Speaking notes for The Honourable Jason Kenney, P.C., M.P. Minister of Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism

At a funding announcement for two Community Historical Recognition Program projects marking the Komagata Maru incident
Vancouver, British Columbia, December 12, 2010

As delivered

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. I’m joined here by my colleague, the Honourable Dr. Alice Wong, Parliamentary Secretary for Multiculturalism, as I am Minister for Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism making me a very busy man, and I depend on Alice’s help.

Thank you so much for your kind welcome to my second visit to this historic Vancouver Gurdwara which is part of a long and proud tradition of the Sikhs community in Canada, the Khalsa Diwan Society is really a foundational institution in the Canadian Sikh community and it is a great honour to be here and I am excited to be here to make this announcement.

First let me say that I have some good news to bring before I get into today’s announcement. I was in Punjab in India two months ago visiting our immigration office in New Delhi and then our visa office and Consulate in Chandigarh, Punjab for the second time in one year actually. And our government and officials have been working very hard to respond to concerns within the Canadian Punjabi community about sometimes the difficulty of families and friends obtaining visitor visas to come here to Canada, and I am pleased to tell you as I learned during my visit to Punjab that the acceptance rate for visitor visa applications from Punjab has gone up significantly. Five years ago it was 32 percent and it is now just under 50 percent and going in the right direction, but more importantly, we are issuing, because more people are applying, far more visas are being issued, and this year, 2010, we are on tract to issue twice as many visitor visas to people from Punjab and Haryana State as we did – as the government did in 2005.

So there has been a huge increase, and I want to acknowledge the hard work of our officials. I know it’s an issue that we need to continue to work, and that is one of the reasons, as you may know, I was focussed in meeting with Chief Minister Badal Singh and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on the issue of combating fraud in immigration facilitated by unscrupulous agents in that region who often cause people great harm. And so I simply wanted to bring that good news as well as the fact that last year, 2009, India re-emerged as the number one source country for immigration to Canada, for permanent residents coming to Canada. And, of course, most of those coming are from Punjab.

As well, I should say that I had the great honour of meeting with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his visit to Toronto. It was the first visit of an Indian head of government to Canada in 36 years and now, thanks to the leadership of Prime Minister Harper, we have seen a full normalization of relations which is very positive news.

So, as you know – first of all I visited here last summer, and thank you for your hospitality at that time. I learned that I did not know you had this aspiration of constructing a museum to recognize the contribution of Sikhs to Canadian society particularly with a focus on the immigration restriction measures of the era of the Kumagata Maru.

You know the story very well, Sikhs began to come to Canada and other Canadians of Punjabi origin began coming here in significant numbers shortly after the turn of the last century, around 1904, and in fact, in 1907, this Khalsa Diwan Society was created to provide support to Sikhs immigrants to Canada. And it was around that time that the first Gurdwaras were constructed and that the Sikhs began to have a real presence in Canada working hard. And this is one thing we can say about the presence of the presence of the Sikhs community in Canada, that this is a community that was always willing to do tough work, with a great work ethic, with pride in the work that it did, whether it was in the fishery or in the forestry or in mining, in those early days that was tough back-breaking work, and the pioneers represented here today by Jack Opal and others are people to who we all owe an enormous debt of gratitude because they chose to come to Canada 100 years ago at a time when this was not a very diverse society, at a time when there were no Sikh institutions, there was no larger South Asian community. There were a lot of discriminatory and prejudicial attitudes towards immigrants in general, and Sikhs in particular.

And those prejudicial attitudes were reflected in a government policy adopted by the Laurier government in 1905 called the Continuous Journey Policy. The Continuous Journey Policy was – essentially said that in order to come to Canada you had to come in one vessel without stopping. And this was designed very deliberately to stop immigration from the sub-continent because it was considered at that time essentially impossible to take such a long journey in one vessel without stopping coming from the sub-continent. Now as you know, in 1914, certain Punjabi activists from different backgrounds, and this is very important, they were not only Sikhs, there were also Punjabi Muslims, and Hindus as well as Sikhs who decided that they would challenge the Continuous Journey Policy, and so they got themselves to Japan where they acquired the right to rent and use the Komagatu Maru Japanese passenger vessel to make the voyage across the Pacific. And they arrived on May 23, 1914 in Vancouver Harbour, in Burrard Inlet right near Stanley Park.

And at that time, the Dominion of Canada government said, “We will not let you disembark because you are here in violation, you tried to trick us around the Continuous Journey Policy, and we don’t want South Asian, we don’t want Indian immigrants coming to Canada.” They refused to go away. The ship was running out of supplies and so this society, the founders, the pioneers who began the Khalsa Diwan Society in 1907 went to the community and gathered charitable support, gathered food, gathered water, gathered other necessary supplies and took these things out to the Komagata Maru as it was moored in Burrard Inlet for several weeks. And they helped to save the lives of those people.

Ultimately, the Canadian government realized that there were some people there who had previous immigration status in Canada and so 22 of the passengers who had been to Canada before were allowed to disembark because they had a claim to be here. And the others were told they had to leave.

And you know the rest of the story, eventually they returned to India, to the port of Calcutta where a riot broke out; many people were killed both passengers of the ship, their supporters, as well as the British Soldiers, and it was a great historical tragedy.

So we fast forward from 1914 to today and over all of that time, Canada opened itself up, stopped immigration restriction measures based on race or country of origin. Ultimately Conservative Prime Minister John Diefenbaker in 1960 brought in a new immigration act that eliminated racial discrimination and country of origin discrimination in our immigration system. Thanks in part to that, tens and eventually hundreds of thousands, and now over a million, immigrants from India came to Canada, about half of whom, of course, are Sikhs with origin from Punjab.

