本文发表在 rolia.net 枫下论坛What would Grandpa Wong think?

Last week, the National Congress of Chinese Canadians thought it had a good news story. In the wake of similar federal agreements with the Italian and Ukrainian communities, the congress triumphantly announced it had beaten out two other Toronto-based organizations to negotiate a $12.5-million payout from Ottawa for the head tax once levied on Chinese immigrants when they entered the country.

But then reporters began asking awkward questions. Why did the deal exclude an apology? Why was there no compensation to those who paid the head tax? And why, on the eve of a federal election, was so much money going to a single organization that sent out squads of volunteers to campaign for a Liberal candidate running in Toronto's Chinatown in the last election?

Ping Tan, a Toronto lawyer who heads the NCCC, started getting tetchy. He publicly scolded Linda Tse, a Fairchild Television correspondent, when she asked several pointed questions at his press conference. "You don't ask questions like that," he snapped.

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Toronto First Radio, a Chinese-language station with a popular suppertime call-in show, never got invited to the press conference in the first place.

No wonder. A few weeks earlier, the host of the show, Simon Li, had posed this loaded question to listeners: Do you think this is a sponsorship scandal in the Chinese-Canadian community? "A majority of callers said the only difference is it is taking place in the Chinese community, not Quebec," says Mr. Li, 25.

One major difference is that no one is suggesting that any criminal conduct has occurred. It's a harsh comment, meant to reflect concerns about Liberals favouring their supporters, but it demonstrates how divisive the issue of head-tax redress has become among Chinese Canadians.

Further complicating matters, the government, which could fall as early as Monday, this week downplayed any suggestion of a done deal with the NCCC. A spokesman for Raymond Chan, multiculturalism minister, said on Tuesday that his department was merely "reviewing" the application from the organization.

But on Thursday, Mr. Chan did sign an agreement in principle with Mr. Tan -- for just $2.5-million. And a multiculturalism program under his purview provided Mr. Tan's group with a $100,000 grant for airfare, hotels and meals for a national conference this weekend in Vancouver to discuss how to spend the money.

So far, Mr. Tan says, the group has no specific plans for the payout money. But one thing is certain: It won't be used to compensate the families of Chinese Canadians who paid the tax, in compliance with the government's stipulation that no individual redress payments be made.

Officials with Mr. Chan's office, who say that the NCCC is the only organization that actually applied for redress money, issued a press release that included a list of dozens of community groups that support the deal. But one organization listed -- a Chinese-Canadian veterans group called Army, Navy & Air Force Veterans in Canada -- disassociated itself from the congress, specifying it wants an apology as part of the government's settlement.

Another group listed is, in fact, one of the toughest critics of the deal -- the Chinese Canadian National Council, which has lobbied since 1984 for direct head-tax redress. "We want something for the head-tax payers and their families," said Victor Wong, executive director, whose group didn't apply for the federal money because it disagreed with the government's conditions. He says the council plans to file an injunction to stop the payment to the Congress, and stage protests today in Chinatowns in Toronto, Montreal, Edmonton and Vancouver, where Prime Minister Paul Martin is expected to meet with Mr. Tan and other congress officials.

Mr. Tan hopes his organization will eventually see even more money. "This is the initial funding," he says. "We have an agreement to negotiate for more."

In this pre-election flurry of feel-good largesse, the federal government bypassed the one group formed to represent the victims, the Ontario Coalition of Chinese Head Tax Payers and Families. The group has signed up 4,000 payers and their families since the 1980s. It estimates that only a few hundred head-tax payers, at most, are still alive.

Like the callers to Mr. Li's radio show, the head-tax coalition alleges that another Liberal scandal is in the making. "They will transfer $12.5-million of taxpayers' money to political cronies," Susan Eng, the coalition's co-chair, said at a press conference last week before the lower amount became public.

Pressed at the time for specifics about cronyism, Ms. Eng came up short. But at Mr. Chan's Liberal nomination meeting last Sunday in Richmond, B.C., congress members and officials packed the hall, including many who didn't live in the riding, according to several witnesses.

So what would Grandpa Wong make of all this? He and other family members of mine paid a total of $1,300 -- about $23,600 in 2005 dollars, according to the Bank of Canada inflation calculator -- to enter Canada. Grandpa Wong and my grandmother each paid $500 in 1915. My other grandmother, who arrived in 1902, paid a lower head tax, $100, as did her stepson and daughter-in-law. Her husband, Grandpa Chong, arrived in 1881, before Ottawa dreamed up the tax. One of about 9,000 coolies recruited to build the Canadian Pacific Railway, he paid a different tax -- after the last spike was driven in -- to stay in Canada and find a new job. But that's another story.

Canada discriminated against aboriginals, Japanese, Germans, Italians and Ukrainians, to mention just a few. The government devised regulations to keep out Africans, Indians, Jews and a host of other non-Aryan types. But only the Chinese were singled out for a punitive admission fee -- and issued receipts. From 1885 to 1923, more than 82,000 Chinese immigrants to Canada paid an estimated $23-million to the government. (In 1923, the head tax was replaced by the Chinese Immigration Act, the Orwellian name for a law that barred virtually all Chinese immigration until its repeal in 1947.)

My grandparents might have had a claim for redress, but they died decades ago. Even if I wanted repayment of their $23,600, it would probably work out to the price of three Starbucks lattes by the time I finished divvying it up with my zillions of cousins, second cousins, their children, and their children. The rest would go to lawyers and accountants -- oh, wait; we have a dozen of those in the family, too. The point is, we're all here and flourishing; thank you, Canada. But I can't and shouldn't speak for others.

Jack Chong, a retired postal sorter, has kept his father's $500 head-tax receipt, dated April 9, 1914, and numbered 87126.

"We want the government to say they were wrong, to apologize," said Mr. Chong, 73. "Why don't they give the money to us? Instead, they throw the money to the Congress."

For 91 years, Har Ying Lee's family has also kept her father's head-tax certificate. Mrs. Lee, 69, said her father worked as a laundryman, briefly returning home to marry and start a family.

The Chinese Immigration Act forced him to leave them behind when he came back to Canada. Mrs. Lee said her father saw her once when she was an infant, and not again until she was 22 and had arrived as a bride in Canada. "My mother is still alive. She's 97," said Mrs. Lee. "My father told me it took him so long to come up with the head-tax money that he hoped my mother would have a long life to get the money back. She wants the head-tax money back. We need direct compensation from the government."

George Lau, a thin, energetic man, is a co-chair of the Ontario coalition of head-tax payers. His father paid the head tax in 1924. Now, at 74, Mr. Lau fears time is running out for redress. He points out that Mr. Tan came to Canada from Malaysia as a student in 1968, after the era of the head tax. "They were not impacted," said Mr. Lau, speaking of people like Mr. Tan. "They shouldn't be given sole responsibility for handling this money."更多精彩文章及讨论，请光临枫下论坛 rolia.net