The head tax: the price of a door

From 1881, more than 15,000 Chinese workers helped build the Canadian Pacific Railway, the steel link that joins the country from ocean to ocean. About a thousand lost their lives doing it. But once the line was finished, the country turned its back on them. In 1885, a law imposed a $50 head tax on Chinese immigrants. By 1903, it had reached $500, about two years' wages.

According to The Canadian Encyclopedia, some 82,000 Chinese immigrants paid nearly $23 million in head tax. The cost was such that many men could not bring their families over: wives, children and parents stayed in China, sometimes forever. On July 1, 1923, the tax disappeared, but it was replaced by a law that banned almost all Chinese immigration until 1947.

On June 22, 2006, Prime Minister Stephen Harper offered a full apology to Chinese Canadians in the House of Commons, even saying one sentence in Cantonese. Symbolic payments of $20,000 were offered to living head tax payers and to surviving spouses. Nothing gives back the lost years. But acknowledging the wound finally makes it possible to tell the story together, and to remember that this country was also built by people who were made to pay for the right to live in it.