A national campaign
For more than two hundred years Chinese people in Canada were not treated fairly or equally, yet we laid the track, worked the mines and built the communities that hold this country together. Our petition has closed with 2,443 signatures, and the campaign for a national Chinese-Canadian Heritage Month continues.
Petition e-7523 closed August 15, 2026 · The work is not finished
Latest update · August 17, 2026
A message from Marvin Rotrand, Director General of United Against Hate Canada. Five months after United Against Hate Canada and the Montreal Chan Associations launched the national campaign to have Parliament enact February as Canadian Chinese Heritage Month, there is real progress, and much work still to do.
House of Commons petition e-7523 closed on August 15, 2026 with 2,443 signatures from every province. Member of Parliament Michael Ma (Markham-Unionville) will table it in the House once Parliament returns from its summer recess, in late September or the first week of October.
The campaign now comprises 41 organizations across the country, with campaign chairs in every province except Newfoundland and Labrador and Prince Edward Island. Chair Lian Zhang has accepted to coordinate Newfoundland and Labrador for the time being.
17 municipal councils have adopted motions of support: Brampton, Burnaby, Cape Breton Regional Municipality, Chetwynd, Clarington, Durham Region, Guelph, Markham, Nanaimo, Newmarket, Parry Sound, Richmond Hill, Stratford, Toronto, Vaughan, Whitby and York Region. A notice of motion in Vancouver returns to Council on November 18, and twelve other cities and towns have pledged motions of their own in September and October. Motions are shared with Members of Parliament and have a powerful impact.
The goal is national recognition. An earlier campaign in 2024 did not succeed nationally but led Ontario to recognize February as Chinese Heritage Month through Bill 183. In British Columbia, MLA Teresa Wat has tabled her own bill for a provincial Chinese Heritage Month. Alberta and Saskatchewan are also seriously examining provincial bills.
Canada already recognizes 69 heritage months and commemorative days, and will adopt Senator Kutcher's motion for a Ukrainian Heritage Month later this year. There is still no recognition of the Chinese community of 1.8 million people, the largest minority in Canada without official recognition. Between the 1885 head tax and the 1947 repeal of the 1921 exclusion legislation, the Chinese faced barriers no other ethnic or racial group in Canada faced, and they still put down deep roots and contributed to this country's growth.
MP Ma is working toward a bill declaring February as Canadian Chinese Heritage Month, which the campaign hopes can be tabled in the coming months. It would then follow the usual procedure and could take a year before final adoption. In the meantime the campaign will grow the number of sponsoring groups and municipal motions, meet stakeholders and decision makers, heighten its visibility, and continue hosting monthly national Zoom calls.
Marvin Rotrand, Director General, United Against Hate Canada
Chinese workers were instrumental in uniting this country by rail. The record is plain.
17,000
Chinese labourers
Came to build the treacherous western section of the Canadian Pacific Railway through British Columbia between 1880 and 1885.
$1.00
a day
Half or a third of what white workers earned, and they still had to pay for their own food and tents.
3 of 4
workers in the mountains
Chinese crews took the highest-risk tasks: handling explosives, clearing rock, cutting through the mountain passes.
Hundreds
to thousands died
Lost to harsh weather, rockslides, dynamite blasts and sickness. Many who survived were left stranded with no money to return home.
Head taxes, a total ban, and twenty-four years of separated families, followed by communities that endured and rebuilt anyway.
1885
With the last spike driven, Canada imposed a $50 Head Tax on Chinese arrivals, later raised to $100 and then $500, roughly two years of wages.
1923
On July 1, 1923, Dominion Day, Canada banned virtually all Chinese immigration. The community marked the date as Humiliation Day.
1923–1947
Fewer than 50 Chinese immigrants were admitted in that entire span. Families were split across an ocean for a generation.
1947
The Act was finally repealed on May 14, 1947, as post-war human rights standards shifted.
2006
Canada formally apologized for the Head Tax and exclusion, but there is still no national month recognizing our contributions.
After the CPR was built, Chinese Canadians were pushed to the margins of society. The laws were designed not only to keep people out, but to keep families apart and prevent a thriving community from taking root.
The Exclusion Act made it nearly impossible for Chinese women to enter Canada. By 1941, roughly 29,000 Chinese men lived here, more than 80% of them married, yet their wives and children were left behind in China. The community became known as a “married bachelor society,” with men living alone for decades.
Every person of Chinese descent in Canada, whether Canadian-born or naturalized, had to register for a government identity card within 12 months. Refusing meant fines up to $500 or imprisonment. This surveillance singled out one group on the basis of race alone.
Chinese Canadians were barred from voting, holding public office, and owning property in many areas. They were pushed into low-status work such as laundries, restaurants and domestic service, and earned far less than white workers for the same labour.
With legal immigration blocked, some Chinese immigrants entered Canada using fraudulent papers that claimed false identities. These “paper sons” lived for years in fear of deportation, often hiding their real names even from their own children.
During the Great Depression, unemployment among Chinese Canadians in Vancouver soared as high as 80%, compared to roughly 30% for the city overall. Those who received government relief were often given less than others.
During the Second World War, hundreds of Chinese Canadians volunteered to serve. Their service helped prove their loyalty and pressured the government to repeal the Exclusion Act in 1947 and, eventually, to grant full citizenship rights.
