Vancouver Sun columnist Daphne Bramham’s myopic opinion that Canada has no need to say sorry for the Komagatu Maru incident reflects a racist and blinkered pedigree that some of our modern day pundits find difficult to shake.

Bramham declares the Komagata Maru passengers were illegal migrants and with a ruthless naiveté equates them to the Chinese boat people who arrived on BC’s coast in 1999. She couches her argument saying countries have every right to set their own immigration policies, picking and choosing which people and how many to allow in each year.

Governments have a responsibility to set immigration policies that are advantageous to their citizens, Bramham writes, adding Canada cannot accept everyone who shows up at our doorstep and nor could it 90 years ago.

No argument here.

But Bramham’s comparison of the Chinese boat people of 1999 with the passengers of the Komagata Maru is like comparing the Canadian coast guard to the KKK. Both want to protect the homeland but do it differently.

Extrapolating from Bramham’s diatribe that lacked any credible analytical framework, the KKK-like actions against the passengers of the Komagata Maru requires no remorse.

The Komagata Maru arrived in Vancouver on May 23, 1914 with 376 passengers on board.  With the exception of 20 returning residents and the ship’s doctor and his family, none of the passengers was allowed to land.  Instead, they were detained in Vancouver Harbour.  Ninety percent of the passengers of the Komagata Maru were Sikhs.  The rest were Hindus and Muslims, but they all came from Punjab, the homeland of the Sikhs. 

Legal scholars say the passengers on the Komagata Maru had the right to enter Canada because they were British subjects.  Citizenship in the British Empire, if it meant anything, allowed for free passage in the empire.  The folks in BC, however, had different thoughts and their emotions were whipped up by an exclusionist immigration policy based on race and nationality. 

The policy had its origins in the 1880’s when the Canadian government first imposed a head tax on Chinese immigrants. We have already apologized for this and given redress. Then Vancouver mayor Truman Baxter organized an anti-Asian rally as the Komagata Maru bobbed in Vancouver harbour and records show the first speaker was the prominent politician H.H. Stevens.

 “I have no ill-feeling against people coming from Asia personally,” he told the crowd, “but I reaffirm that the national life of Canada will not permit any large degree of immigration from Asia . . . I intend to stand up absolutely on all occasions on this one great principle—of a white country and a white British Columbia.”

Stevens’ speech, it was noted, was followed by “thunderous applause.”

The passengers were left in deplorable conditions aboard the Komagatu Maru for two months.

A gunboat was then used to threaten the ship and its passengers, before it was forced back to India.

The “white folk” in Canada were satisfied that the racist device used to exclude would be immigrants from India called the Continuous Journey Provision of the Immigration Act, had been upheld. That law provided the authority to refuse entry to anyone who did not come by continuous journey from his or her country of origin.

The Komagata Maru came to Vancouver via Hong Kong after shipping companies under pressure from the Canadian government refused to sell tickets from India to Canada, making it impossible for anyone to come from India and meet the requirements of the Canadian law. 

Unlike the snakeheads who smuggled the Chinese boat people to the secluded northern coast of British Columbia, the architects of the Komagata Maru journey made their plans to challenge an unjust Canadian law, public.

They did not hide their intentions nor try to enter the country stealthily.

Bramham’s hypothesis if Canada apologizes for the Komagata Maru incident our future generations may also have to say sorry for sending the Chinese boat people home, is childish. The Chinese boat people were not sent home because they were Chinese. The passengers of the Komagata Maru, on the other hand, were deported because of their race.

That’s the fundamental difference. And that’s plenty to say sorry for.