Kids Corner

Above: William Lyon Mackenzie King and his famous dog: the nut-case who was the architect of Canada’s “White Man’s Country” and received his instructions, he confessed in his diaries, from his dead mother … who ‘communicated’ to him through this dog!

History

The Saga of The Komagata Maru:
Part II

Compiled by PARDEEP SINGH NAGRA

 

 

 

Continued from yesterday ...

 

 

Part II

The hysteria against the immigrants reached all the way up to the top of the Canadian Government when Prime Minister Wilfred Laurier immediately set up a Royal Commission and appointed his protégé, William Lyon Mackenzie King, to head the investigation. King became the architect of the forthcoming racist immigration policies and initiatives.

At this juncture, it is worth examining the character of Mackenzie King, who would also, before long, become Prime Minister, to understand his thought processes.

First, it was he who coined the phrase, “White Man’s Country”, as a description of his vision of Canada.

Secondly, during this period -- and this fact did not come out, unfortunately, until after his death -- that his political decisions and actions were shaped by his dead mother who (as his diaries later revealed to the world in great detail), being dead,  “communicated” to him through his dog!

Such was the mind of the man assigned the task of designing a policy to keep Canada ‘white”.   

After analyzing the situation, King devised an original and clever plan. He came up with two orders-in-council to be added to the Immigration Act of 1906.

The first order-in-council stated: ”All immigrants must come to Canada via a through ticket and by continuous journey from their country of birth or citizenship.”

The second read as follows: “All immigrants from Asia must have in their possession $200.”

To make sure the continuous journey legislation was seal tight, the government went so far as to force the Canadian Pacific (“CP”) Shipping Company to end direct voyages from South Asia.

The second order-in-council was clearly discriminatory, since white immigrants were required to have only $15 in their possession upon arrival in Canada.  Each Asian arriving on Canada’s shores would now be required to have eight times that amount!

The numbers speak for themselves about the effectiveness of the continuous journey regulation and the zeal with which it was applied. In 1907-08, 2,623 Sikh and other immigrants were allowed to enter Canada; in 1908-09, the number plunged to 6. In 1909-10, only 10 were admitted, and in 1910-11 only 5.

If this was not enough in the fall of 1908, immigration officials came up with a plan for the mass relocation of all South Asians who had settled in Canada to British Honduras (now Belize).

Life was very challenging for the early immigrants who were mostly all men.  They were not allowed to go back and re-enter Canada, nor bring their wives, family or children and faced daily racial taunts and discrimination.

But all of this did not stop the spirit of the Sikhs. They worked tirelessly towards the nation building of Canada, building the railroad, working in the lumber mills, cultivating the fields, running factories and much much more.

The spirit of these early Canadian pioneers was reflected by Gurdit Singh, a farmer from Punjab, who chartered the ship Komagata Maru to sail to Canada. 

On May 23, 1914, the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying 376 immigrants from British India reached Canada.

The passengers consisted of 340 Sikhs, 24 Muslims, and 12 Hindus, all British subjects. It is believed that one of the Sikh passengers, Jagat Singh Thind, was the youngest brother of Bhagat Singh Thind, a Sikh-American writer and lecturer who was involved in a protracted legal battle over the rights of non-European immigrants to obtain U.S. citizenship.

When the Komagata Maru arrived in Canadian waters, it was not allowed to dock. The first immigration officer to meet the ship in Vancouver was Fred "Cyclone" Taylor.

The Conservative Premier of British Columbia, Richard McBride, gave a statement that the passengers would not be allowed to disembark, while the then-Prime Minister of Canada, Sir Robert Borden, decided what to do with the ship.

Conservative MP H.H. Stevens organized a public meeting against allowing the ship's passengers to disembark and urged the government to refuse to allow the ship to remain in Canadian waters. Stevens worked with immigration official Malcolm R. J. Reid to keep the passengers off shore.

It was Reid's intransigence, supported by Stevens, that led to mistreatment of the passengers on the ship by refusing all supplies of water and food to the ship during the weeks and months they waited for the government’s decision … which wasn't resolved until the intervention of the federal Minister of Agriculture, Martin Burrell, MP for Yale-Cariboo.


To be continued tomorrow …



Edited by sikhchic.com
May 5, 2014 

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Part II"









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