On July 12, 1881, a confrontation occurred between two archetypes of the Canadian west. On one side, Officer Jack Kirkup, the “mountain sheriff” of the Cariboo range, profiled by Harper’s Monthly in 1891 as a legendary enforcer of the frontier. This six-foot, 300-pound “superb example of manhood,” with the “symmetry of an Apollo,” a man who could single-handedly maintain order in a riffraff-ridden area the size of Rhode Island,^{Footnote 1} had come to enforce a $3 poll tax. Facing him, an anonymous group of coolies, newly arrived from China, laboring for a pittance on the Canadian Pacific Railway, friendless and powerless. What happened next was not the stuff of legend: the coolies sent Kirkup ignominiously packing. Two months earlier they had rioted against excessive deductions and short rations by their employer, but on that occasion two policemen restored order. The tax revolt was more serious: it took five months and armed men “in battle array” to extract the taxes. For the citizens of British Columbia, this was no isolated episode: they had complained for years that the Chinese in BC refused to pay their taxes.

The uprising of July 1881 both reflects and belies the usual stories told about the Chinese in British Columbia. Historians have very ably documented the extraordinary degree of anti-Asian sentiment that characterized public discourse in British Columbia from its earliest days. From 1858, BC was an important destination for Chinese immigrants and a profoundly hostile one. That year, news of a gold rush in the interior of British Columbia attracted thousands of miners, many of whom came up the coast from California. The first Chinese immigrants from California arrived in Victoria in June 1848; by the early 1860s, about five thousand Chinese immigrants had come from the United States, and from China, where demographic pressures, dearth, and the Taiping Rebellion of 1850 to 1864 provoked a large out-migration.^{Footnote 2} Colonial officials welcomed the influx of people and money into the region, but they worried that such an international population threatened British loyalties. Girded by mountains, ocean, and Americans to the north and south, the region was only precariously connected either to Britain or to Canada, at least until the advent of transcontinental transportation. Locals worried intensely about their fraught and fragile British identity, and the presence of Chinese immigrants only added to their sense of insecurity. Elemental principles of British Columbia’s political culture emerged from that keen sense of insecurity, persisting long after Confederation with Canada. Inhabitants of eastern Canada, where Chinese immigrants were a rarity, observed BC’s anti-Asian panic with bemusement.^{Footnote 3}

Historians agree that the leading ground for hostility to the Chinese in British Columbia was economic competition. Chinese immigrants earned lower wages than “white” laborers, who intensely resented the competition. Large-scale employers in British Columbia eagerly sought Chinese immigrants because they could pay them so much less: $1 per day for mining work, for example: one-third the amount that white miners earned, half what indigenous miners earned. The critique of Chinese labor began in earnest when Robert Dunsmuir used Chinese labor to break a coal miner’s strike in 1877, and it gained momentum in the 1880s as thousands more Chinese entered Canada to labor on the transcontinental railroad. Labor journalists used Chinese examples, drawn from around the world, to denounce capitalism and “wage slavery.” Capitalists tend to exploit the most vulnerable workers the most ruthlessly and the Chinese were vulnerable. The economic rationality behind anti-Chinese sentiment also found expression in union hostility to other low-wage labor, including women and Eastern European workers.

But hostility toward the Chinese was markedly greater, even qualitatively different. It continues to puzzle scholars. It characterized even the most egalitarian labor organizations, such as the Knights of Labor, and it was espoused even by labor activists who scorned all other racialized discourses, including the antiblack sentiment that widely characterized working-class opinion in the United States. There, David Roediger has argued, drawing on the models of working-class culture first advanced by E. P. Thompson, as well as the classic 1930s work of W. E. B. