Making disparaging generalizations about other human groups is nothing new, but as columnist Les Leyne (“Head-tax era requires acknowledgment,” Jan. 9) and others have pointed out, it was especially rampant in B.C. in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Then, as now, a significant factor was labour’s unhappiness with the importation of temporary workers from Asia who would accept lower wages. The difference is that, a century ago, the legislature was eager to enact such prejudice into law, notably with respect to the Chinese.
However, not everyone subscribed to these generalizations.
Certainly B.C.’s first judge, Sir Matthew Baillie Begbie, did not. Responding to questions from a royal commission in 1884, he stated that the “four prominent qualities” of the Chinese were “industry, economy, sobriety and law-abidingness.” And that, he said, was the main reason they were unpopular. (Interestingly, the then-editor of the Daily British Colonist took him to task for his views, describing the Chinese as “hereditarily on a lower plane of civilization.”)
While Begbie was chief justice, he struck down every piece of discriminatory legislation, provincial or municipal, that came before him; and he lobbied Ottawa, usually unsuccessfully, to disallow those laws that he could not strike down.
What is notable about Begbie’s decisions is how “Charter-like” they are. Although he could invalidate discriminatory laws only if he concluded that they were beyond the authority of the legislature or council, he went further. In 1888, for example, he refused to allow Victoria to deny pawnbrokers’ licences to Chinese applicants. In so ruling, he referred to “race jealousy” and concluded that this sort of law should be set aside as an infringement “of personal liberty and of the equality of all men before the law.”
Certainly Begbie was no saint, as he himself acknowledged. But his record on this issue contrasts sharply and favourably with that of the politicians.
Hamar Foster is a professor and John McLaren is professor emeritus in the University of Victoria’s faculty of law.
