Chapter 15
Coming in from the Wilderness (2001–6)
“Though fierce as tigers soldiers be,
Battles are won by strategy.”
After three years of legal research and preparations, including numerous meetings with the plaintiffs, a court date was finally set for the class action suit on behalf of head tax payers, spouses and descendants—April 24–25, 2001. Much interest was stirred up in the media, especially the Chinese language press. Even the National Congress of Chinese Canadians had retained a Toronto lawyer, Richard Woolsford, for the possibility of intervening in court during the Chinese Canadian National Council–backed case.235
In court, Mary Eberts and Avvy Go, the lawyers for the plaintiffs, argued that the discriminatory legislation “created profound and enduring racial prejudice against persons of Chinese descent in Canada,” in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Second, the government had benefitted from “unjust enrichment” due to the discriminatory laws for the head tax paid by 81,000 Chinese immigrants. (The face value of the $23 million in head tax is estimated at $1 billion today.)
The government lawyers contemptuously asked that the case be thrown out on the grounds that it was “frivolous, vexatious, or an abuse of power.”
On July 9, 2001, Justice Peter Cumming rendered his judgment. The Charter, he said, “cannot apply retroactively or retrospectively.” On the second argument of “unjust enrichment,” the judge ruled that the various forms of the Chinese Immigration Act through the years were constitutional and therefore the enrichment was legal.
The case was dismissed. However, the justice also concluded that the legislation had been “patently discriminatory against persons of Chinese origin” and continued:
By contemporary Canadian morals and values, these pieces of legislation were both repugnant and reprehensible.…
It may well be that Parliament should consider providing redress for Chinese Canadians who paid the Head Tax or were adversely affected by the various Chinese Immigration Acts.236
The dismissal was not unexpected but we were encouraged by the judge’s comments. However, to complete the legal process, the judgment was appealed to the Ontario Court of Appeal, which heard the case a year later, on June 10–11, 2002. It was then, on June 10, that Justice James Macpherson made an infamous remark from the bench: “The Chinese head tax payers were happy to be here and had already received redress through their ability to remain in Canada,” he said. “Paying the head tax is made all worthwhile when one can see their granddaughter playing first string cello for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra.”237
The stereotyping of the Chinese in Canada seemed to have reached the level of a learned judge.
The CCNC lodged a complaint to the Canadian Judicial Council against Justice Macpherson for his remarks. The council dismissed the complaint on October 28, 2002, stating:
It is understandable that litigants who have experienced an injustice would be dismayed to see their attempt to seek redress aggressively questioned by the very judges who must rule on the matter. It is understandable, but it is an inevitable consequence of adversarial appellate advocacy. To the extent they (the remarks) have offended “any individual or group”, he (the judge) has apologized.238
The Ontario Court of Appeal agreed with Justice Cumming’s judgment and the appeal against the verdict in the class action suit was dismissed on September 13, 2002. As in the original case, no costs were awarded which meant that the plaintiffs did not have to pay court costs. The plaintiffs and their lawyers decided to ask for leave to argue the class action case at the Supreme Court of Canada, but on April 24, 2003, the Supreme Court issued a ruling not to hear the case. The legal process terminated at that point.
That was not the end of the Macpherson matter, however. In her excellent paper, “Playing Second Fiddle to Yo-Yo Ma,” Avvy Go later wrote about how she felt at the time of Justice Macpherson’s comments:
While Ms. (Mary) Eberts, the plaintiffs’ lead counsel, was trying her very best to point out to the learned judge that his comments were nothing more than “happy immigrant” stereotype, the other counsel, yours truly, a Chinese Canadian immigrant, was in so much anger that I had to control my urge to start screaming at the top of my lungs as if in doing so, I could make the judge understand how much his words were hurting me and the people in his courtroom.
How ironic that it is at the very moment when members of a minority group are appealing to the conscience of our court to hear their sufferings and heed their call for justice, that they have to witness in first hand the utmost failure of our legal system to even acknowledge their status as a minority group and hence the inequality that they have experienced and continue to experience in our society.239
Further, Avvy wrote, “If Chinese Canadians were indeed doing well, perhaps it would have been easier to swallow this line of reasoning.” But, she said, the reality was a lot different from the model minority myth:
Just like all immigrants of colour, many Chinese immigrants are struggling in low-waged, non-unionized jobs. Those who came with professional background and post-secondary education are unable to practice the professions … because of systemic discrimination in the Canadian job market.240
Those involved in the Head Tax and Exclusion Act redress movement had all supported going to court. We had been feeling politically powerless without any access to government, and this method, we had felt, would garner some publicity and gain some sympathy from the public. People associated with the court case agreed that it was a long shot and had hoped that the use of the courts was a process that would rejuvenate the redress movement—which it did.
Working in parallel with the legal process, others were looking beyond the courts, believing full well that the litigation would produce empty results. Using the medium of email, a new generation of activists241 with fresh energy was impatiently calling for a revival of the campaign in the political arena. This new group was untainted by the personal hostility between the CCNC and the NCCC.
In early 2001, feeling frustrated with the lack of progress at the national level, Alice Leung of the Edmonton chapter of the CCNC and Kenda Gee proposed a Redress Foundation composed of people from across the country free from the history of allegiances to either of the two existing national organizations. As was typical for Canada’s regional divisions, they wanted to shift the centre of the redress universe from Toronto and put it in the Prairies and Quebec.
In a March 21, 2001 email to me, Avvy Go was quick to dismiss this idea. Avvy was an “old guard” of the CCNC and there was no way that she would work with people from the NCCC, which she believed was formed to undermine the CCNC and its redress and human rights work.242 The critical mass of the redress movement was still in Toronto and Vancouver, where the majority of head tax families resided. Without their participation, an independent redress organization would not succeed. However, the idea percolated with me and other people who wanted a more aggressive approach to redress. This thinking would shortly result in a different organizational form.
In 2000, I had stepped back from the CCNC National Redress Committee (CCNC–NRC), feeling burnt out and disappointed with a lack of results. Walter Tom and Kenneth Cheung stepped up admirably as representatives from Montreal and Quebec in the CCNC–NRC.
In February 2001, Joseph Du, co-chair of the NCCC for the Prairies, phoned me from Winnipeg; he was coming to Montreal and wanted to meet May Chiu and me. He had read an article that May and I wrote calling for unity within our community around the redress issue. Meeting us with Jack Lee of Montreal, Joe Du wanted to know if we could form some kind of working relationship between the CCNC and the NCCC.
Joe Du and Jack Lee were well known among the NCCC organizations in Montreal’s Chinatown, so every time Joe came into town, we would meet just outside Chinatown at the St. Hubert BBQ at Complexe Desjardins, as he feared being seen conspiring with CCNC operatives. We told Joe that we did not represent the CCNC and in fact, by this time, May and I had been very critical of the CCNC’s lack of leadership and direction in the redress campaign.
We didn’t think much would come out of this meeting, but we didn’t know that in the NCCC, Du was waging a campaign to form a broader unity around redress. He invited me to address the tenth-anniversary annual conference of the NCCC in Toronto on September 1, 2001. I was rejuvenated with the thought of building a united front.
Prior to the conference, Du and I continued our discussions and agreed to a resolution that he would present. Du’s resolution called for a common front of Chinese Canadian organizations around redress and the basis of this common front would include individual compensation for the surviving head tax payers or widows and compensation to a community foundation. Unfortunately, Du was not at the conference to defend his resolution. I suspected things hadn’t gone his way with the national leadership.
In my speech, I urged conference delegates to take this opportunity to come together and push the government for justice for the individual head tax payers as well as for the community as a whole, trying to marry the positions of the CCNC and the NCCC. I tried to make it clear that I was there as the son and grandson of head tax payers and not as a member of the CCNC.
