coalition of activists who had protested against the 1979 CTV W5 program that depicted Asian Canadian students in Canadian university as foreigners taking up spaces that should have gone to Canadian [i.e., white] students.186) Somewhere along the way the word “equality” dropped from the name. Ironically, due to the twist of language, the common Chinese name for the CCNC remained Ping Kuen Hui—Equality Council.
Those who came together to form the CCNC were young university graduates with progressive leftist leanings similar to the New Democratic Party. Right from day one, there was a generational, cultural and linguistic gap between the CCNC and the long-established lo wah kiu grassroots organizations in the Chinatowns of Canada (such as the family associations and the Chinese benevolent associations), which represented the head tax generation of conservative, Confucianist, Sun Yat-sen nationalists. Members of the older organizations spoke Toishanese from the rural culture of China; members of the CCNC were young, second-generation Canadians who spoke mainly English or young, educated Asian immigrants who spoke Cantonese and Mandarin. Although a few of the regional lo wah kiu groups joined the CCNC at the beginning, the CCNC was not able to tap into the immense resources of established Chinese organizations that represented the older generation. The family associations, the tongs, had united across the world outside of China on a clan or district basis; they felt they had no need to be part of other large organizations.
The events surrounding the founding of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians (NCCC) in the 1990s remain somewhat murky.
Some say it was founded in reaction to the CCNC taking an anti-China stand. I don’t subscribe wholly to that theory. The Tiananmen incident may have been a catalyst but the CCNC never represented the interests of the established conservative organizations. Times had changed, and the organizations that had served Chinese immigrants so well for so long now felt they needed to get themselves organized on a national scale—the CCNC, though, did not serve their purpose. They needed their own national congress to represent their views to government.
Two of the larger CCNC organizations from Vancouver—the social service organization SUCCESS and the Chinese Benevolent Association of Vancouver joined the congress at its founding.
Before the NCCC was founded, though, two national conferences of Chinese Canadians were held in 1991, in Winnipeg (March) and Toronto (May). The Toronto conference passed a resolution stating that it resolved to form the National Congress of Chinese Canadians “to act as spokesperson and to work for the redress of Head Tax.”187 Kai Tao, a Winnipeg delegate at the national conference in Toronto, explained why they did not call for individual financial compensation: “Some members of the community are afraid of racial backlash and negative reaction from other Canadians.”188
In 1992, more than 500 delegates representing 280 organizations met in Vancouver to officially form the National Congress of Chinese Canadians. At the founding convention, the congress stuck with the resolution. It would seek redress in the form of an apology and community compensation; it did not call for individual compensation.
The stance of the NCCC would offer the succession of governments in Ottawa an opportunity to play the “divide and rule” strategy to impede any redress. The CCNC was still very much a going concern and animosity, sometimes very personal, developed between the two national organizations. They were also divided politically, to reflect the federal political parties: NCCC members were known as Liberal Party supporters, whereas the CCNC mainly supported the NDP (although some were Progressive Conservative supporters).
A fifteen-member delegation of the NCCC (Conference) had a meeting with Gerry Weiner and his officials on December 2, 1991. Weiner used the birth of the NCCC and its policy of not supporting individual compensation as an excuse to impede redress on the part of the Mulroney government.
