June 22 Head Tax Apology Ceremony
simulcast across Canada:
Vancouver location is Fairmont Hotel Vancouver
What a long way we have come since November 26th, 2005, when Liberal Prime
Minister Paul Martin and his Parliamentary Secretary Raymond Chan refused to speak to
head tax descendants asking for an apology, as they made their way into the SUCCESS
Hall to sign an Agreement-in-Principle for NO Apology, and NO compensation.
On June 22nd, 2006, the Conservative federal government will simulcast Prime Minister
Harper's apology for the Head Tax and Exclusion Act legislation from the House of
Commons. This public event will take place at the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver from
noon to 3pm.
The BC Coalition is arranging transportation for the elderly and those who need assistance.
Transportation will be provided from 10 am - 11 am,
from SUCCESS - 28 West Pender Street,
and will return from Hotel Vancouver to SUCCESS from 3 - 4pm.
Members of the BC Coalition will attend and witness this historical and, hopefully
celebratory occasion in the BC ballroom of the Fairmont Hotel Vancouver at Burrard
and Georgia.
I will be attending and inviting my parents, my grandmother my cousins. I have
head tax payers on both parents's sides. My mother's father and grandparents paid
the head tax. And my father's mother... I am sure. His father actually arrived in 1886,
the year before the head tax was enacted. But grandmother had to come to Canada,
where she gave birth to two daughers and 4 sons. My father is the youngest, born in
1925, 2 years after the head tax was turned into the Chinese Exclusion Act.
When grandfather's 4th wife returned to China, with her Canadian born children,
they were unable to come to Canada until after 1947 due to the Exclusion Act.
My grandmother, #5 wife, stayed in Canada.
June 22 Head Tax Apology Ceremony simulcast across Canada – Vancouver location is Fairmont Hotel Vancouver
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