Canada as a White Supremacist Nation

Japanese-Canadians heading for internment.

My portside pal Xerxes has declared Canada a “white supremacist” nation.

I doubt there can be more than perhaps a few hundred white supremacists in Canada. I suspect “white supremacy” has not been a living ideology anywhere in North America since the 1960s at the latest. Perhaps a little later in parts of Africa. All the sudden talk of “white supremacists” over just the last two years is reminiscent of the McCarthyite “communists in the State Department” scares in the 1950s, but ratcheted up exponentially. Mass hysteria.

Where is it coming from? No doubt, from the impulse to shout “Shut up!” at things you do not want to hear. All expressions of dissent from the general public are suddenly “white supremacy.” In the US, just voting for Trump makes you a “white supremacist.”

To call Canada a “white supremacist nation” is out of contact with objective reality. Canada, America, Australia, New Zealand, and Singapore, stand apart as the handful of non-ethnically-based nations in the world. Everywhere else, nationality is based largely on shared genetics. And Canada is not even tarnished, like America, by slavery or Indian Wars or forced relocation of any aboriginal people. If Canada is “supremacist,” there is no such thing as a non-supremacist country. Making the term meaningless.

Xerxes, in making his charge, does cite a few specific examples of “white supremacy.” First, the old head tax on Chinese immigration. It is worth noting that this is the only example in Canadian history of discrimination in immigration based on country of origin.

But this was, in its day, a “progressive” measure. It was Canadian labour, naturally enough, who demanded it. They saw the Chinese as unfair competition for jobs; a Chinese man whose family stayed home could accept a job at what would not be a living wage for a Canadian man with a local family to support. One can understand their concern, and, right or wrong, it was not “racist.”

It should perhaps also be noted that the first restrictions on Chinese immigration were at the insistence of the Chinese government—who saw human capital as their chief resource. And for centuries China of course simply did not allow foreigners to immigrate into China.

Xerxes then cites Canada turning away Jewish refugees before the Second World War.

This seems misplaced as a supposed example of “white supremacy.” When did Jews stop being “white”? When did they become “white” again?

In any case, although the government’s actions seem callous now that we see what Hitler then did, it should be remembered that Canada was at the time in the middle of the Great Depression. Virtually no immigration was allowed in those conditions; Jews were not singled out. Again, the exclusion was in the interests of labour, not racism.

Xerxes then cites the internment of Japanese-Canadians during the Second World War. Here, he does seem to have an example of real racial discrimination. “Enemy aliens” were interned as a matter of course, in Canada as in other countries; but the Japanese interned were often Canadian citizens. Their loyalty was not trusted; German-Canadians and Italian-Canadians were not subject to the same treatment. Still, it all happened in a state of war emergency, when jumping at shadows seems relatively understandable; it might have been safer than leaving them at risk from possible lynch mobs; and in 1988, the Mulroney government issued both an apology and financial compensation.

If that’s the worst that can be said of Canadian racism, it is time Canadians were proud of this heritage.