Illustration by Catherine Chan
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This spring, I received a request to write a short piece on the Komagata Maru. I teach South Asian history, so the request made sense. The ill-fated ship had arrived in Vancouver on May 23, 1914, with 376 passengers from India, who lingered just off the coast for two months after being refused entry.
In the end, everyone but a handful were turned back as they did not fulfill a regulation from 1908 that prohibited people from landing in Canada if they had not travelled continuously from their native lands. Immigrants were also required to be in possession of $200.
The continuous journey requirement, an amendment to the Immigration Act, effectively stemmed new arrivals from Asia while disguising racist intent. When combined with the suspension of the sale of through tickets from India to Canada, the law ensured it was virtually impossible for South Asians to land here.
These legislative changes, which followed an infamous report suggesting that South Asians were incompatible with the Canadian climate and way of life and would therefore end up destitute, are now widely recognized as racist and discriminatory.
But I could not write that history piece as I was smarting from my own wounds over a refused entry. In mid-April, my parents in India were denied a tourist visa for a family vacation in British Columbia. While muttering to myself about history repeating itself, I did not believe my parents were in the same proverbial boat at all. The B.C. government had apologized for the Komagata Maru in 2008, as had then-prime minister Justin Trudeau in 2016.
Trudeau apologizes for ‘great injustice’ of Komagata Maru incident
I convinced myself that all I had to do was find unassailable evidence to disprove the two reasons cited to deny them entry to Canada for four weeks.
The refusal letter my parents received claimed they lacked the financial ability to vacation here. This is the modern-day version of the demand to show $200, except what is considered sufficient is now a mystery. Had my parents somehow failed to prove they could stay for free in my home?
The tellingly titled “generic denial letter” also stated that the officer did not believe my parents would leave at the end of their visit. I gathered more than a hundred pages of documents to dispel this suspicion.
I annotated documents detailing our collective financial history from both sides of the globe. $200 in pocket? Check.
Then I added evidence of a time-limited visit: return flights from Delhi to Vancouver, a ferry schedule to Salt Spring Island and hotel reservations in Vancouver to bookend the time on the island. I attached copies of previous passports and visas to Canada and elsewhere. The entry and exit stamps proved they never overstayed. Their four trips to Canada since 2007 averaged out to exactly four weeks per visit.
And then there was the evidence of the comfortable life they would return to. Evidence of intent to return? Check.
I spent hours shrinking the hundreds of pages because, in a haunting reminder of the engineered impossibility of the demands for a continuous journey, the website only allowed five files of 2 MB each.
I felt optimistic about the quantum of evidence.
My parents started packing their bags.
Within weeks, they were refused a tourist visa for a second time. The officer still did not believe they would leave Canada.
This time I was broken. I had no papers left to show.
The truth is, my parents have little desire to undertake this very long journey, let alone to linger in Canada.
I had worked hard to convince them to make this trip because I would love for them to spend time in my home. Because my six-year-old wants to play with them outside of a phone screen. Because my partner wants them to see the island that is his childhood home.
It is true that, unlike the passengers on the Komagata Maru who’d boarded a ship to immigrate to Canada only to be returned to India to face bullets, my parents have merely been deprived of a family vacation.
As for me, I have been rendered destitute after all. I might be a naturalized citizen of Canada, but I do not belong. I made myself a home here but failed to mount the evidence required to allow my parents to visit it.
I have tried to tell myself that a chasm separates me, with the ledger of privileges I uploaded to the government website, and the fellow South Asians turned away from Canada’s shores more than a hundred years ago.
But I have learned that “sufficient evidence” is a moving target in a system where the rules have been perfected to disguise racism, and the reasons for keeping out Third World travellers are generic precisely to make room for discrimination without conceding the word’s negative connotations.
In 1914, we Canadians had an ostensibly race-neutral law that somehow mostly affected those of a certain hue, but then too there were some among us – of brown skin – who could land, to be cited as evidence of the innocence of the law itself.
In 2025, we remain haunted by that law, but we convince ourselves that the past is history. As I did too this spring, when I mistakenly believed that by refusing to dwell on the past, I could secure my present in Canada.
Ishita Pande lives in Kingston.