Immediately after the conference, I wrote a report that I circulated to the CCNC and independent redress activists. In the conclusion, I tried to put a positive spin on the conference:
There is internal dissent inside the NCCC on redress, on the united front, and compensation issues. There are NCCC people in individual cities that we can work with, Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton and even Vancouver. The Vancouver delegate in his regional report mentioned the work of Victor Wong and the VACC (Vancouver Association of Chinese Canadians) as activities on the west coast.
… It is important to talk to people on the ground, face to face contacts with all spectrums of the community to develop a working relationship and to enhance unity.
Joe Du, Jack Lee, May Chiu and I continued to collaborate to develop a statement of unity, which we originally dubbed the “Quebec–Manitoba Declaration” and later renamed the “Unity Declaration” when other regions of Canada participated in the unity effort.
On the international front, Walter Tom went to the UN World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, in September 2001 to further publicize the redress campaign and to win international support. Edmonton’s Kenda Gee kept the international redress flames burning with Poll Tax redress activists in New Zealand. The Edmonton Redress Committee issued a press statement on February 8, 2002, calling on the Canadian government to follow the example of New Zealand and apologize to Canadian head tax payers. A few days later, on the Lunar New Year (February 12), New Zealand Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologized to Chinese New Zealanders for the Poll Tax.
I had made a mistake in Moving the Mountain in saying that Canada was the only country that had a head tax, as Kenda pointed out. He noted that both New Zealand and Canada took the idea of the racist tax from Australia, which he believed violated the treaty between China and the British Empire. “If Canada can borrow the white supremacist policies from another in history,” he wrote, “surely, it can make the same effort to reconcile its mistakes from the action of another nation.”243
Among redress events in 2002, the redress community was active in pursuing political action, with Kenda nurturing relationships with Canadian Alliance and Conservative politicians in Edmonton and Calgary.
Even though I didn’t take part in many CCNC conference calls, I was still getting the minutes. The CCNC had firmed up the individual compensation at $20,000, which was a precedent number set by the Japanese Canadian redress and other settlements, such as for merchant seamen. The CCNC concentrated their efforts on Sheila Copps, heritage minister, who had promised to work on redress while she was in Opposition. Inky Mark, Canadian Alliance/Conservative MP for Dauphin, Manitoba, was collaborating with the NCCC to draft a private member’s bill on redress. I convinced the CCNC leadership to contact Inky or they would be left behind. May Cheng, CCNC president, eventually did urge Inky to include compensation for the head tax payers and families in his bill (but he didn’t do so).
“Demonstrations and rallies are the actions of the politically powerless,”244 Gary Yee once said to me. He operated with the view that redress could only be won if we could win over to our side a political champion powerful enough to affect change. Nevertheless, a determined group of seniors from Montreal saw the need to take some action.
It was time for another head tax rally on Parliament Hill. This time, there were no head tax payers involved; now the marchers were the elderly descendants who were seeking redress for their families. New activists in Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal began organizing and mobilizing for the October 29, 2002 rally. May Chiu, who was at the time the executive director of the Montreal Chinese Family Service, organized the volunteers to fill up a bus, paid for by our activist businessman, Kenneth Cheung. The rally drew more than one hundred people.
May was critical of the CCNC speakers, who spoke only in English—she had to translate the speeches into Chinese for the elderly. The rally, though, drew a number of politicians, including Heritage Minister Sheila Copps, Multiculturalism Minister Jean Augustine and NDP MPs Margaret Mitchell and Alexa McDonough. Inside the House that afternoon, the rally was the subject of intervention by James Moore from the Canadian Alliance, and Bloc Québécois’ Madeleine Dalphond-Guiral, who took the opportunity to again demand the Chrétien government resolve this long-standing issue.
After the rally, May Cheng and Yew Lee met with Copps and Augustine to try to convince the ministers to review the government’s policy of “no apology, no compensation.” At the meeting, the two ministers said they would be “willing to receive a proposal for redress from the CCNC.”245 Cynthia Pay, the new national president of the CCNC, sent a letter to Copps, attaching the latest CCNC proposal, which was similar to the one given to Sheila Finestone back in 1994, with the exception that the demand for compensation for widows and descendants was not explicitly stated. The issue of compensation for descendants had always been problematic for the CCNC and that led to various ambivalent positions throughout the years.
The 2002 CCNC proposal requested:
- Individual financial redress in the amount of $21,000 per claim, with specific eligibility criteria to be negotiated;
- Further individual redress of a symbolic nature, including:
- Letter of acknowledgment and regret from the prime minister of Canada to each holder of a head tax certificate, including the surviving spouse or descendants in circumstances where the head tax payer is deceased; and
- Gold Mountain coin in the denomination of $500; and
- Other non-financial redress to be negotiated; and
- Community or collective redress—with a focus on educational, social and cultural activities or programs, and in particular, projects which are beneficial to seniors or which promote anti-racism and cross-cultural understanding.
A month later, on December 10, Inky Mark tabled his private member’s bill C-333, calling on the government to negotiate with the National Congress of Chinese Canadians on restitution, without any mention of other organizations and without raising the issue of individual compensation to the victims of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act. Derek Lee, a Liberal MP from Toronto, had also proposed a private member’s bill to resolve head tax redress a decade beforehand without any success.
By late 2002, the Montreal Redress Committee had grown weary of the Toronto-centric CCNC leadership and met to discuss what needed to be done to move the struggle forward.246 Nevertheless, we affirmed the legitimacy of the National Redress Committee and the participation of the CCNC as an equal member of the national committee, since we knew unity at this time was critical. We set to work on coalition building with organizations and individuals in our community to support the NRC. This coalition would include individual members of the NCCC and local organizations belonging to the NCCC that shared our views.
We reaffirmed our position to demand redress and compensation for the head tax payers, as well as for the widows and first-generation descendants or to the estate of the deceased head tax payers. This latter point of the estate was at Kenneth Cheung’s insistence; he asserted that descendants of the head tax payers also suffered from the immoral laws and deserved compensation.
We disagreed with the CCNC’s November 12, 2002 position paper that seemed to be soft on the demand to compensate widows and descendants. We knew there were only a handful of head tax payers still alive across Canada, so we wanted to maintain the individual human presence of the widows and direct descendants as living survivors of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act and to present their names and faces to the public. We pegged the dollar amount for individual compensation at no less than $20,000, an amount awarded in other redress situations. We didn’t think much of Inky Mark’s private member’s bill, and preferred just to let it die a natural death. We tried several times to get Paul Martin to visit James Wing, who was now residing at a seniors’ residence in Martin’s LaSalle riding.
Strategists in the redress movement saw 2003 as a good year to build momentum by taking advantage of the federal government’s gradual decline into disarray. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien was embroiled in the sponsorship scandal early in the year, and in a bitter internal struggle with supporters of Finance Minister Paul Martin. Chrétien was becoming a lame duck.
May Chiu and I continued our discussions with Joe Du through his frequent visits to Montreal, telephone calls and emails. I drafted a declaration, which I asked Joe to endorse. He still maintained the position that by not asking for individual compensation, we could unite the community around collective redress. May and I were just as stubborn that the actual victims of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act must be compensated as a matter of justice. I remember in a moment of exasperation I said to Joe, “If we don’t win redress for our elders, the community deserves nothing.”
May, from her position at Chinese Family Service and as a leader in Chinatown, continued to work with individuals and organizations associated with the NCCC. After a meeting with some NCCC people from the Chinese YMCI and the Montreal Chinese United Centre, she was convinced that we should be working with them on redress based on two simple principles of unity:
- Support the Congress demand for an apology and collective compensation;
- Congress will not oppose the head tax payers and descendants’ efforts to claim individual compensation.