Attempts were made to seek a rapprochement on redress between the two national Chinese Canadian organizations—the congress and the council. Gary Yee and the CCNC Toronto office finally arranged a meeting with the NCCC leadership, including Toronto lawyer Ping Tan,189 on April 9, 1992. In his report on that meeting, Gary wrote:
The NCCC representatives appeared to have different interpretations of the May 1991 redress resolution. It was unclear whether individual financial redress was possible under their resolution. … As long as NCCC does not oppose individual financial redress in their statements to the media, public or government, then there really is no excuse for the government to delay.190
Shortly after, the NCCC began hardening its position against individual financial redress and clung to a position of community collective redress. Over the years, the NCCC invited representatives from the Chinese embassy and consulates across Canada to participate at its national conventions and other functions. Some critics even went as far as to claim that the NCCC was formed by the Chinese embassy to represent its interests in Canada. Red baiting of this sort is reminiscent of the old Soviet days with the embassy of the USSR seen as a source of international subversion.191 (In 2016, as the outgoing head of CSIS and national security advisor to Stephen Harper, Richard Fadden would fire a parting shot of innuendo—widely reported in the mainstream media but without any explicit proof—that Chinese Canadian politicians and people associated with the NCCC might be spying for China.192)
A little earlier, through a series of individual meetings with Minister Weiner, the CCNC and other member groups of the newly formed National Redress Alliance—such as the Italian Canadian Congress and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress—had come to one conclusion. All decided that putting pressure on Weiner to take action required homework, deeper grassroots consultation and organizing to develop a more concrete proposal to present to the government.
The CCNC organized a well-attended National Redress Conference in Toronto on March 16 and 17, 1991. The National Redress Committee of the CCNC was formed at this conference, a move that the community greeted with enthusiasm. However, a resolution was also passed regarding the redress campaign and, to the dismay of many outside of Toronto who did not attend the meeting, the resolution did not offer any concrete plans or demands to resolve the issue.
What may have influenced the decision to take a cautious approach was a March 12 letter from Vancouver that was issued to the CCNC and distributed at the conference. It was signed by five community luminaries, including lawyer Tommy Tao of the Chinese Benevolent Association. This letter offered a dissenting view to the CCNC’s position on individual financial redress, suggesting that the demand for such compensation be dropped. The letter included the hard-hitting statement: “The views of the claimants are tainted by self-interest.”
The letter named some of the organizations193 that would later join the congress and presented their positions, going on to propose that individual redress should take the form of a “certificate of honour” or a gold coin to be issued to each head tax payer or family. This suggestion would come back to haunt us. The letter concluded:
With so many really serious problems that we now face globally and nationally, we sincerely hope that the headtax issue can soon be resolved and put behind us, so that we can channel our energy towards the other much more pressing issues.
By July of the following year—1992—Tommy Tao, then an NDP candidate in the federal riding of Vancouver Quadra, seemed to have warmed to the CCNC position. As reported in the Vancouver Sun, “Tao called on all Chinese-Canadian community leaders to unite and support the CCNC’s proposal.”194
But, in the spring of 1991, several community leaders began attacking the stance of the CCNC on redress and its work in support of Chinese students after Tiananmen with “behind-the-back letters”195 to Prime Minister Mulroney openly criticizing the council. One of these leaders was Joseph Du196 of Winnipeg, who claimed that the CCNC was not being fair by excluding Winnipeg from the funding to aid students.197 In a letter to the prime minister, Du also criticized the leading role the CCNC was playing in redress, saying that the organization did not speak for the whole community. (Du, however, would later play a more positive role in the lead up to the 2006 redress struggle as co-chair of the NCCC.) Ping Tan, who became the founding national executive co-chair of the NCCC, also wrote a letter to Mulroney criticizing the CCNC on both the head tax and the Chinese student issues.198
This was the start of the personal animosity between the leadership of the CCNC and the NCCC.
Gary Yee, who had dedicated his time and energy to the redress movement for seven years, only to have some johnny-come-latelies to the struggle complain to the prime minister, was personally hurt.199 These types of public criticisms only served to provide an excuse for the government to delay redress with the often-repeated admonition: “Your community needs to get together and let us know what you want.”
Following up on the warm reception it had received at its founding, the CCNC’s National Redress Committee sought feedback from community organizations across Canada so it could draft a meaningful redress proposal for government. In a June 25 memo to the committee’s policy subcommittee, Yantay Tsai of Winnipeg, editor of the Manitoba Chinese Post, emphatically and boldly stated: “Those who do not consider themselves victimized have the freedom of choice to decline redress but they have no right to deprive other victims’ right for redress.”200
Activists in Montreal were seen as independent leftist hardliners. We had started to grumble internally among ourselves about the lack of strong leadership from the Toronto-centric CCNC, so we set about reinforcing our own local activities, such as uniting with individuals and organizations within the community, reaching out to other communities (Black, Jewish and Japanese), lobbying local politicians for their support, and educating the wider society through articles and interviews in the media. We stood by our principled position that the victims of racism needed to be individually redressed as an issue of justice and human rights.
Hoping to prop up the CCNC’s hand in dealing with the government, I sent a letter to Gary Yee on December 5, 1990, saying that the CCNC must be “ideologically prepared to take on the government,” and that
Unless we settle this issue, it will be difficult for us to be taken seriously in other vital areas such as employment equity, race relations and immigration. If we cave into the government now, we would only reinforce government attitudes that the Chinese community is docile and easily won over.
Two weeks later, Jacky Pang, CCNC national executive director, mailed a letter to Chinese Family Service executive director Cynthia Lam calling for a need to “redefine the structure of the Montreal Redress Committee.” Pang wrote:
Since we are going to extend the membership of the Committee to all organizations and individuals, it is anticipated the executive of the enlarged Committee may need to go through a process of democratic nomination and election, rather than by default that William Dere is the Chair of the Committee.
Ouch!
Shortly after, the Chinese Neighbourhood Society—one of the two member chapters of the CCNC in Montreal—became more involved in redress. That was a good thing. Society board members William Lai and Walter Tom joined the redress committee. I was re-elected as committee chair.
Strengthened with the new forces, Montreal Redress Committee members Jonas Ma, Walter Tom and I met on June 25, 1991, with the Montreal Head Tax Action Committee, which had recently been created by the organizations that supported the National Conference of Chinese Canadians. In a July 2 memo to the CCNC–NRC, I wrote that the NCCC-affiliated action committee reflected an older section of the community who were associated with Chinatown businesses, restaurants and family associations. We should continue to reach out to this group since they were now committed to fighting for some form of compensation. However, it was up to us to set the agenda and propose concrete action. “We should organize a National Redress Rally on Parliament Hill this Fall,” I suggested in the memo. “I am sure we can mobilize hundreds of elderly to participate.”
I could see why the CCNC people in Toronto were not inclined to work with the NCCC. Some in the CCNC accused the NCCC of sowing division in the community over redress. The Montreal Head Tax Action Committee was only one of a number of head tax action committees that the NCCC had created in the major cities as a counter to the redress committees associated with the CCNC. The division in the community over redress now had an organizational form.
I am sure the government revelled at these developments to stall any settlement.
At the beginning of 1991, the CCNC sent out a survey to the three thousand head tax registrants. When the CCNC released the results—gathered from 867 returned questionnaires—it turned out that 90 per cent of the respondents came from three cities: Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal.201 Also, 45 per cent were head tax payers and/or their spouses; 45 per cent were descendants of head tax payers; and 10 per cent came from organizations and other individuals. What the respondents wanted broke down this way:
- 90 per cent were strongly in favour of some form of compensatory redress; only 1 per cent was satisfied with just an apology.
- 38 per cent believed that redress should only go to the head tax payers or widows; 62 per cent wanted individual redress to go to the descendants (children and grandchildren), but only 30 per cent of the head tax payers and 21 per cent of the widows supported financial redress for descendants.
- 85 per cent wanted the $500 refund plus interest. But 75 per cent wanted more than $500 in financial individual redress. Just 30 per cent of the respondents would be satisfied with the total amount of $23 million as a symbolic return of the head tax collected, while 70 per cent said the final amount should not be capped at $23 million.202
The survey results, released by June 1991, offered the CCNC–NRC powerful support as it tried to get the government to the negotiating table. However, the survey also showed that of the two thousand head tax payers who were alive in 1984, only nine hundred were still alive in 1991.
While the surveys were still coming in, there were developments on the redress front on the West Coast.
In March 1991, Victor Yukmun Wong and others, like Charles Mow of the Chinese Canadian Historical Society, formed the BC Coalition of Head Tax Payers, Spouses, and Descendants “to advocate on behalf of the BC head tax registrants.” It was a time when the “established organizations in Vancouver were either reluctant or unable/incapable of furthering the redress campaign,” Victor, co-chair of the new coalition, wrote.203 Victor was an NDP activist; other well-known community activists, like radio personality Hanson Lau and cable TV’s Sid Tan, later joined the organization. The coalition was credited with re-launching the redress movement on the West Coast, where it was able to draw more than one thousand people to meetings.
At the meeting held in Vancouver on July 28, 1991, with more than two hundred people in attendance, the coalition ratified demands and positions that included wanting the CCNC–NRC to adopt a position in favour of individual financial redress. They called for a payment of $20,000 per head tax certificate, going to the head tax payer, the surviving spouse or surviving descendants.
The BC organization disagreed with the CCNC position of a total compensation package topped at $23 million, saying the CCNC “should have gone to the grass-roots first before arriving at this position in 1988.”
The BC coalition also called for an immediate national campaign to bring the government to the negotiating table. Public meetings were held in major cities across Canada—1,100 attended in Vancouver, 280 in Montreal and 350 in Toronto. Newspaper articles by Gary Yee, John Tang, Victor Wong and me appeared in both mainstream and community newspapers.
Then, on August 10, 1991, the Metro Toronto Redress Committee put forward its position in a memo to the CCNC–NRC: It called for a symbolic return of the $23 million—face value of the head tax collected. It wanted the CCNC–NRC to negotiate specifically for redress of the HTEA and to work in mutual support with the other communities seeking redress—Ukrainian, Italian and Sikh Canadians. The Metro Committee supported individual compensation to include the surviving head tax payers, widows or children based on one certificate–one compensation. Community compensation would focus on services and homes for seniors, anti-racism education and race relations.
A very interesting letter came out of another part of the country that year. I received a copy, dated May 14, 1991, and addressed to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney. The letter, signed by a number of influential Chinese Canadians—including Manitoba Chinese Post editor Yantay Tsai—called on the government to deal with the redress issue as a gross violation of human rights in Canada. As such, it “must be dealt with from a national perspective of all Canadians as opposed to a community perspective.” The letter also said:
We are deeply concerned that many Chinese Canadian community organizations, which have hitherto shown no interest in the Head Tax and the Exclusion Act issue, have suddenly in recent months taken positions and demanded community compensation.204
The letter called on the Mulroney government to start negotiating with the CCNC, the only national human rights organization in the Chinese community and to whom over three thousand head tax payers and families had given a mandate to negotiate on their behalf. The letter concluded by urging the government not to use a “divide and rule” strategy.
On the evening of October 8, 1991, Gary Yee called me to confirm that we would be meeting Minister Gerry Weiner on October 28, and asked if I could bring James Wing. We discussed finalizing our proposal so that we could present it to Weiner at the meeting. The next night, Victor Wong of the BC Coalition called from Vancouver to get me onside for their $20,000 individual redress proposal.
I immediately called a meeting of the Montreal Redress Committee to firm up our position. At this committee meeting, on October 16, 1991, we decided to take the positions that I outlined in the memo reporting on our meeting to Gary Yee: the main points included standing firm in support of compensation for the descendants of the head tax payers. We supported the Metro Toronto Redress Committee’s suggestion of $5,000 per claimant, which would be part of the symbolic $23-million total compensation. We would propose a deadline of July 1, 1992, for a final settlement.
We all had an overly optimistic deadline—to negotiate an agreement by Canada Day, 1992, the 125th anniversary of Confederation.
Chinese Canadian war veterans had played a key role in repealing the Exclusion Act and winning the vote for the Chinese in Canada. However, they played a reactionary role when it came to fighting for redress for the individual head tax payers and their families.
In 1991, the hundred-member Chinese Canadian War Veterans Association voted by a slim majority to reject the concept of any individual compensation for the victims. They carried their loyalty to the country to such an extreme that it was not in the best interest of the actual victims of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act.
