The head tax was imposed on all Chinese immigrating to Canada beginning in 1885. It was raised from $50 a person to $100 then to $500. In 1923 it was replaced by the Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese immigration completely, remaining in effect until 1947.

Butz spoke in a November 30 discussion at the convention on a resolution calling for “negotiations between the Canadian government and representatives of the [82,000] head tax families for redress to acknowledge the suffering of individual Chinese Canadians, their families and the entire Chinese community.” The resolution was adopted.

A union representative of the United Food and Commercial Workers for Vancouver Island, Butz reported that her grandmother paid the head tax when she came to Canada in the early 1900s. Butz said her mother, who was born in Canada, was “stripped of her Canadian citizenship” when she married a Chinese man in Hong Kong.

In 1939, on the eve of the Japanese government’s invasion of Hong Kong, her mother tried to return to Canada but was denied entry because of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Her parents then fled to China to escape the Japanese invasion, Butz explained. Three of their children died in the war.

She told the Militant that her parents again applied to immigrate to Canada after the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed but weren’t approved until 1952.

Butz said it’s wrong that the government is offering compensation only to the 400 surviving head tax payers and their spouses. She insisted every family who paid the head tax and suffered its consequences should be compensated even if almost all of those who paid it—like her grandmother—are no longer alive.

That’s what the Chinese Canadian National Council, which has been leading the fight for head tax redress for more than two decades, is demanding.

Eugenia Au, a hospital worker in Vancouver, came to Canada from Hong Kong. The Hospital Employees Union member said that before she came, “I didn’t know Canada was so racist.”

When she arrived here, Au told delegates, she learned that the Chinese had to face a series of racist laws and practices in addition to the head tax and Chinese Exclusion Act. They were denied the right to vote, legally excluded from many jobs, barred from being lawyers and pharmacists, and prevented from living in exclusive white neighborhoods.

Au recounted how thousands of Chinese workers, who helped build the Canadian Pacific Railroad through the Rocky Mountains, were paid 10 cents an hour “to do the dirty work.” That was much less than the white workers made. The Chinese workers were given an extra five cents an hour to plant dynamite under totally unsafe conditions. Hundreds of Chinese workers were killed.

Some people argue that the head tax is history and should be forgotten. To the contrary, argued Au, the exploitation of migrant farm workers, who are brought into Canada as cheap contract laborers, shows “that they’re doing the same thing to them that they did to the Chinese.”

The migrant workers “don’t have any rights… . The government and the bosses take advantage of them,” she told the Militant. “They live in shacks in really bad conditions” and aren’t given proper medical care. Au said the huge immigrant rights demonstrations in the United States on May Day showed the way forward. The protesters are “letting people know they’re not taking this kind of treatment any more,” she said.  
 
 
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