In an email to May, I said, “The problem lies with the Toronto people from both sides, Congress and CCNC with animosity going way back.” Ever the naive optimist, I added: “If we can break the Toronto stranglehold, then we have a good chance of success before Chrétien leaves office.”247
Meanwhile in Toronto, the CCNC leadership was intensifying its lobbying efforts with the Liberal leadership hopefuls, targeting Paul Martin as the heir apparent. Yew Lee and Jonas Ma were based in Ottawa so they had some access to Martin’s political aides. They had set up a meeting with Paul Martin on March 25, 2003. (The day before that, the CCNC delegation met with Sheila Copps, another leadership hopeful, but nothing much came out of that meeting.)
Before the Martin meeting, we did our homework. Yew and Jonas met with Kevin Bosch, director of research for Martin, and the CCNC people in Toronto met with Carolyn Bennett, a Toronto MP who was a strong supporter of Martin. Bennett was a friend of Mary Eberts and sympathetic to the CCNC. Both Bosch and Bennett told us to stress nation building and the legacy of Paul Martin Sr.
We met in Martin’s office; Bosch was with him. In the CCNC contingent were Yew Lee, Avvy Go, Winxie Tse, Victor Wong and, from Montreal, Kenneth Cheung and me. From my notes, this is how I recall the thirty-minute meeting, with Martin asking basic questions like how many people were affected by the Head Tax and Exclusion Act and when did it end:
Then he asked, “Your definition of redress is a cash payment?” It was obvious that he was ill informed about this aspect of Canadian history. The delegation proceeded to explain to him the history of the HTEA and the urgency of redress for the Chinese Canadian community and for Canadian society. Martin’s response, “The Chinese are not the only people to whom a wrong was done. I do not want this to be the flavour of the month where Government is making an apology to a different group each week. I do not want to have cheapened apologies.”
Martin talked about the nation-building legacy of his father and that his greatest pride was in the work Martin Sr. did on the Citizenship Act.
If I’d known then what I know now, I would have confronted him on Order in Council (PC) 2115, retained by the Liberal cabinet, of which Martin Sr. was a part. It stipulated that only Chinese immigrants who were citizens (not a requirement for other immigrants) were allowed to bring their immediate families to Canada, and it was kept in place after the repeal of the Exclusion Act. But, to continue with my notes:
I raised again the possibility of meeting with James Wing, a constituent in his LaSalle riding. He asked me to contact his riding office. Then he said, “I think Mr. Wing has been wronged. … Whatever we do, it has to involve a change in the Canadian psyche; I don’t think a cash payment does a lot for the Canadian psyche.” The meeting concluded with Martin challenging us to frame redress in terms of nation building.
Not much came out of the Martin meeting other than presenting the redress issue to him in person. But we got the measure of the man; he was not sympathetic. Paul Martin was still stuck in the mindset of “no apology, no compensation.”
Two months later, May 2003 proved to be an inauspicious time for Asian Heritage Month. Sheila Copps’ Heritage Canada produced and distributed a poster with Asian caricatures, one with a coolie hat and several with slanty, slitty eyes. There was uproar from the Asian Canadian communities, who demanded the withdrawal of the poster and an apology from the minister. Writing in The Globe and Mail, Susan Eng said:
Now that I see the poster, I understand why this government has been so recalcitrant on the head-tax issue. A mindset that infantilizes and caricatures whole communities of people sets the stage for easy dismissal when some of them make claims for redress. … Our government has not yet learned from its past.”248
Susan also had some choice words for Vivienne Poy, former governor general Adrienne Clarkson’s sister-in-law and a Liberal appointed senator, who had pushed to implement May as Asian Heritage Month. “Luckily, Senator Poy also thought it a good idea to e-invite community groups to join in this month’s celebrations and circulate the poster with a helpful link to the Heritage Canada Web site,” she wrote, “so more of us saw the disgraceful poster than would have otherwise. … For her part, Senator Poy assured the readers of the Edmonton Journal that she does not have ‘slit eyes.’”249
Tony Chan, author of Gold Mountain: The Chinese in the New World, also commented on the poster controversy through an email to the redress network, in his usual colourful style, saying in part:
if you assess the poster closely, it reveals an overt attempt to infantize asian canadians.
representing visible minorities or women [as] children is at the heart of white colonialism and an attempt to reinforce dominance of *whiteness* as the arbiter of acceptability.
so the asian canadians who suggest that this is merely a “small” matter have already bought into the notion that *whiteness* rules.”250
The CCNC reaction to Montreal’s efforts at building a redress coalition was lukewarm. There was concern that the CCNC would lose the leadership in the redress campaign. “If we are going to form a Coalition, the key determination for participation must be whether or not the groups/individuals support individual compensation,” a CCNC document stated.251
Instead of looking within the community to build a coalition, the CCNC decided to look outside to form a new group, Canadians for Redress. The CCNC leadership was counting on Jack Layton, the newly minted head of the NDP, to headline this loosely knitted assembly of redress supporters. This was not what May Chiu and I had in mind.
Upon the recommendation of Kenda Gee, Karen Cho, a recent graduate from the Concordia film program, approached me in March 2003 to be a subject in a film she hoped to make about the head tax. It was to be an update on the redress movement since Moving the Mountain. I thought this would be a great opportunity to get the redress story into the mainstream public media and I helped to link up Karen to the redress network.
Throughout the spring, I worked with Joe Du to finalize the important sounding Quebec–Manitoba Declaration. The five points of the statement, later to be known as the Unity Declaration, were:
- The Canadian government shall immediately and unconditionally begin negotiations with the National Organizations and representatives of the Chinese Canadian community to redress the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act. This includes the CCNC and the NCCC.
- The Canadian government shall offer an apology and redress by providing community compensation, the nature of which shall be negotiated between the government and Chinese Canadian community representatives.
- The Canadian government shall offer an apology and redress the individual effects of the Head Tax by compensating the surviving Head Tax Payers and the surviving spouses of deceased Head Tax Payers.
- We call on all Chinese Canadian community organizations and individuals to respect the rights and actions of all those affected by the Head Tax and Exclusion Act who may want to seek individual compensation from the Canadian government.
- We call on all Canadians to support the redress campaign of the Chinese Canadian community. In winning redress of this longstanding injustice, our community will contribute to building justice and equality for all Canadians.
The negotiation centred on point number four. Joe Du wanted to soften the words related to respecting “the rights and actions” of the victims to seek individual compensation. In the end, the wording as it stood prevailed. I distributed the declaration to the CCNC affiliates and Du did the same with the NCCC organizations. Winxie Tse, president of the CCNC, responded, “We are concerned that there does not appear to be consensus on this issue with some of the member chapters as well as with some members of the Redress Committee.252
In the end, CCNC National never signed the unity document. Gary Yee later told me that there was heated debate over the statement but there was no support.253 Nevertheless, May Chiu got Chung Tang, executive director of the Toronto Chapter of the CCNC,254 to endorse it.
The NCCC National also did not sign on, but Joe Du and Jack Lee had better success with their local associations. Du received the endorsement of Philip Lee, chair of the Winnipeg branch of the Chinese Benevolent Association. (Lee was to become Manitoba’s lieutenant governor in 2009.) Philip Chang of the Winnipeg Chinese Cultural Centre also endorsed the agreement. In Montreal, Timothy Chan of the Hoy Sun Association signed on and Walter Tom did his magic with the Hum/Tom/Tam family associations to get their endorsements. We also received support from Cynthia Lam of the CCNC affiliate in Montreal, the Chinese Family Service.
Despite CCNC’s past groundbreaking work in the redress movement, Montreal, Edmonton and Winnipeg did not think the CCNC had anything new to offer or that it could lead the community to the next level of the redress campaign. In mid-2003, via email and teleconference, we began to discuss forming a new redress coalition based on the principles stated in the Unity Declaration. Kenda Gee won over May Lui in Halifax and I contacted the redress activists in Newfoundland. Around the beginning of September, we formed the Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance (CCRA) as a united front coalition. We had representatives in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.
The Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance came into being just in time to attach its name to a report prepared by May Chiu and presented to Doudou Diène, the United Nations special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. The special rapporteur was on a ten-day tour of Canada to hear cases related to his purview.
In her September 17, 2003 submission, May laid out the history of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act and the modern-day struggle for redress including the court action. She included the Unity Declaration to show the demands of the community and the names of the supporters. Since the Chinese community had exhausted all local remedies in the two decades since the campaign started, the CCRA submission asked the UN special rapporteur to
- Receive and Investigate complaints from the Chinese Canadian community, head tax payers, wives, widows, and family members, and their representatives about the violations of their basic human rights caused by various Chinese Immigration Acts and Chinese Exclusion Act whose effects continue to this day;
- Inquire why the Canadian Government has neither acknowledged that it had violated the basic human rights of the Chinese Canadian community and individual head tax payers and their families nor entered into negotiations to begin reparations;
- Recommend that the Canadian Government immediately enter into negotiations with the Chinese Canadian community, individual head tax payers and their families, and their representatives on the form of redress they have the right to receive for the human rights violations they have suffered.
Unbeknown to us at the time, the CCNC and the Metro Toronto Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic also presented a submission when the special rapporteur reached Toronto on September 25.255 It urged the special rapporteur to
recommend to the Canadian Government to redress this historical injustice as it was perpetuated against the Chinese Canadian community, particularly on the individuals who have paid the $500 Head Tax, and were subject to the 24 years of discrimination under the Exclusion Act.
I later discovered that there was a third submission to the special rapporteur by Noah Novogrodsky of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law, International Human Rights Clinic.256 It asked the special rapporteur to recommend that Canada offer restitution for the $23 million rightfully belonging to the Chinese Canadian head tax payers.
The National Congress of Chinese Canadians held its twelfth Annual Convention on Joe Du’s home ground, on September 12–14, 2003. Once again, he invited me to attend as a speaker on redress. Thinking about what happened at the NCCC convention in Toronto two years earlier, I asked myself whether I was a glutton for punishment.
Du finally convinced me when he said Kenda Gee, May Chiu and Walter Tom were also invited to speak in order to strengthen our numbers. In the end, both Kenda and May decided not to go, although their names were left on the speakers’ list. May wanted us to stress our role as a “third way” instead of unifiers of old rivals.
Walter and I were committed to go; we saw it as an opportunity to build the redress coalition. I would also get a chance to meet Daniel Lai from the University of Calgary who contributed to the final wording of the Unity Declaration. I got the organizers to invite Karen Cho, who around this time won the NFB’s Reel Diversity Competition to make her film on the redress movement.
I spoke at the plenary session “Head Tax – Re-visit.” The title of my speech was “The Unity Declaration and New Strategies for Redress.” I went all out to gain as much support as I could around the unity statement and to forge a redress united front. I even name-dropped Paul Martin, knowing that this audience would be suitably impressed even by our fleeting get-together with the soon-to-be prime minister. “The first step in responding to Paul Martin’s challenge to our community is to come together and present a united front to the government,” I said, continuing:
Many in our community who have dedicated many years in fighting for redress are doubtful about being able to unite. They are telling me that I am wasting my time here. But how can we respond to Martin’s challenge of nation building if we cannot build unity within our community?
I have been working on Redress for over 15 years because I owe it to my father and grandfather. … I owe it to my mother who is still alive. She suffered through 3 decades of separation from my father due to the Exclusion Act. My father was a founding president of the Chiu Lun Gong Sol in Montreal. This family association is part of the NCCC today. In the streets of Montreal’s Chinatown, I have been able to work with members of both the NCCC and the CCNC. There is no reason why this working relationship and coming together of our community cannot continue at the national leadership level.
Raymond Yao, the Chinese language Ming Pao Ottawa correspondent, asked me for an advance copy of my speech for “a story on this historic alliance amongst the like-minded leaders from both the CCNC and NCCC.”257
I was pleased to receive Karen Cho’s reaction to my speech, too. She was unburdened with the baggage of Chinese community politics. “Your speech on Sunday was very powerful and moving,” she said. “I believe you succeeded in influencing and educating a lot of people. A step in the right direction.”
As in 2001, I wrote a summary of the 2003 convention, including the following:
Overall, I thought we took one step forward. Dr. Du is more convinced that we are doing the right thing, although heavy pressure was put on him. Raymond Yao told me that the Congress leadership met late into the night on what they should do. They were saying that they would have to change the 1991 resolution of no individual compensation. But they needed to hang onto that resolution because they staked their whole redress career on it. …
I met Moe Levy of the Museum for Human Rights that got a grant of $30M from Heritage Canada and a potential for $70M more for a total of $100M. I asked him how, when the Chinese couldn’t get a paltry $23M symbolic refund. He said united political pressure. I used that in my speech, but I didn’t say that most of that pressure came from [well-connected media magnate] Izzy Asper.
A breath of fresh air blew through the redress movement when the CCNC National kicked off its Last Spike campaign, centred around a donation from prominent author Pierre Berton.
Berton donated a railroad spike to the CCNC in 2003; it was one of three hundred that were distributed to VIPs at the CPR’s last spike ceremony at Craigellachie, marking the completion of the cross-country railway, in 1885. The Last Spike campaign kicked off in Halifax on September 12, 2003, then travelled across Canada with meetings along the way and wrapped up in Vancouver on November 7, the date of the original last spike ceremony in 1885.
In a news release to launch the campaign, Berton said:
The last spike marked the end of a nation-building project in Canada. It also signified the beginning of a shameful era of the exclusion of Chinese immigrants. Let this new journey of the last spike bring about the rebuilding of our nation by redressing our past wrongs towards Chinese-Canadians.258
Avvy Go travelled with the spike to Western Canada, stopping in Calgary and Winnipeg, where a meeting was held on October 26, with several organizations259 participating and the support of the Winnipeg mayor. Joe Du also attended, with a group of NCCC members.
The year 2003 ended with a flurry of activities in Montreal. The Last Spike finally arrived and Walter Tom organized a student debate on redress around the symbolic spike. On November 26, we organized a luncheon to honour our pioneers in the family associations and the tongs in Montreal. The highlight was a stirring speech by James Wing, now a frail ninety-one-year-old. CCNC, NCCC members as well as “the third option” CCRA attended the luncheon. Kenneth Cheung, now the national chair of the CCNC, and Christian Samfat of the Chinese Neighbourhood Society proudly displayed the spike. The event was filmed by the NFB for Karen Cho’s film as well as by the Global TV series Past Lives, which was featuring my family in one of its episodes.
At a Center for Research-Action on Race Relations luncheon, May Chiu and I met with two of the more progressive senators, Mobina Jaffer of BC and Donald Oliver of Nova Scotia. Both were very sympathetic and urged us to continue our efforts to put united political pressure on the government. May also met with Marlene Jennings, who was rumoured to be in Paul Martin’s cabinet, to prep her on redress.
I distributed the Unity Declaration as widely as I could, proposing a National Redress Conference to map out a two- to three-year plan to win redress. I pursued Victor Wong, now national executive director of the CCNC in Toronto, to support the Unity Declaration. Victor insisted that we support another proposal called the CCNC Last Spike Resolution, with demands similar to the 2002 CCNC proposal mentioned above. However, I knew that the Last Spike Resolution would not garner much support outside CCNC circles and that the Unity statement was more inclusive of other opinions. Looking back with hindsight today, it seems somewhat ridiculous that the community organizations were divided over such small differences.