But many of the pioneers in the community would not forget. They could not forget, because the Komagatu Maru incident was not just an isolated moment in time, but it became a symbol for unjust treatment in many ways, prejudicial treatment of South Asian immigrants for several decades. And these hard working who paid their taxes and respected our laws and helped build our country said, ‘Thank you Canada for all you have given us, but it would be so meaningful in the honour of the memory of our ancestors if we could acknowledge together as Canadians the unjust nature of what just happened in the Continuous Journey Policy and in particular in Burrard Inlet in 1914.

And so various organizations in the community kept the memory alive, they kept the memory of the hard work, and the experiences and the challenges and the difficulties of the pioneers, and friends, I think that is so important and for the following reason. Today, we continue to receive new immigrants from around the world more than any other country, and we continue to receive young Punjabi and Indian immigrants, young Sikh immigrants who come here. And they don’t face those challenges. Yes, every now and then they might run into someone with a negative stereotype or attitude and every now and then, baptized Sikhs may find that people don’t understand the traditions, the five k’s. And yes, there are still fights to be made, but basically, for young Sikhs in Canada today, this is the best country in the world. They can do anything. They can achieve anything. And we have to be careful because this is a country of such prosperity and such opportunity, it is easy for young people to take that for granted.

So the reason I’m here today making this announcement, the reason our government has launched a program of redress and recognition for the Komagatu Maru, for the immigration restriction measure, and as well for the internment of certain ethnic communities, members of ethnic communities during the First and Second World War is because history means something. If you are going to honour the past and conserve what is best about it, you also have to face up to what was wrong in the past. If you are going to take history seriously, you need to recognize the moments of injustice in our own history. Not dwell on them too much, we as Canadians shouldn’t flagellate ourselves too much about injustices in our past, but nor should be ignore them or deny them or pretend they never happened.

This is why Prime Minister Harper made the apology for the Chinese head tax, and the Exclusion Act and the other prejudicial immigration policies that were targeting Canadians of Chinese origin. And it is why he is the first and only Prime Minister in the history of Canada to have acknowledged the unjust nature of the Komagatu Maru incident and the Continuous Journey Policy upon which it was based. He did so first in a speech here in Surrey in the summer of 2006 and he announced that our government would launch consultations with the South Asian community about how best to redress -- that is to make some symbolic gesture of regret to the Punjabi community in particular for what happened to their ancestors.

So he asked me to do that, we held consultations, I met with many of you and that ultimately led to the Prime Minister’s apology on behalf on the Government of Canada and Canadians for what happened in 1914. Now regrettably some say that apology is not good enough, they want a second apology. These are the same people who did not offer any when they were in power, so I don’t take that seriously. I think we should take the Prime Minister at his word and be grateful that we finally have a government that has acknowledged the unjust nature of the events of 1914.

But to give practical meaning to the Prime Minister’s apology, he asked me to create and fund a program of historical recognition and education so that we can teach those newcomers and young people in the community and the broader Canadian population about what happened then, because it’s only in learning about those events that we can ensure that we do not repeat them. And so our government launched the Community Historical Recognition Program started in 2006 and in 2008 I announced that we were allocating at least $2.5 million of funds to projects designed to commemorate the Komagatu Maru incident, that is to create monuments or other projects that would cause remembrance of the event and to educate current and future generations about it.

Now, the Khalsa Diwan Society has been a real leader in this project. I want to acknowledge Jack Opal and the two other members of our – we appointed a special advisory committee from the community. Jako Pola Sikh, a Punjabi of Muslim faith from Toronto and a Hindu Punjabi Canadian professor from Montreal reflecting the diversity of people on the vessel because we wanted the community to give us the advice about what were the best projects. I don’t thing bureaucrats and politicians have all the answers. I think usually the best answers come from the grass roots and come from the community.

And so we appointed the special advisory committee to advise us on the grants and then we opened up the process for applications and the Khalsa Diwan Society have made a couple of very interesting and worthwhile application and let me say the process, I apologize to the committee, because I know the process is very cumbersome, when we are talking about government, there is always red tape and regulations and terms and conditions, but thank you for your patience, and so the good news is that I am happy to announce today that my department, Citizen and Immigration Canada through the Community Historical Recognition Program will give $82,500 to the Khalsa Diwan Society to determine a location and design a monument to mark the memory of the incident.

I understand that the monument will be a replica of the ship and will include engraved names of all the passengers along with a descriptive plaque and pictures of the passengers. It will be a tremendously suitable memorial to a group of people whose story we should not forget. And as I say this is to design a location and monument – a location and design a monument and if there is further work to be done, I know there might be further applications forthcoming.

My ministry will also give the Society, $104,000 to develop the first phase of a museum dedicated to the incident. The museum will highlight the policies and practices of the Canadian government concerning immigrants from South Asia during the first half of the 1900s. It will also focus on the impact newcomers had on the west coast of Canada during those years. I believe that we are hoping that the museum will open on the grounds of the Khasla Diwan Society – is that in the building next door? – late next year or early in 2012.

So friends, this is great news. These are two projects which fit perfectly with what we are trying to do with the Community Historical Recognition Program. It is tangible proof of the government’s determination not only to acknowledge the hardships faced by the Indo-Canadian community and others, but also to use education and remembrance to fight racism and to encourage Canadians to respect people from all backgrounds.

So again I want to thank you for your Khalsa Diwan Society leadership, constructive role, forward looking, never forgetting the past. This is a great model for the broader Sikh and Punjabi and indeed broader Canadian communities. So thank you again.