There were a handful of common objections to redress heard within and outside the Chinese community. Head tax claimants were motivated by self-interest and greed. Chinese immigrants paid the head tax willingly and now their families were successfully benefitting from Canadian society. The government had the legal right to restrict Chinese immigration to Canada and did not have the money or the legal duty to redress wrongs from the last century. There would be a backlash against Chinese Canadians from the mainstream media and the larger community for the aforementioned reasons.
To put things into context, the counter-arguments that we presented at the time included noting that when Dak Leon Mark first approached Margaret Mitchell in 1983, he was motivated by a sense of justice, equality and human rights; he wanted the $500 head tax refunded to him only because no other group of immigrants had to pay. Also, Chinese immigrants had not paid the head tax willingly—they were not given a choice. The government had the legal right to restrict and ban Chinese immigrants from Canada and now it must be held accountable.
The age-old argument that the government did not have the money was, in our opinion, merely a smokescreen. The $23 million the government had collected as head tax was equivalent to over $1 billion today. Essentially, Chinese immigrants contributed to paying Canada’s debt and reducing the deficit with the head tax. The government should show that it cannot profit from racism. The backlash, we said, would come from those who did not understand. Our community and the government had the duty to explain our history in Canada. The government was denying our history as long as it denied redress. There had been no backlash when the Mulroney government redressed the Japanese Canadian community for internment during World War II with over $400 million paid as compensation. The fact that a Conservative government in Ottawa and Ronald Reagan in Washington were justifying their redress of the Japanese took some of the sting away from any redneck objections.
Armed with the feedback and consultations from across the country and the survey from the head tax registrants, Gary Yee prepared for our October 28, 1991, meeting with Minister Gerry Weiner. Days beforehand, Ping Tan cancelled a meeting with Gary, so Gary and the CCNC–NRC went into the meeting with Weiner without any clarification from the NCCC.
On the morning of October 28, I drove to Ottawa with James Wing as the Montreal contingent of the CCNC–NRC. James was an energetic seventy-eight-year-old at the time and probably the youngest of the surviving head tax payers. He had been one of the first lo wah kiu to become active in the redress campaign. During the ride to Ottawa, he spoke about his friendship with my father and grandfather, giving me new insights into what life had been like during those years.
Delegates205 from Toronto (led by Gary Yee), Ottawa and Halifax conferred with us in a Chinatown restaurant in Ottawa to prepare for the 3:30 p.m. meeting.
We arrived at the official meeting early and waited patiently in one of the wood-panelled parliamentary conference rooms. Weiner then came in with his entourage of half a dozen aides. We introduced James Wing, and James presented his poignant history to the minister. Weiner appeared visibly moved and said he would try his best to find a solution. When Gary presented our proposal, Weiner was more impassive; he was noncommittal and said he would study it.
Our main points included wanting an all-party parliamentary resolution to acknowledge the injustice and racism inherent in the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act; a letter of acknowledgment and regret from the prime minister to each holder of a head tax certificate (including the descendants); and individual symbolic financial redress in the sum of $23 million. The proposal also demanded financial redress of $10,000 per head tax certificate to eligible children of deceased head tax payers without surviving spouses. Other demands included community financial redress of $5 million for a Chinese Canadian community trust.
All these demands were reasonable and fair. At the meeting I argued that the federal justice minister should also participate in the negotiations for a settlement since this was a question of justice.
On January 5, 1992, Gary Yee flew to Vancouver and addressed a meeting organized by the BC Coalition, attended by over 1,200 people. Weiner must have taken note; two weeks later, he met with Victor Wong in Vancouver and said he would present the CCNC–NRC proposal to the prime minister soon.
Gary Yee was open to collaborating with the National Conference of Chinese Canadians (the precursor of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians, which would be officially founded in September 1992). But, in a memo to the National Redress Committee on March 26, Gary wrote that he had tried to meet with the NCCC’s head Ping Tan without any success. Gary added that he would continue trying to obtain a meeting with the Congress leadership to push for an agreement that financial redress for the elderly head tax claimants was a priority.
In a later face-to-face meeting, Minister Weiner assured Gary Yee that his department’s redress package was almost ready to be sent to the prime minister. All member chapters were urged to send letters to the prime minister and to hold public forums to update the community on the progress of the campaign. Plans were underway to hold a Redress Rally on Parliament Hill on Victoria Day.
In a March 24, 1992 letter to Weiner, Gary expressed concern that funding for the Canadian Race Relations Foundation, which was to have been part of the Japanese internment settlement, had been deferred:
It is offensive to the Japanese Canadian community and all their redress supporters. Furthermore, how can we expect your government to enter into good faith negotiations with us on Chinese Canadian redress if you fail to honour or respect past redress agreements.
Gary urged the minister to begin the negotiations on head tax redress as soon as possible. He also actively participated in the National Redress Alliance of other affected communities.206
A couple of months later—on Victoria Day, May 18—the redress rally on Parliament Hill was an extraordinary success (as described in the vignette at the top of this chapter).
“One of my personal highlights was the march, when we brought the seniors on the bus to Ottawa,” said Montreal human rights lawyer Walter Tom, who travelled on the bus with his grandfather, Hum Wing Goon, a head tax payer who came to Canada in 1921. “We talked about the awakening of the community. That was something we’ve never done before. This was an active thing.”207
James Wing spoke passionately on behalf of head tax payers; Mrs. Lee, a widow from Toronto,208 spoke calmly in a moving speech on behalf of the spouses of deceased head tax payers; Walter Tom made a stirring speech in French on behalf of the Montreal Redress Committee. Japanese Canadian redress activist Art Miki, who flew in from Winnipeg to support our campaign, also spoke. The Moving the Mountain team travelled with the two buses from Montreal and filmed the rally. There were more than 350 people, mostly seniors.
Many saw this as a turning point in the redress campaign, as it was the first time that the Chinese Canadian community was taking such direct action and presenting itself before Parliament. The next day, a delegation that included head tax payers, spouses and widows remained in Ottawa to lobby MPs and attended Question Period, where they were acknowledged in the gallery by the Opposition. Some of the delegation met Gerry Weiner in the lobby of the House of Commons, where he confirmed that he had made his recommendations to the prime minister but refused to disclose any details.
We would not get to know the government proposal until a year later.
To maintain the redress pressure on the Prime Minister’s Office, member chapters of the CCNC were urged to write letters to the prime minister demanding the government start negotiating an expeditious and fair settlement.
The National Congress of Chinese Canadians finally held its long-anticipated official founding conference on the same weekend as the CCNC rally on Parliament Hill. Gary Yee and Victor Wong wrote letters urging its leaders to clarify their position on redress and to not oppose individual redress. But there was no discussion on this at the conference. The newly formed organization also suffered an early split as the pro-Taiwan (Kuomintang) section of the Chinese Benevolent Association pulled out of the congress.209
Then, in the spring of 1993, articles began appearing in major Canadian newspapers to explain the nature of the head tax campaign and why it was so urgent to seek redress for the remaining elderly head tax payers. This media blitz by the CCNC–NRC was also designed to pressure the Mulroney government into starting redress negotiations with our community.
“Redress will enable our community to leap confidently into a new era as full citizens in an inclusive Canada. Redress will provide justice to our seniors,” Gary Yee wrote in an op-ed article in The Globe and Mail. “Redress will help demonstrate that our government should not profit from racism.”210 Gary’s grandfather had paid the $500 head tax on arriving in Canada in 1917, but had died in 1989—five years after Brian Mulroney had promised that if he were elected, his government would resolve the issue.
During 1993, Mulroney was about to leave office and we again put our hopes on politicians to live up to their promises made during election campaigns or in a period of legacy building. Mulroney never lived up to his promise; seeing his popularity sinking in the polls, he resigned from office on June 25, 1993.