I can’t move on from this time without telling a very revealing story of the behind-the-scenes antagonists who pulled the strings to oppose the settlement of redress. A Canadian Press article reported in 2003 that federal bureaucrats had advised Heritage Minister Sheila Copps not to apologize or compensate Ukrainian Canadians for their internment during World War I. “Documents obtained under the Access to Information Act show federal officials were concerned that a deal with the Ukrainians would spark demands from other ethnic groups.”260 I should point out that back in 1990 when Copps was still young, idealistic and untainted by power, she voiced strong support for head tax redress.261 But it seems she didn’t have the ability to act against her deputy ministers. Again, it would take some bold political leadership to overcome the resistance of the federal bureaucracy.
In a year-end email touting the third path of the CCRA, I wrote that the campaign “belongs to the community and all those who wish to get involved and push it forward. … We must all have the freedom to participate and speak out on behalf of the head tax payers and their families.”
In 2004, federal politics was in turmoil and people were getting tired and dragging their feet around redress. Paul Martin had become prime minister on December 12, 2003, when Jean Chrétien resigned in the midst of the sponsorship scandal.262 Martin then lost his majority in the June 28, 2004 elections, but returned as prime minister with a minority government. The Martin administration was wearing us down by simply refusing to talk. Paul Martin revealed his true self by not even acknowledging our invitations to meet with the only surviving head tax payer in his riding, James Wing.
In April, UN Special Rapporteur Doudou Diène released his report, part of which discussed the Head Tax and Exclusion Act. He recommended that “the Canadian government consult with members of the Chinese Canadian community to examine possibilities of compensation with the people who were affected, including the head tax payers, descendants and other members of their families.”
This report received national and international attention.
As the Pacific Citizen, the national publication of the Japanese American Citizens League, reported: “The government’s response to the UN recommendations was the same as it has been for the last ten years: No.” It continued:
Minister of Multiculturalism Jean Augustine (said) to the Pacific Citizen, “In terms of the section dealing with the redress, I can only repeat that Canada decided to put closure to the issue and that being no financial compensation for historical acts.”
“The pictures that the government is giving of racial harmony is different from the community’s,” Diène said. “They (the community) have expressed experiences of racism.”263
You can imagine the reaction to the government’s stonewalling and ongoing policy of no talk, no redress from the redress campaigners. The Pacific Citizen article quoted Kenda Gee, chair of the Edmonton Redress Committee, as saying, “Jean Augustine’s parrot of the ‘official government’ policy is completely unacceptable” and that “the remarks … merely underline the ignorance or willful blindness of this issue that is prevalent among our Ottawa bureaucrats and officials.”264
As we plodded along, I felt that every bit of national and international pressure and exposure would help to move the campaign forward.
By September, Karen Cho, a fifth-generation Canadian of mixed heritage, was wrapping up her documentary, the final title of which became In the Shadow of Gold Mountain. Through the film, Karen discovered how the Chinese half of her family wasn’t welcome in Canada, while this country encouraged and rewarded the European half of her family to settle here. The documentary featured James Wing, Chow Quen Lee and Vancouver’s Gim Wong, a World War II veteran who witnessed his parents’ “brutal struggle” to pay off their head tax debt.
The film premiered in Montreal on September 24 in a joint presentation of the National Film Board and the Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance at the Chinese Catholic Mission in Chinatown. The event attracted four hundred people who jammed into the mission’s auditorium. The audience was a cross-section of the community with many elderly and many young people. Yew Lee drove in from Ottawa, James Wing said a few inspiring words, and Karen was there to answer questions and to animate the discussion afterwards. There were representatives from the city and from Quebec’s Ministry of Immigration. Parti Québécois MNAs Louise Harel and Elsie Lefebvre attended in person. Montreal MPs Irwin Cotler, Marlene Jennings and Raymonde Folco sent support letters.
CCNC National also sent a message of solidarity. We saw the momentum building as the evening well on; after the screening, 292 people signed the petition circulated by the Edmonton Committee. Many people signed up to join the CCRA or asked to be kept informed.
The National Film Board worked with the CCRA to organize screenings across Canada. Much to our chagrin, CCNC National did not organize a screening in Toronto. In the Greater Toronto Area, Nancy Siew and Simon Cheng stepped in to present the film as part of the United Way of York Region fundraising.
Maybe it was because May Chiu had withdrawn the Chinese Family Service from the CCNC, or because the Edmonton chapter had pulled out of the CCNC National, but at a screening of the film at the University of Alberta, there was a run-in with a white supporter of the CCNC who came in from Toronto. He would not allow literature from the CCRA or the petition from the Edmonton Redress Committee to be distributed at the event, saying that it was from “outsiders.” Needless to say, we were quite upset with this sectarian action.
Kenda, who was chair of the Edmonton Redress Committee, was moved to pen an email to Gary Yee, who was no longer officially associated with the CCNC but was still considered the elder statesman of the redress movement. Kenda informed Gary that the Edmonton Committee would regrettably stop supporting future CCNC activities.265
In the Shadow of Gold Mountain gave people a boost in the campaign and became a tool for organizing.
While May Chiu and I were distributing leaflets to attract people to the Montreal presentation, we ran into Jonas Ma, who was in town to visit his mother. Jonas joined us in the leafleting and we had a long discussion on what steps to take to move forward. In an email to me later, Jonas noted that we had spoken about “the urgency, priority and time-framework” for all stakeholders. “Most urgent, highest priority and immediate,” he said, were the surviving head tax payers and their spouses—“so that they can see justice in their life.” He continued:
2) Second most urgent: HT descendants to present a position to the government after a funded and self-managed process of consultation within a year or so;
3) Third in term of urgency, priority and probably long-term: community compensation with community-wide consultation. … [T]his kind of discussion is only meaningful if the government is willing to negotiate.266
In responding to Jonas—and agreeing with his three points and priorities—I noted that if we didn’t achieve redress for the surviving head tax payers and widows, his points two and three would be irrelevant because what right would the community have to take this money? “Compensation, first and foremost must go to the direct victims, the ones who built our community and won the right for all of us to be here,” I wrote, continuing:
Now the question is how do we win justice for our elders in the short time we have. … We want justice for our pioneers who were direct victims of racism and who suffered tremendous hardship due to that racism. This is clear. There is no other way of seeing this.267
The Ottawa film screening was set for November 3 at the Library and Archives Canada screening room. The National Film Board sent out invitations to all the MPs and senators. Jonas and the organizers didn’t want to feature any politicians as speakers since Karen Cho and Yew Lee would be on hand to carry the discussion. Ray Yao followed the Montreal and Ottawa events closely and gave the film extensive coverage in Ming Pao.
In the Shadow of Gold Mountain was a tool to help galvanize the community around redress from its premiere in September 2004 to well into 2005. Public screenings were organized from Halifax to Vancouver, and people used the film to educate themselves on the Head Tax and Exclusion Act redress and to begin local mobilization to join the redress efforts. In addition, the film received national media exposure with its broadcasts on the CBC and its cable TV news channel, Newsworld. Even though Moving the Mountain was a groundbreaking film that kick-started some activists to become involved in the movement, In the Shadow was a timely film and became the tool for the redress movement that Moving the Mountain never was. Due to its patronage by the National Film Board and the CBC, it reached more Canadians and brought the history of the head tax into the mainstream.
In the second half of 2004, those of us in the redress movement began debating among ourselves whether to revise our stand on fighting for compensation for descendants. By this point, we had been banging our heads against government obstinacy and cold-heartedness for twenty years.
