History
10 stories
The Shipwrights at Nootka Sound
The first Chinese people documented in what is now Canada arrived in 1788 and built a schooner. An older reference work calls it the first vessel constructed by white men on this coast.
Invited, Then Interned
Ottawa went to Galicia and Bukovyna for farmers and got them. When war came, their Austro-Hungarian papers made them enemy aliens, and 8,579 people were interned until 1920 — two years after the armistice.
The School They Had to Build
In January 1908 the Victoria school board barred children born in China from its classrooms. The Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association lost in court, raised money across the country, and opened its own school the next year. It is still standing.
The One Who Could Speak Chinese
Norman Bethune sailed for China in January 1938 without the language. The twenty-six-year-old Winnipeg nurse who travelled with him had been working in it for six years, and almost nobody here knows her name.
The Day a London Court Said Canadian Women Were People
In 1929 the Privy Council overturned our own Supreme Court and wrote the sentence about a living tree that Canadian constitutional law has run on ever since. The five women who forced it were not saints, and both halves of that belong in the record.
The Rail They Built and the Tax That Followed
About fifteen thousand Chinese workers cut the hardest section of the Canadian Pacific Railway. Parliament's answer, the same year it was finished, was the first racial immigration law in Canadian history.
The Election Canada Fought Over Free Trade
In 1911 Laurier lost 48 seats and a government over a modest trade agreement with the United States. The voters asked a question about leverage that the economics could not answer, and it is the question back in front of us now.
The Surgeon Canada Forgot and China Never Did
Norman Bethune left Montreal for Yan'an in 1938 and was dead within two years. Mao's tribute made him required reading for a generation of Chinese schoolchildren, while his own country took forty years to notice.
The Republic on Lake Winnipeg
For six years New Iceland had its own constitution, its own councils and its own newspaper, inside Canada and outside any province. Then the boundary moved, and the smallpox it had brought with it had already moved further.
The Country to the East, and the People Who Wanted It to Be Here
In 1761 a French scholar read a Chinese court history and decided China had reached America a thousand years before Columbus. The theory has been proposed, demolished, revived and demolished again — and it still shaped how the Pacific was drawn.