Vancouver Province
for January 4, 2001

Sooner or later folks, the Saxons have to forgive the Normans. Which is to say that there is a limit to the obligation of one generation to compensate victims of their ancestors. That there is some obligation upon succeeding generations to redress wrongs is clear. The question is, where do you draw the line?

What about the Chinese "head tax" issue now before the courts and the public? Should this generation compensate the victims and their descendants? The "head tax", going back to the late 1800s, was to keep the Chinese out of British Columbia. It was fortified by the Asian Immigration Act which excluded Chinese immigrants not least because they threatened white workers with cheap labour.

It’s always dangerous and usually wrong to judge previous generations by the standards which prevail today. That is not to say that we shouldn’t confess society’s errors. Of course we must condemn slavery and other inhuman practices. But condemnation is only one half of the judicial equation. The other is compensation and it is here that I say society has a right to impose a statute of limitations.

The line is always a fuzzy one. No one would suggest that all those with proved Saxon lineage should get compensation from the present descendants of the bastard Duke of Normandy. Nor, evidently, would anyone support the notion that descendants of American slaves be entitled to compensation from the descendants of slave-owners or successors to the governments than permitted the noxious practice. Nor, it seems, should the governments of the United States and Canada compensate refugee Jews they turned away in 1939 and sent to their doom in the Holocaust.

Closer to home there is the case of Japanese-Canadians who were deprived of their assets and sent to concentration camps in World War II. And it is perhaps this case against which the case for Chinese-Canadians ought to be contrasted.

There are similarities. Both Japanese and Chinese are Asians and both were subjected to the same set of official and public prejudices. They represented the "Yellow Peril" which, in those terms, the press and politicians said threatened to drown the west coast of the Americas in an ever increasing swarm of yellow heathens from foreign lands. Neither groups had the vote and both were forbidden to enter certain professions. Both groups came to a British Columbia that was very white and very British. Wrongly by today’s more enlightened standards but very normal by the standards of the day, the population of British Columbia were collectively appalled at the notion of extending any rights to non-whites from Asia.

But there is an important difference. The Japanese, who were for the most part British subjects, were deprived of their liberty and property without any recognizable legal process. Indeed, their property was vested in a so-called "trustee" who sold it, often for as little as ten cents on the dollar, and the money was used to sustain the victims in their enforced durance vile. This was more than just an act of prejudice. This went well beyond the bounds of keeping political control of the levers of power. This was mass jailing, without colour of right, accompanied by piracy.

In compensating Japanese Canadians – it amounted to a paltry $25,000 per – it was borne in mind that the events took place in wartime when it was thought by many that Japan might invade the west coast of North America. There was real fear. But the fact remained that what was done was wrong and limited compensation was paid.

The Chinese who paid the "head tax" did so voluntarily which speaks volumes for the conditions in China of that day. Moreover it cannot be the tax itself that is repulsive – a "head tax" is paid by immigrants to Canada today – but that it was levied specifically against Chinese. The Asian Immigration Act, clearly an act to exclude, caused great hardship for it effectively meant that men could not bring their wives to this country or go to China to find a wife.

Our treatment of both groups was wrong but, when all’s said and done, it’s not a matter of justice but where you draw an admittedly arbitrary line in compensating a societal evil.

That’s never easy but my sense of it – and it’s no more than that – is that Chinese-Canadian claimants are on the wrong side of that line.