The first descendants were people like Yew Lee and me, the sons of head tax payers. The second descendants were the grandchildren like Gary Yee, Victor Wong, Walter Tom and Kenda Gee. We knew that, as the many lawyers in our movement would say, time was of the essence for our surviving head tax payers and widows. By this time we had become more pragmatic and flexible. Even May Chiu—who was not a descendant, but who waged the good fight because of the principles of equality—agreed and she put the thoughts down articulately in an email:
I feel like I’m cutting off a leg, but at this late stage of the game, I’m prone to say let the descendants fight for their own compensation. We don’t have much time left for the survivors and adding descendants would leave the door wide open to the floodgates argument. In speaking with the community, when we say that our priority is the survivors and widows, there is a lot more sympathy because there are so few left.… Maybe when all the survivors and widows have died, you can advocate compensation for the descendants.268
Around this time, I learned from Joe Du that Raymond Chan, the newly appointed secretary of state for multiculturalism, would be attending the annual convention of the National Congress of Chinese Canadians in Victoria on September 18. My suspicious nature led me to fire off an email of warning to redress activists.
In the email, I stated that Chan seemed to be cozying up to the NCCC and that he and the NCCC might strike a symbolic deal on redress (community funds, medals, trinkets, etc.) at the expense of the head tax payers and widows. I wrote further that this was the most opportunistic and expedient course of action for the government and it would use the NCCC as the conduit to legitimize the deal. The government would parade its Chinese contingent of Vivienne Poy and Raymond Chan to tout this “historical” settlement. I stressed that if the government did offer this kind of proposal, which the community had rejected twelve years ago, we would need to develop an appropriate response.
I repeated the CCRA priorities that I had expressed to Jonas Ma: (1) immediate settlement and justice for the surviving head tax payers and widows, and (2) future negotiations with community representatives for eventual community redress. I finished the email by saying, “This is the kind of pre-emptive position we need to get through to Raymond Chan before he misleads the community into a symbolic settlement.”
Joe Du boasted to Kenda in a September 18 email: “We control Raymond Chan now.” But a short year later, we would discover how Chan, Paul Martin and the NCCC had struck a deal; we would not be sure then who was controlling whom.
Towards the end of 2004, we were getting a little impatient with our lack of results. In an email to Kenda and others, I listed a couple of items that had come out of a Montreal HTEA redress committee meeting. Paul Martin, in meeting with the editorial boards of the Chinese media in Montreal, had given “the same evasive answer he gave nearly two years ago when I met him” on redress, I wrote, claiming that the community was divided on the issue, and that he didn’t know what the community wanted. I added: “Looks like the message has not yet gotten through his thick head or the collective thick-headedness of his staff.” The other item was about “the scuttlebut” that when Raymond Chan and Viv Poy attended the NCCC meeting in Victoria, “a proposal was floated to give a settlement package of $23M–$25M to the community as an endowment fund, which would dish out some money to the surviving HT payers and spouses.” The NCCC, I added, was “hoping this compromise would settle individual and community compensation.”
Others, like Walter Tom, weren’t feeling as burnt out as me. With enthusiasm, Walter continued to make the rounds with the elected politicians, including Liberal MP Raymonde Folco, who, Walter wrote in an email, “understood the urgency of the situation and supported our position that the survivors and their widows should not be held hostage to community politics.” In a Montreal community forum with Raymond Chan, Walter joined Jack Lee and Tim Chan of the NCCC in presenting a “united front requesting individual and community redress for the HTEA.” He also reported that the City of Montreal administration had “accepted to put forward a resolution recognizing the contributions of early Chinese Canadian pioneers … and supporting Redress, using as a basis the CCNC resolution adopted by BC and Vancouver in 1992.”269
The year 2005 would be a pivotal year for the redress movement. (Foreseeing this, Kenda Gee had told me by email at the end of 2004: “In 2005, redress will be won or lost.”270)
By February 2005, James Wing’s health had deteriorated noticeably. He was now 93. On Valentine’s Day, May Chiu sent another letter to Paul Martin to inform him of James’ failing health and ask him to visit James—now the only surviving head tax payer—in Martin’s LaSalle riding. I don’t know if Martin ever responded to that letter, but I do know that he never visited James.
On March 27, through Walter Tom’s hard work, the Chinese Canadian Redress Alliance, along with a number of other organizations including NCCC members, held a ceremony at city hall to recognize the contributions of the early Chinese pioneers to the city. Montreal had formally passed a resolution of support calling for redress and compensation for the Head Tax and Exclusion Act. More than two hundred guests from the different Chinese ethnocultural organizations as well as representatives from the three levels of government attended. A representative of the Chinese embassy was also there.
Mayor Gerald Tremblay made a strong and passionate speech recognizing the contributions of Chinese Canadian pioneers and lent his voice in support of redress. Certificates of honour were presented to the various institutions and individuals from the community. My mother was one of those awarded a certificate. Now in her hundredth year, she was too weak to attend the ceremony, so my daughter, Jessica, received the certificate and spoke on behalf of her grandmother.
Gim Foon Wong also made a mark in 2005. A passionate, outspoken man with an unquenchable thirst for justice for the head tax families, he wanted to make his contribution to the redress movement, so he decided to ride his motorcycle across Canada at age eighty-three, to publicize the redress campaign.
Gim was a World War II veteran. During the war, he wanted to be a fighter pilot and tried several times to enroll in the air force. Initially, he was refused, as Canada did not want to accept Asians into the armed forces. Eventually, short of manpower, the air force accepted Gim in 1943 and trained him as a tailgunner, one of the most dangerous jobs. Gim excelled in his training and was later promoted to flight engineer, a commissioned officer. He chuckled to himself every time a non-Chinese person had to salute him.271
Gim’s feisty, scrappy personality was shaped by his humble beginnings. His father arrived in Canada in 1906 and paid the $500 head tax. His mother arrived in 1921 and also had to pay the $500. Like most other Chinese immigrants at the time, the burden of repaying the head tax debt kept the family in poverty. (Gim was featured in Karen Cho’s 2004 film, In the Shadow of Gold Mountain, and Kenda Gee’s 2012 award-winning documentary, Lost Years.)
In June 2005, Gim and his son Jeffrey began their preparations for the “ride for redress.” Jeffrey would follow Gim in a camper van. They estimated about a month on the road at a cost of about $5,000, which they hoped the sponsor CCNC would help to fundraise.
As he had planned, Gim reached Ottawa on Canada Day; he stopped his motorcycle at the steps of Parliament, and unfurled a small banner that simply said, “I am Canadian.” He then waited for Prime Minister Martin to arrive. Miro Cernetig, in the Vancouver Sun, described the scene:
“I got within 15 feet of him,” says Wong, shaking his head ruefully at the memory of his one-man effort to penetrate the prime ministerial bubble. “We let his office know I was coming. But the RCMP pounced on me. I never got to meet Paul Martin.”272
The next day, Martin missed another golden opportunity to show his respect for the Chinese Canadian community when Gim arrived in Montreal. He was a unifying force for the redress activists of the CCRA, CCNC and the NCCC as well as local politicians, as they all came out to welcome him. Montreal had raised enough money to pay for this last leg of his ride plus the airfare to take him home. Gim was physically and emotionally wiped out when he reached Montreal and he was in no condition for a road trip home. His son drove the camper towing the motorcycle back to Vancouver.
Despite the opposition of other Chinese Canadian veterans, Gim felt strongly that fighting for redress of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act was the Canadian thing to do. The fact that he was a veteran, lending his voice to redress, gave the campaign credibility and a different profile to counter the fear of backlash emanating from the more timid sectors of the community. We all agreed that Gim’s ride invigorated the movement to continue its efforts for the next crucial stage of the struggle.273
The excitement of Gim Wong’s ride for redress would sustain us into the autumn.
In August, the CCRA began to discuss our demands and to develop a work plan because we were hearing within the community that something was afoot. Our old friends Raymond Chan, Inky Mark and his accomplice Bev Oda were engaged in behind-the-scenes discussion with the NCCC. The cozying up of Chan and the NCCC was producing some results. Conservative Bev Oda on November 4 introduced her private member’s bill, Chinese Canadian Recognition and Redress Act, C-333, a revival of Inky Mark’s bill that called for the government to negotiate with the NCCC only, without any mention of compensation for the head tax payers or their families. Mark’s original bill had died in 2002.
The CCRA vigorously denounced C-333 when it was first revived, calling it the “Chinese Canadian Non-Recognition and Non-Redress Act.” In a press release, we said it represented a “devious and cynical attempt to curry favour with some members of the Chinese Canadian community,” and went on to say that the bill did not redress “the actual victims” who had suffered due to the Head Tax and Chinese Exclusion Act. “There are head tax payers and widows still alive today. They have not been consulted in this process. They are victimized and excluded once again.”274
We said this was an attempt of the government to divide the Chinese community by singling out only one organization.
Oda’s bill did not pass but the Martin government tried to use it as a cover to cut a deal with the NCCC and hoodwink the Chinese Canadian community. The Acknowledgement, Commemoration and Education (ACE) program was a slush fund of $25 million over three years, built into the February 2005 federal budget. It was hoped that, with this money, Martin would do away with the nuisance of the different ethnocultural groups demanding redress for various “wartime measures and/or immigration restrictions,” as Heritage Canada put it. Seeing it as a “blanket act of redress,” the CCNC, CCRA and other ethnocultural groups rejected the ACE proposal.275
By September 2005, talk of a general election was in the air, and May Chiu asked me to meet her. She informed me that the Bloc Québécois had asked her to be a candidate in the elections, but she wasn’t sure in which riding. I postulated that the party would not offer her a winnable riding, reserving those for the pure laine candidates. She would be put into a throwaway riding as a token candidate. She told me that she had the idea of running in LaSalle, Paul Martin’s riding. I said that was a great idea; LaSalle had a sizable Chinese population and the campaign would do the most damage to Martin and his wrong-headed stand on Head Tax and Exclusion Act redress.
Seeing that, no matter what the community said, the government was bulling ahead to sign the ACE agreement with the NCCC, I sent an open letter to Paul Martin and with the power of email, I copied it to all the MPs. In part, I wrote:
You are planning a photo opportunity at the end of November with some members of the Chinese Canadian community who are willing to accept your government’s paternalistic gesture.
In the wake of the Gomery Commission into the sponsorship scandal, your government is willing to hand out $12 million to an obscure group in the Chinese Canadian community ….
You have not consulted the actual victims of the Head Tax and Exclusion Act, the elderly pioneers, the “gold mountain widows,” nor their families. … They need recognition of their history, struggles and contributions to Canada. They want acknowledgement of the pain and suffering the HTEA caused themselves and their families. They want sincerity which can only come in the form of an official apology.276
On November 24, an agreement in principle was signed in Ottawa by Raymond Chan, representing the government, and Ping Tan, who was billed as representing the Chinese Canadian community—as represented by, it noted in parentheses, “the National Congress of Chinese Canadians.” The agreement pointedly said: “The Government of Canada and the Chinese Canadian Community have developed this Agreement-in-Principle, premised on the principles of ‘no compensation’ and ‘no apology’.”277
The agreement provided for an initial funding of $2.5 million to be given to the NCCC and in return the organization would not seek an apology or any compensation for the head tax payers. The $2.5 million later grew to $12.5 million.
There was immediate outrage that the government had so little consideration for Chinese Canadians, and that the NCCC would sell out the head tax payers and their families for such a paltry sum.
Four days after signing the agreement, the Martin government lost a vote of no confidence in the House of Commons. This vote followed months of wrangling, with the opposition parties accusing the Liberal government of corruption in the aftermath of the Gomery Commission into the sponsorship scandal. Martin was forced to call a general election for January 2006.
The Chinese language media voiced the community’s outraged response to the agreement in principle as they daily reported the denunciations from call-in shows on radio and TV. On the popular Toronto First Radio call-in show, twenty-five-year-old host Simon Li doggedly asked Martin about the ACE agreement. It was an unprecedented display of defiance by speaking truth to power. Here are some excerpts from the interview (transcript provided by Brad Lee):278
Li: My callers would like to ask you this question, Mr. Prime Minister: What is so wrong with saying sorry to those who paid the head tax?
Martin: You’re dealing with a government policy that has been established for a long time. … not only have we put up the original $2 million but there’s more money to come and this was done by Raymond Chan …
Li: But what’s so wrong in saying, “Sorry”?
Martin: We’re acknowledging what happened. …
Li: Mr. Prime Minister, I’ve met a 100-year-old man who has paid the head tax. What is wrong with you giving him back his money?
Martin: I also met with a person who was somewhere between 93 and 98, who paid the tax. What he said to me was, “What I want you to use this money for is to educate … Canadians in the wider community what happened.”
Li: So in a nutshell, the 100-year-old-man that I talked to would not get his money back?
Martin: What he is going to get is that Canadians for generations to come are going to know what a terrible thing happened to him. …
Li: What do you have to say to my callers who have said that your party has taken the tax payers’ money (and given it) to political cronies?
Martin: I was the person who put in place the Commission of Inquiry that called in Judge Gomery …
Li: I’m talking about the head-tax issue here and the National Congress [of Chinese Canadians].
Martin: Well … we met with the National Congress and they’re the ones who said that we should deal with this issue. They’re the ones who said this is the way to deal. … Deal with it in terms of education.…
Li: Let me put it a more direct way. Why, Mr. Prime Minister, on the eve of a federal election was so much money given to a single organization that sent out squads of volunteers to campaign for Liberal candidates in Toronto’s Chinatown in the last election?
Martin: Uh, this money is being given to the wider Chinese community. It’s not being given to any single organization and we met with leaders right across the country on this. …
Li: … We were just talking about the representation of the National Congress, and the government’s list of supporting organizations for the proposed settlement consists of over 200 organizations, some of which are not even aware … [that they] have been included such as CCNC, which was deleted from the list after filing complaints to Raymond Chan, Family Services of Greater Montreal, Amitié chinoise, the Chinese neighbourhood association in Montreal, et cetera, et cetera. [Has] your government done the due diligence in your announcement and could you provide evidence to show all the listed organizations have indeed supported the proposed settlement?
Martin: … we dealt with the leadership. …
Li: How could, as I said before, your government and Raymond Chan send out the list, saying that your settlement has the support of 200 organizations? Several of them, they said they were not aware. … how could this happen?
Martin: The fact is that we did consult with as wide a part of the community as we possibly could …
Li: They don’t think so.
Martin: Well … you can speak to Raymond Chan …
Li: My last question, Mr. Prime Minister. Some of my callers … a number of them believe this is another Liberal sponsorship scandal, but it’s in the Chinese community … . Given the money you’ve given to the National Congress, do you agree?
Martin: … I think that what we’re doing is the right thing.
Even Jan Wong, who was at the time a Globe and Mail columnist, was moved to comment on the ACE agreement. Jan had not previously shown any public support of the redress movement, but now she asked the right questions in an article:279 “Why did the deal exclude an apology? Why was there no compensation to those who paid the head tax? And why, on the eve of a federal election was so much money given to a single organization?”
The indignation of the Martin deal with the NCCC could be seen on Chinese TV and heard on the Chinese call-in radio programs, as my Toronto brother-in-law Xia Yang, who had immigrated to Canada a few years earlier, told me. He said redress was the topic most widely discussed on the current affairs programs. There was something qualitatively different happening in Canada’s Chinatowns. People started talking about the head tax payers and how they were getting screwed by this sponsorship type deal between the NCCC and the Martin government. There was a backlash to the deal, not from the mainstream, but from within the community. Many people in the community saw through the agreement and accused the Liberal government of being paternalistic and taking them for fools.
An air of defiance, excitement and expectation in the redress movement carried us into 2006. Head tax redress had now become an election issue.
In the lead up to the January 23 voting, we did our usual canvassing of the politicians to get their stand on redress. There was movement on the part of the Conservatives. They read the mood of the Chinese Canadian community and they promised an apology if elected.
Kenda Gee worked tirelessly to defeat the Liberal incumbent, Anne McLellan, the deputy prime minister, in the riding of Edmonton Centre. He developed a good relationship with Laurie Hawn, who eventually won the seat. Kenda provided Hawn with information on the redress campaign and Hawn became an advocate of head tax redress within the government caucus.
During the heated debate around head tax redress during the election campaign, two timely broadcasts of In the Shadow of Gold Mountain on CBC Newsworld—on January 3 and 7—explained the head tax issue to a vast audience of Canadians.
My brother-in-law was well aware that I was active in the redress movement, so he would ply me with accounts of how the Chinese media were covering redress and the ACE agreement. The media turned from occasional reporting of redress to taking an active editorial stand sympathetic to the elderly head tax payers. The media played up Chinese sentiments of respect for the elderly by featuring interviews and images of surviving head tax payers and spouses. I thought this was one of the turning points in the campaign.
However, Ray Yao, the Ottawa correspondent for Ming Pao, later disagreed with me.280 Ray, who with his white goatee could be mistaken for David Suzuki, gave me an in-depth analysis of the Chinese language media. He had come to Canada in 1976 from Hong Kong, where he was the assistant editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review. Prior to that he was the deputy chief editor of the oldest English newspaper in Asia, the China Mail. Ray covered the Vietnam War from Bangkok. In Canada, he was a special advisor to the CBC on Hong Kong and China, a regular contributor to the Financial Post, then the Ming Pao correspondent in Ottawa. He retired from that post in 2008.
Ray told me that the history of Chinese language newspapers in Canada started with Sun Yat-sen, the Kuomintang and the Chinese Benevolent Associations in the early twentieth century. The modern-day Chinese media were owned by the private sector, were motivated by profit and were generally conservative. The younger second and third generations did not read Chinese; they lacked the communication skills to influence the Chinese press. The people who operated the Chinese media were from Hong Kong, Taiwan and even China, so they were generally removed from the lo wah kiu generation. “The lo wah kiu did not oppose redress,” Ray said. Instead, they said “‘we paid with our tears, sweat and blood, but we had the opportunity to raise good families here, Canadian society provided us with mainly political and social stability—our kids could go to schools; our kids went to universities with the gwailo.’”281
And how did the Chinese media cover the two competing organizations, the NCCC and the CCNC, and redress in general? Ray told me that the Chinese media didn’t willingly show preferences. The NCCC, though, was closer to the new immigrants and the Chinese media. The CCNC was more mainstream in focus, and it used English more than Chinese.
“The media lack editorial commitment, [and they have a] lack of resources for background or understanding of the redress issues,” he said. The number of news releases and conferences was what determined coverage. “NCCC issues releases in Chinese and can speak Cantonese,” he continued. “The NCCC is more Liberal, Hong Kong leaning, the CCNC more NDP and PC. Political agenda got in the way of unity. Raymond Chan and Paul Martin couldn’t care less about the Head Tax, only getting the vote.”
Ray went on to say that the Chinese media got more involved only when “the issue of compensation became more of a reality.” The turning point had come when the mainstream media began discussing this and politicians turned it into a social justice issue to solicit Chinese support.282
I had the sense that Ray was talking as a critical, hard-biting journalist with a cynical view of the Chinese media establishment.
Paul Martin’s dithering and hard-headed handling of the head tax issue cost him many votes in the Chinese Canadian community. The over one million strong community was flexing its electoral muscle as it engaged the participation of a new generation of articulate and politically savvy activists to push the Martin government up against the ropes.
George Lau, co-chair of the Ontario Coalition of Chinese Head Tax Payers and Families, was quoted as saying that Chinese Canadians over the age of fifty had in the past tended to vote Liberal “because we are grateful immigrants.” Now, though, “this issue of the Chinese head tax is changing our minds.”283
The day after the general elections, the CCRA issued a press release claiming credit for helping to defeat the Martin government.
The Chinese community in Montreal succeeded in helping to defeat Liza Frulla (Jeanne-Leber), Minister for Heritage Canada. Frulla’s Department was instrumental in formulating the “no apology, no compensation” policy towards Chinese Canadian pioneers,…
In LaSalle-Emard, Bloc Québécois candidate, May Chiu, a long time HTEA activist shamed Prime Minister Paul Martin for not agreeing to meet 92 year old Mr. James Wing, LaSalle constituent and Head Tax payer. Mr. Martin’s margin of victory was greatly reduced… Right across Canada, Chinese Canadians were galvanized by the Liberal betrayal of their early pioneers…. This flexing of political muscle is felt in many ridings: the election victory of NDP’s Olivia Chow in Toronto, the defeat of Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan in Edmonton, the reduction in the margin of victory for Liberal Raymond Chan in Vancouver.284
We were buoyed by the results of the elections. It didn’t matter whether we would normally have voted NDP or Liberal. Harper promised to issue an apology and some form of redress. He was astute to see how the community had denounced the Liberal deal with the NCCC. It was an opening for the Conservatives into the ethnocultural communities and they took full advantage. We felt we had turned the corner in the redress campaign. However, we were still concerned that the ACE agreement in principle was legally signed and still had validity until the new government decided to abrogate it.
Raymond Leung phoned from Vancouver in the evening of February 28 to inform me that he had issued a statement on the agreement in principle and asked me to help him circulate it. Raymond was the acting president of the Chinese Benevolent Association of Canada, the venerable organization that was founded in 1889. It was very significant that one of the most respected organizations representing the lo wah kiu generation had come out to oppose the agreement.
The statement from the CBA labelled the agreement “unworkable,” for several reasons:
- The NCCC was “not a total representative of the spectrum of [the] Chinese Canadian community in Canada.”
- The agreement did not include a formal apology in Parliament or direct payments to head tax payers, their families or descendants.
- Since the agreement, the Chinese community had been more divided than before on the Head Tax issue.
The CBA in Vancouver believed the head tax issue needed to be revisited, and it called for a modified agreement to be drawn up between the new federal government and “all factions” of the Chinese Canadian community, “with the following undertakings”:
- That a formal apology be made in Parliament to the Victims, or their Families or Survivors or Descendants of the Head Tax;
- Redress must include a direct compensation to individual Victims, or their Families or Survivors or their Descendants as a token of regret for the past Injustice;
- That a Compensation Fund be set up with a program to commemorate and educate Canadians about past Injustice done to a vital member of our great Canadian Community;
- A Head Tax Redress Committee be formed to include all major Chinese Associations, Government Representatives and Head Tax Victims or their Representatives.285
I immediately distributed the CBA statement to my mailing list of Head Tax and Exclusion Act activists and organizations and the major news outlets, and emailed the new Conservative cabinet and all other MPs.
I received an invitation to attend a March 24 head tax consultation meeting at George Brown House in Toronto, all expenses paid, with Heritage Minister Bev Oda and Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister Jason Kenney. The invitation came from Canadian Heritage by fax to my office late Friday, March 17. Luckily I went to the office on Saturday morning to catch up on some work and noticed the fax; I had the rest of the weekend to consult with people about the proposed meeting and I had until Tuesday to accept.
I was the only one invited to the meeting from Quebec; Montreal people urged me to attend, even though it was so hastily arranged. I was one of several dozen people invited from across Canada who were associated with either the CCNC or the NCCC.
When I arrived at the meeting venue in Toronto and saw well-known Chinese Canadian lawyer Susan Eng inside the building, it really felt as though we were coming in from the wilderness.