Historical photographs and documents from across Canada, from the railway mountains of British Columbia to Montreal's Chinatown, showing the work, the discrimination, and the communities Chinese Canadians built.
July 31, 2026 · Chinatown, Montreal
Organized by Jimmy Chan ( 陳燮堃 主席 ), Co-Founder of the Canadian Chinese Heritage Month, Montreal Chinese community leader and President of the Chan Associations in Chinatown. Jimmy gives special thanks to Marvin Rotrand for his leadership in bringing together politicians across Canada in support of our Canadian Chinese Heritage Month petition campaign.
Marvin Rotrand, Co-Founder of the Canadian Chinese Heritage Month, is a former Canadian politician who served as a member of Montreal City Council. He is now the Director General of the group United Against Hate Canada.
It took Jimmy two full weeks of planning and conversations with hundreds of people to bring our community together for this first press conference. More than a hundred people were invited and most of them came, giving the campaign the support it needed to spread the word.
That morning we made an important piece of history in our Chinatown: unity. Attendees committed to carrying the message to their communities, families and friends, and to encouraging everyone to sign before the deadline.
Our unity is making a real difference in strengthening the petition campaign.
Media coverage
CityNews coverage
Coverage of the Chinese-Canadian Heritage Month petition campaign press conference by CityNews.
Full press conference
From the launch · July 31, 2026
What was announced when the campaign launched its petition drive. These milestones from the summer of 2026 are kept here as a record of how the campaign built its support.
“He will table the petition in September in the House of Commons,” said Michael Ma, Member of Parliament for Markham-Unionville. “The petition is a tangible example of the community’s support for the bill which should be in first reading before the end of the year. The bill will call on Parliament to enact a Canadian Chinese Heritage Month with an annual recognition each February. The petition is open on the House of Commons website until August 15.”
“Our focus over the last months has been on winning municipal motions of support and we have succeeded in obtaining 17 so far,” said Jimmy Chan, President of the Chan Associations in Quebec and Co-Founder of the campaign. “We are pleased to alert the public that major cities such as Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto, Vaughan, Markham, Burnaby, Nanaimo, Cape Breton Regional Municipality, and Richmond Hill are among those that have formally voted their support and that we are in discussions with a dozen other municipalities in regard to their August Council sessions.”
“The national campaign is still recruiting new supporting organizations and now numbers 37 member groups who will now focus on boosting the number of signatures on the petition,” said Jimmy Chan. “We are grateful to Mr. Ma for championing this. His bill is extremely meaningful for Chinese Canadians. Today, we are announcing a major signature gathering event in Montreal on July 25. It will pull in a lot of new signatures for the petition.”
“We’ve been busy in British Columbia to advance the campaign,” said Adrian Marr, Chair of the Chinese Heritage Committee of the OCCA Communities Associations in the Central Okanagan. “We’ve met with provincial and municipal politicians and alerted Chinese and other associations across British Columbia of our work. Today I am very pleased to announce that we have a commitment from Councillor Lenny Zhou to bring a motion of support to Vancouver’s August City Council meeting. That motion will significantly strengthen Mr. Ma’s efforts in Parliament.”
“Our focus in Nova Scotia has been to speak to political leaders. We met with Halifax Regional Municipality Mayor Andy Fillmore’s advisors, have interfaced with Members of the Legislative Assembly and are reaching out to Chinese organizations in all four Atlantic provinces,” indicates Yao Yao, campaign chair for Nova Scotia. “The Chinese Society of Nova Scotia will use the next month to augment the number of signatures from our province on the petition. We are proud to be part of this national movement.”
The campaign today announced the nomination of Dougald Lamont as campaign chair for Manitoba. Mr. Lamont previously served as the leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and was the Member of the Legislative Assembly for St. Boniface. “We’ll be seeking the advice of Philip Lee who was Manitoba’s Lieutenant Governor from 2009 to 2015 and is extremely proud of his Chinese origins,” declared Mr. Lamont. “Manitoba has already obtained 36 signatures on the petition and we intend to significantly grow that number. We want Parliament to know we stand in support of Michael Ma’s bill.”
We thank M.P. Michael Ma for moving the bill and for opening the petition on the House of Commons website until August 15.
Jimmy Chan gives special thanks to Amanda Yeung Collucci, the three-term Markham City Councillor and accomplished leader with 20+ years in corporate strategy, who came all the way from Markham, Toronto to support our Quebec Montreal press conference for the Canadian Chinese Heritage Month petition campaign on Friday, July 31, 2026. Councillor Collucci will fervently campaign to advance the heritage month by making it part of her platform in this October’s municipal election, and she invited candidates going door to door in Ontario and British Columbia as part of the province-wide municipal elections to ask voters to add their names to the petition, calling the overlap a golden opportunity to heighten the profile of the effort to obtain a Canadian Chinese Heritage Month.
Despite extreme racism, the workers who stayed became the foundation of Chinese-Canadian communities across the country. Our community keeps doing its part to make Canada shine. Our contributions deserve recognition, and our ancestors deserve honour, through a Chinese-Canadian Heritage Month celebrated nationwide.
Our heritage is part of Canada's history. It matters for the generations to come.
Petition e-7523 · Closed August 15, 2026
The petition is closed, but the campaign is not. Follow the Facebook page for updates, share this page with your family, friends and community, and be ready to support the bill when it reaches the House of Commons.
Follow the campaign