An Average Post About the Komagata Maru

Hello, and welcome to my first post on our newest project, “Ology of Apology”. This project focuses on the Canadian Government’s injustices towards minorities. This post will focus on a more specific event though. The Komagata Maru.

The Story

Passengers of the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-: CVA 7-127

The Komagata Maru is a story of injustice, and a story of bravery, testing the limits of the law. The story starts in Hong Kong, where a wealthy Sikh man name Gurdit Singh came into possession of a boat named the Komagata Maru. 150 Punjabi passengers boarded the ship in Hong Kong, all Punjabis. But this wasn’t enough yet. The ship travelled through Japan and picked up 226 more passengers.

Passengers aboard the Komagata Maru
Image: James Luke Quiney fonds/City of Vancouver Archives/AM 15984-:CVA 7-122.

The ship then began its 2 month journey into Canadian waters. Although Gurdit Singh and the passengers were aware that Canada had been turning away south Asian immigrants for almost 5 years, they thought that being British subjects would be enough to be allowed admittance. This was not the case. Only 20 passengers (and a few special cases) were allowed onto solid ground due to the fact that they were returning residents and could prove it. The other 350 some passengers were kept on the boat for 2 months with food or water supply all while the local police were harassing them hoping to get them to leave by their own volition.

People coming to watch the conflict between the law and the Komagata Maru
Image: City of Vancouver Archives/James Luke Quiney fonds/AM1584-:CVA 7-129.

The Punjabi people on land did their best to get food and water to the ship while raising money to bring the issue to court. They raised an incredible sum of money and hired lawyers to take the case to court. The court later ruled that the ship had broken the continuous journey act and the ship began its journey back to India. The ship stopped in Japan where approximately 20 passengers got off of the ship. The ship then arrived in the port of Budge Budge in India, where some distrusting police members got into a scuffle with the passengers resulting in the death of 20 passengers.

This is a brick that was used to fight against the police officials trying to force the Komagata Maru to leave

Source: Museum of Vancouver


The Apology

in 2008, Stephen Harper made a public apology to around 8,000 people in a local event in Surrey, BC. The Sikh community thought that this apology was half hearted and demanded it be said on the floor of the House of Commons, which didn’t happen until 2016, when Justin Trudeau made the decision to apologize in the House of Commons as the Punjabi community asked.

This is the stage where Justin Trudeau gave his formal apology

Recent events such as residential schools are getting the same sort of apology in an attempt to make things write and move forward as a society. These sorts of apologies are important because they allow the general public to be educated or just acknowledge the events and it shows the remorse and responsibility the government is taking on because of it. It also allows the community affected to observe this and forgive.


The Conclusion

This event isn’t just some random thing from history class. This event is even significant to our lives today! This is because of the effect that it had on the way it has functioned as an example for discrimination and how we have pushed against systemic racism evident by the great variety of people now living in Canada. But overall, I think the most important part of this whole story to remember are the people that took the journey knowing it may not work out, eventually leading to the society we live in today.

 

Thanks for reading this post on the Komagata Maru, and I hope you look out for my next posts on the other racial injustices in Canada!

Signing off.

An average post about Canadian politics

Hello, and welcome to this post on our latest project, “Think You Can do Better?”. This project was about taking on the role of a political party in the Canadian federal election and creating the basis for a campaign. My party was comprised of Jordan, Jonathan, Liam, and myself.

Here you can see our campaign video, detailing our intentions and plans.

The video above was the final product of the project.


The HPC (Hippopotamus Party of Canada)

You can read more about our party and our ideas here, on my post detailing the party if you want to read more. Our party believed the current inflated housing market in populated areas, as well as our ever-growing national debt to be problems that need fixing before they get even more out of hand. Our reasoning for the housing crisis is self explanatory. This is seen in our campaign video with a decent sized Vancouver home costing as much as $2,000,000. Thats a lot of money! The debt crisis is more of a controversial topic. The main reason people will denote national debt is because they believe government to function almost indifferently under debt or not. And they are partially right. The big issue with that though is the large hit the country will take if another event like the pandemic occurs, because the debt a country holds directly affects the amount of monetary support or budget the country can afford to spend attempting to recover, as well as the large interest rates. These interest rates can be observed here.


How should we govern ourselves?

This project had a very difficult driving question; “How should we govern ourselves?”. This question is particularly hard to answer because the answer will change depending on who your asking and what values and experiences they have. For me, I think that the best political system is one in which every different problem and angle on those problems is presented and heard. One such system, known as proportional reprentation (here is a great in-depth explanation from Fair Vote Canada). Proportional representation is a system where seats in government are spread throughout parties based on percentage of votes, for example, if a party were to get 15% of Canadian votes, they would get 15% of seats in the House of Commons. This means that the large percentage of Canadian’s who don’t vote on the grounds that their vote doesn’t matter, would lose their excuse.


Reflection

Overall, I think that this project put me into a new perspective on politics and showed me that the ideal system I have been talking about is very difficult to implement due to how the current system works. And I also think that despite advocating for such a this as an individual, as a party it is disadvantageous to have proportional representation due to the fact that there will almost never be a majority government. On the work side of things here, I think that our campaign video was very successful, even though we were missing some shots due to poor weather and tight time constraints. During this project I’m sure I could have made use of my new Zettelkasten to make my work easier on me, and I hope that I can do that in the future.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk, and I hope you’ll join me later for more!