A Note on Canada's Histories of Racism, on a Grim Day for USians, Too
My original plan was to have this post up for Canada Day, but here we are on the Fourth of July, so I suppose my US friends/readers can “enjoy” the uncanny similarity between Canadian history and the shameful state of affairs in the US today, instead.
Folks who take the time to read local history quickly encounter reminders that both Canadians and USians have always lived in pretty hateful societies. The rhetoric we see today around migrants—everything from sheer glee at the idea of deporting them, to the much more cynical use of fabricated migrant threats to distract from concerted efforts to gut state infrastructure and shore up rich citizens’ accounts—is nothing new.
In the late 19th century in Canada, for instance, Chinese and other Asian-migrant labour was critical to the development of a railway that would bind our sprawling East-West nation together, and thus fulfill the promise in our earliest documents uniting provincial settlements. And yet, just as with the example of Latino migrants in the US today, Canadian politicians wavered between outright contempt for and grudging reliance on Chinese workers to keep the country’s economy humming along.
In 1883, you can find the subject consuming significant portions of parliamentary debate. As Sir John A. Macdonald, the first Canadian Prime Minister and an essential developer of Canada’s founding documents, said in the middle of a heated argument over a proposed migrant restriction bill (House of Commons Debates, Vol 2, pg. 905):
Who will decide, when doctors disagree. We have had this subject discussed before—a few nights ago; we had, on the one hand, my hon. friend who makes this motion, and we have the hon. gentleman who has just spoken so well on the subject; and on the other hand we had the hon. gentleman from Charlottetown, and my hon. friend from King’s, New Brunswick, who is not now in his place, on the other side, defending the usefulness of the Chinese and the advantage of having them in the country.
I shall take as I did before, a middle path. I shall agree with my hon. friend from the mainland, New Westminster, who says, it will be all very well to exclude Chinese labor, when we can replace it by white labor, but until that can be done, it is better to have Chinese labor than no labor at all. I am one of those who have a great sympathy with the cry of California and Australia, against the permanent introduction or entry into a country of a foreign race.
I am sufficient of a physiologist to believe that the two races cannot combine, and that no great middle race can arise from the mixture of the Mongolian and the Asian. I believe it would be a great mistake, and would tend to the degradation of the people of the Pacific; and that no permanent immigration of the Chinese people into Canada is to be encouraged as a body of settlers, but under the present system there is no fear of that. …
Now, the short and pithy speech of my hon. friend from New Westminster, states exactly my opinion. He says: So soon as you can replace the Chinese by white labor, pass any legislation you like, but in the meanwhile do not deprive all the enterprises of that country, in fact, enterprises in some respects, railway enterprise and other enterprises of the only labor which they can get. In a few years you will have the Rocky Mountains pierced by a Pacific Railway, and perhaps by-and-bye, we will have an overflow from the Western States into British Columbia flowing north, but at present such is not the case. We have no white labor of any consequence going into British Columbia. There is no doubt a project pressed upon the Canadian Government by the Government of British Columbia, to aid them in bringing white labor from England around Cape Horn on vessels carrying rails to British Columbia. There is no other means of bringing them. We cannot send them to Panama, and if we try via San Francisco, they all disappear before they arrive at British Columbia; so that either they must have Chinese labor or no labor at all.
It is quite true that the Chinese take away their wages, and it would be preferable, that we should get a body of workmen, and laborers, and artisans, who would remain in the country and settle in it, spend their wages in the country, raise families and become valuable settlers; but that will come very soon, and in the meanwhile until the Pacific Railway is constructed, it seems to me it would be premature to press this motion.
We are asked to pass a resolution by which we will adopt the Australian law. Now, I venture to say, that very few members have yet studied the case, or have yet read, or know what the Australian law is. I venture to say that it would be quite impossible for this House to adopt this resolution in its entirety. The employment of these people is, I think, an absolute necessity. I am told that in the Island, you cannot get a servant; you cannot get a cook, unless a Chinaman; and the cry for the present is got up by a few whites, those there, and who like to have a monopoly of the work and to have the right to charge their own price for their labor.
…
It is quite true that the hon. gentleman who spoke last said that white labor is infinitely more valuable than Chinese, and that, for general work and practical purposes, one skilled, strong Englishman, or white man, is worth three Chinese; but if you cannot get the one white man, you must employ the three Chinese in the meanwhile. Let us consider this subject, which is of very great importance, now brought before Parliament.
[… T]he answer of the last House was that in the meanwhile you must keep Chinese labor until white labor is ready to supplant it. As soon as this takes place, then I will go just as strongly perhaps as the hon. gentleman who has moved this resolution, in favor - perhaps not of exclusion, because it is a very strong measure for a civilized country to exclude the people of a nation with whom you trade, and whom you treat as a civilized nation or a quasi civilized nation;—but there must be some regulation, one similar to that passed in the United States which amounts to exclusion, but more nearly alike to the legislation in Australia where it is not excluded positively, but where it is regulated and restricted.
But until we can be sure that British Columbia gets a sufficient amount of white labor, I think we ought not to paralyze to a great extent all the enterprises and all the industries of that country for the sake of increasing the wages of a few white operatives who are in that country.
This is the same year when Macdonald would say these chilling words in the House of Commons (1107-8), amid the expansion of the residential school system:
When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.
(And yes, for Canadians confused by the spelling of words like “favor” and “labor”, that is how the original record jots them down. Not the most disconcerting parts of these passages, but certainly surprising!)
Canadians are now better versed in the horrors of the residential school system. There is also significant understanding that Macdonald’s cohort actively sought to suppress First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations through campaigns of weaponized food aid after the white-colonizer slaughter of buffalo across the Americas. In Canada, food rations were restricted and even allowed to go to rot, simply to compel Native persons to sign treaties that diminished rights and displaced them to reservations.
And the cruel use of nutritional deprivation is not just a barbarous act from the 19th century; in the 1940s, Canada had its own shameful version of the Tuskegee Experiment, via malnutrition experiments on Indigenous children in the West.
Canadian students are thankfully now taught about the Chinese Immigration Act (1885) and the decades-long Chinese “Head Tax” system, along with all the generational trauma this placed on the families of Chinese labourers who first laid the foundations of our nation—and often died on those foundations, too.
But still, there’s an exceptionally light touch taken around the staggeringly open racism and xenophobia that consumed House of Commons sessions in the era. Those odious official events happened—parliamentary acts, government policies—but the people who made them happen are often obscured whenever this history is taught.
This might be because it’s difficult to build an unwavering sense of national pride the moment you admit that one of the core founders of your modern nation—John A. Macdonald—employed Aryan rhetoric at a level atypical even in his peer group. Aryanism was a rising fad in the late 19th century, and it was tied to body of biological-racist claptrap driving nationalist movements across Europe and North America. As Timothy J. Stanley described the context in which Macdonald invoked such vile ideas:
[Macdonald] warned, “if [the Chinese] came in great numbers and settled on the Pacific coast they might control the vote of that whole Province, and they would send Chinese representative to sit here, who would represent Chinese eccentricities, Chinese immorality, Asiatic principles altogether opposite to our wishes; and, in the even balance of parties, they might enforce those Asiatic principles, those immoralities . . . , the eccentricities which are abhorrent to the Aryan race and Aryan principles, on this House.” He then claimed that the Chinese and Europeans were separate species: “the Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics” and that “the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful; it cannot be, and never will be.” Chinese exclusion was necessary or, as he told the House, “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed . . .”[7]
Macdonald’s comments shocked his contemporaries in Parliament. He was the only member of the Canadian Parliament to use the term “Aryan” during the 1870s and 1880s, as well as the only member to argue that Asians and Europeans were separate species. The previous Canadian premier, Alexander Mackenzie, had even rejected calls for restrictive legislation on the Chinese as unseemly for “a British community,”[8] and had told the House, “To avow the principle that some classes of the human family were not fit to be residents of this Dominion would be dangerous and contrary to the law of nations and the policy which controlled Canada.”[9] When The Franchise Act reached the upper house, Senators, including some of Macdonald’s own appointments, debated whether they could get away with sending the legislation back to the House of Commons because of the invidious distinctions it enacted.[10]
Still, despite the fact that Macdonald’s personally hateful, racist, xenophobic nature is rarely taught as such in schools, Canadians are raised up with a significant sense of our historical transgressions. We are taught about times when our government put people into concentration camps because their nationality was the same or adjacent to one of our wartime enemies. (Though not all of them! Italians and Germans did not endure the same treatment as Japanese persons in World War II, for instance.)
We are also usually taught about the wartime antisemitism that emerged especially in regions with high levels of German and British migration, and how we turned away the MS St. Louis, among other ships of Jewish refugees of Holocaust—then had the gall to pretend that we’d actually defeated racist and antisemitic hate just because we fought against the Third Reich-variant of a sickness that has lain within us all along.
After World War II, as I noted in another essay, there was a huge push by Raphael Lemkin for the newly formed United Nations to develop a definition for genocide—but Canada, like Britain and other countries, was of two minds about the term. Major Western powers did not forward the motion in the first place—that was the work of Cuba, India, and Panama: all nations with strong reasons to care about the destruction of local culture by outside forces—and Canadian representatives were instead among those sent expressly to temper Lemkin’s definition.
Together in UN debate, official and behind the scenes, these Western powers succeeded in whittling down Lemkin’s broader analysis of the many ways that a culture can be and is destroyed by others. Instead, they turned it something that wouldn’t cause problems for Allied countries with their own recent histories around the violent slaughter, expulsion, and starvation of groups they deemed lesser.
Raphael Lemkin on Genocide, and Why States Are Not Good Arbiters of Moral Action
Last November, I wrote for now-defunct OnlySky about humanity’s long-term push to develop “human rights”: no easy feat, when up against the divine right of kings, and other statist notions of entitlement for a country to do what it pleased to anyone.
At the end of the day, in other words, these countries were less interested in doing the right thing, and more interested in being seen to do the right thing, while protecting themselves from legal reprisal for past and present wrongdoings, too.
This is why I don’t bother with the word “genocide” much myself these days, and beeline directly to “atrocity”: a term that covers much more than the intentionally limited scope of that litigiously crafted phrase from the mid-20th-century. The current United Nations definition of genocide looks like this:
Article II
In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
But this definition doesn’t even come close to covering the greater sweep of cultural transgressions we now know are an integral part of any group’s destruction.
Atrocity is not just a matter of any specific government’s actions; it’s also the work of broader ideological cover-up. To succeed, it requires a collective social eagerness to play word games on a global stage, and to focus more on passing the buck for blame.
All of our media bluster, and all of the propaganda campaigns that so effectively shut down any efforts at sincere redress of a humanitarian nightmare, are part of “atrocity”.
Because it’s never just a single state/leader that slaughters members of another demographic. To allow other states and their leaders to carry out such violence openly—and to waste our time worrying about how to spin that violence to protect our own from reprisal—is what makes such a state of affairs a stain on all our hands, and one that no amount of legal redress will ever wipe clean.
Nevertheless, I will grant the country of my birth one teeny tiny “win” for integrity. Canada is a bit exceptional on the Western stage, inasmuch as a later Canadian government’s action groups expressly acknowledged that the harm done at least to First Nations, Métis, and Inuit populations was tantamount to race-based cultural genocide. Not many Western states can lay claim to having done the same: to have spoken with integrity—eventually—about some atrocities in their living histories.
Most of the time, you instead see politicians fighting to suppress histories of past wrongdoing—and also, hard at work to destroy evidence of wrongdoing in medias res.
Because it’s always about appearances, isn’t it?
How will this play in court? How will we be seen by others? What’s the future financial cost of any present admissions of wrongdoing? What can we get away with?
This is why I now stick to the term “atrocity”: because it is more totalizing. Because it addresses the very air we breathe, the media waters in which we swim, and the deep sickness at the foundation of so many cultures in which we are sometimes encouraged to take unthinking pride—on national holidays, yes, but every other day as well. The struggle between being forced to serve various forms of knee-jerk statism and defending a living, breathing, thriving, pluralist democracy is relentless.
What should we take away, then, from the fact that the struggles we face today in North America are not so far removed—at all—from the grotesque nature of, say, Canadian parliamentary discourse in the late 19th century?
Because here we are in 2025!
Still fighting against race supremacists and colonial imperialists.
Does that mean it’s useless to fight at all?
Should we “give in” and accept that racists have always won? Always clawed back, in the end, whatever small shares of greater human dignity in pluralist society we ever manage to eke out for ourselves and others, one fragile decade at a time?
The rhetoric from Macdonald’s 1883 House of Commons Debates about what to do with those regarded as “Other” now exists comfortably in places like the US Congress and the Israeli Knesset. We have not changed as a species—not really. We have not grown much at all—except inasmuch as our stories of atrocity have grown in magnitude, in sheer death and suffering counts, via the inevitable passage of time.
And yet, what else are we to do, amid so much ignorant and intentional cruelty—if we have any sense of higher humanitarian decency in us at all?
We cannot change the fact that we were born into a world more imperialist than democratic, more tribalist than pluralist, and more xenophobic and racist than sincerely interested in the fruits of human diversity and equity.
But the sheer fact that imperialism, xenophobia, tribalism, and racism are probably going to “win”—again and again and again—is never an excuse to embrace them.
If all we can do is become an abiding nuisance to people who would rather spend their lives dehumanizing others, then so be it.
Because it is still the work of human uplift—humanist uplift—to resist what might seem intrinsic to our species on the level of raw behavioural psychology.
And it is the work of humanism in general to remember that the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are just that—stories, made up by fellow fleeting humans.
We can always work to make them more humane, if we so choose.
Be well, be kind, and seek justice where you can.
ML