Canada wouldn’t be the same without its historic Asian immigration: Here’s why

Chinese workers in 1917. (C.P. Meredith/Library and Archives Canada)

Asian faces have been part of the Canadian landscape for hundreds of years, dating back to the late 1780s, according to the Government of Canada.

Since then, the community has boasted a long, prosperous history in the country, albeit one mired by attitudes and laws of racism and prejudice.

The first 50

Dr. Laura Madokoro, an associate professor of migration, humanitarianism, settler colonialism and active history at Carleton University, notes that the Chinese community is “probably one of the longest and most established Asian-Canadian communities.”

She confirms that Asian migration to this side of the Pacific Ocean predates the Canadian Confederation of 1867.

“Canada’s history of Asian migration and settlement is bound up with these larger histories of mobility and settlement along the Pacific,” she tells CTV News. “Canada’s one part of a much longer, much larger history of mobility that’s centred in Asia.”

The federal government states that the first Chinese migrants to land in Canada — 50 artisans tasked with building a trading post — arrived with British fur trader Captain John Meares at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island in May 1788.

“The following year, an additional 70 Chinese workers arrived to help build a fort and a schooner,” the government notes.

In the decades that followed, Dr. Winston Chan, a prominent advocate of Montreal’s Chinese community, explains that China entered the throes of the Taiping Rebellion, a civil war between the Qing Dynasty, the last imperial dynasty, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which sought to overthrow it, from 1850 to 1864.

“There was a lot of debt, there was a lot of violence, there was famine, there was a lot of poverty,” said Chan. “Almost everybody that came from China to Canada to build the railroads is from the same hometown that my ancestors are from, which is Taishan (台山).”

Despite the harsh living conditions and poor pay during the railroad construction, many ended up staying long-term, giving rise to the still-standing neighbourhoods known as Chinatown.

“They were paid very, very little at that time,” said Chan. “There was a saying that for every mile, there was one Chinese death because it was so dangerous, didn’t pay well, and they weren’t treated as citizens.”

Why move?

Madokoro notes that the many reasons people choose to move so far away from home have not changed much in the last few hundred years.

“Political instability, economic insecurity, those have always been causes for mobility and migration,” she said.

She gives the example of her own Japanese roots, from the Wakayama region.

“They were fishermen in Japan, and they could translate that work to the Canadian context,” she said. “When economic conditions weren’t great in the homeland, that gave the opportunity or prompted people to think about, well, maybe we’ll try our fortunes elsewhere.”

Chan adds that the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia also brought many people to Canada’s shores.

“There were people from these South-East Asian countries that arrived, that also brought a new type of contribution to Quebec and Canada,” he said.

“Around the 1990s, there was another wave of immigration from Hong Kong, which is called the investment immigrants. So, they came into another wave, and that wave helped build, in some ways, Brossard, (on the) South Shore of Montreal.”

Racist restrictions

Immigration to Canada from Asia didn’t come without discrimination, on the street or in the law.

Madokoro lists: the head tax for Chinese migrants; the Gentlemen’s Agreement for the Japanese, which restricted immigration to 400 men and domestic servants per year; the Chinese Immigration Act, also known as the Chinese Exclusion Act, prohibiting Chinese immigrants from entering the country for 24 years; and the continuous journey regulations for South Asians.

“There’s a lot of pushback when the numbers start to seem too large with the end of the railway. So, there are concerns about South Asian settlement, Japanese settlement and Chinese settlements,” Madokoro said. “You start to have in the late 19th, early 20th Century, these moves to restrictions.”

Chan explains that the Chinese head tax, starting at $50 a person, was “the equivalent of two mortgages at that time.”

Madokoro adds that, “The idea was that it was going to be punitive enough that no Chinese migrant would ever come again to Canadian shores.”

She points out that, though we broadly celebrate multiculturalism now, there’s much left to be discovered about the people who left their homelands in search of greener pastures.

“People lived multiple lives,” she said. “There’s a reality of how people were communicating in their own languages, maintaining cultures, practices (and) religions. But not all of that was necessarily seen by Canadian society... People didn’t just move here and forget everything (from) home.”

Here is a timeline of significant moments in Asian immigration to Canada: