TheStar.com - Group upset over head tax `deal’
The Canadian government has agreed to pay $12.5 million into a Chinese Canadian Community Foundation. Families of those paid the head tax to enter Canada between 1885 and 1923 want the government to issue a formal apology and provide compensation. At one point, the head tax as $500, about 2 years of pay for a labouring worker.
Some 81,000 Chinese paid a total of $23 million to enter Canada under the head-tax scheme between 1885 and 1923, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was enacted to bar Chinese immigrants altogether. It wasn’t lifted until 1947.
The CBC article spells my dad’s name wrong. I had written about the head tax when I recapped my Canada Day events this year, where James Pon spoke. His grandfather worked on the railroad for four years, and it took him 17 years to pay off the head tax debt when he came to Canada to join his father and grandfather.
And yes, I did just link to the Toronto Sun.
Fantasic news! Another Congress representative, who is also a U of T Law alumnus, was in giving a lecture for our bridge week on immigration…even from her talk, though, I had no idea things would happen so soon.
(Soon relative to her lecture, of course, not relative to the decades the government has just sat on this issue.)
Does anyone know Mr. James Pon’s grandfather’s name? I am translating a book about railway workers in Nroth America, and it should be ascertained. Thank you! Please send me email, if someone knows it。