Appendix CASE ONE - Collection Point® | The Total Digital Asset ...

The Legalization of White Supremacy in Canada 189
bodies to return the bones to China in accordance with traditional burial
rites. They were also considered to be a social threat because of an apparent
addiction to gambling and opium smoking. 8 All this was easily translated into
the rhetoric of both physical and moral contagion and provided the basis for
continuing and ever more intense demands that the growth of this 'depraved
population' be stemmed and existing residents be 'encouraged' to return to
their homeland.
During the 1860s and early 1870s there were occasional calls from British
Columbia politicians for the imposition of a discriminatory head tax against
the Chinese. 9 A tax of this sort had already been introduced in the Australian
colonies of Victoria and New South Wales in the mid 1850s and early
1860s (over the expression of some misgivings in London) as a means
of discouraging the migration of Chinese to their gold fields. 10 Tension
and violence had occurred in both jurisdictions as white miners reacted
hostilely to the presence in their midst of the 'celestials', as the Chinese were
pejoratively described. 11 The calls for a head tax failed to gain majority support
in British Columbia, because, it was supposed, it was beyond the jurisdiction
of the province under the British North America Act of 1867, which reserved
matters relating to aliens and naturalization, and trade and commerce to the
dominion government. 12
In 1878 (a year when an upsurge of Chinese immigrants to British Columbia
occurred) the legislature, following the lead of Queensland in 1877, enacted
a discriminatory, quarterly tax against Chinese residents in the province. 13
When this legislation was challenged in Tai Sing v. MacGuire it was made
clear by Justice John Hamilton Gray that the legislation was both ultra vires
and openly discriminatory. 14 He added that, if special legislation was needed
to deal with the immigration of Chinese, then Ottawa would have to enact it
under Canadian constitutional arrangements.
The British Columbia authorities seem to have accepted this judicial advice,
resorting to lobbying of the federal government, which grew in intensity as
large numbers of Chinese labourers were hired to complete the final stages of
8
M. Zaffroni, The Great Chain of Being: Racism and Imperialism in Colonial Victoria (M. A. Thesis,
History, Victoria, 1987), 18-23, 152-69.
9
See report in Victoria Daily Colonist, 19 May 1865 on motion introduced in the colonial legislative
assembly by G.E. Dennes of Saltspring Island, and B.C., Journals of the Legislative Assembly, i, 1872,
15-16 for first motions before the new provincial legislative assembly of John Robson, M.L.A. for
Nanaimo.
10
See Stat. Viet., 1855, no.39; Stat. N.S.W., 1861, no.3.
11
R. Huttenback, Racism and Empire: White Settlers and Coloured Immigrants in the British Self-
Goveming Colonies, 1830-1910 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1976), 59-61.
12
British North America Act 1867, 30 & 31 Viet., c. 3 (U.K.) s. 91(25) and (2) respectively.
13
Act to Provide for the Better Collection of Provincial Taxes from Chinese, S.B.C. 1878, c. 35 ss. 2,
8, based on Act to Amend 'The Gold Fields Act' 1874 so far as Relates to Asiatic and African Aliens and
in Other Respects, Stat. Q'ld, 1877, no. 12.
14
(1878) 1B.C.L.R., 101 (S.C.).