The redress campaign experienced its own change of leadership.
In September 1993, Gary Yee stepped down from his position in the campaign to accept an Ontario government tribunal appointment. He had dedicated himself to the head tax campaign from the start, serving as national president of the CCNC and then chair of the CCNC–NRC. Gary graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School and had served as the executive director of the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic. He remained a redress strategist in the background but could not be a public figure for the campaign due to his new job. I knew Gary to be a very passionate and diplomatic spokesman for the Chinese Canadian community. I would not have had as much patience and I would have suffered a lot more frustration in dealing with the government if it weren’t for his moderating and calming influence.
Amy Go, national president of the CCNC, filled in for Gary as chair of the National Redress Committee until February 1994 when Victor Wong of the BC Coalition replaced her. I remained the vice-chair of the CCNC–NRC.
As a parting gesture before leaving office, Brian Mulroney, through Gerry Weiner, offered a lame attempt to appease the three communities seeking redress with similar proposals.
On May 18, 1993, Weiner met with CCNC representatives in Toronto and presented the government’s unilateral redress settlement, which did not address any of the demands that we had proposed in October 1991. What Weiner offered was laughable, if not sad, but apparently his bureaucrats must have gotten wind of the March 1991 Tommy Tao memo requesting the government present each head tax payer and family with a certificate of honour or a gold coin. That was exactly what the government offered to settle this long-standing injustice: a certificate, a medal, a statement of apology, and plaques or displays at the National Archives.
The Chinese community immediately held consultation meetings in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal, and we overwhelmingly rejected this insulting offer. At the Montreal public meeting on May 26, 1993, James Wing spoke eloquently, as my notes attest:
What did I do to deserve a medal? I won’t go to Ottawa to accept it. We will just be used by the government. Why did we spend so much time to get nothing? We can’t let them off the hook. If they don’t want to settle, then let history be the judge!
I said at the time that our head tax payers already had a certificate—the head tax certificate—so we didn’t need another one. Kenda Gee would later call the medal “the Tommy Tao gold coin.”
The other communities in the National Redress Alliance—the Ukrainian and Italian Canadians—also rejected the government proposal. Mulroney’s attempt at a redress legacy was ignominiously inadequate.
The CCNC–NRC sent a strongly worded formal response to Mulroney on May 27, 1993, after the community consultation meetings with head tax registrants in the three largest cities. “As we expected, your proposal has been strongly rejected,” we wrote. “Many of our elderly head tax payers and widows have labeled it an insult. … We have not fought for redress since 1984 in order to accept a piece of paper and a little trinket before an election.”
However, the National Congress of Chinese Canadians did not reject the government offer. At its Executive Committee meeting, on May 29–30, 1993, the NCCC passed a resolution endorsing the “issue of commemorative coins, plaques and stamps” and requested the government establish an endowment fund of a “reasonable amount” for taking care of the surviving head tax payers, promoting racial harmony, and promoting other activities that would benefit the Chinese Canadian community.211 In a letter sent to Gerry Weiner, Ping Tan wrote, “The Congress is pleased that the Federal Government is moving toward a resolution of the issue.”212
The national media had extensive coverage of redress following the government proposal, with many editorials supporting the community’s just demands for financial compensation. Mulroney stepped down as prime minister in June 1993 and Kim Campbell assumed power. Monique Landry, the new minister of Canadian Heritage, would be in charge of the redress issue. We had to start over again with the new players on the scene.
I came to the realization at the time that it was the federal bureaucracy that was holding back any redress. I sensed that they had been burned with the Japanese internment redress settlement, in which they grossly underestimated the amount to be paid out to Japanese Canadian victims. (The total compensation due to the unjust internment was $416 million.213) That is why, at my final meeting with Gerry Weiner, he talked about the “floodgates.” But, at the same time, he told me that for us to win redress we needed “to light a fire under the pants of government.”
We needed bold political leadership in Ottawa to overcome the bureaucratic resistance. In the final analysis, redress would have to be, above all, a significant political act.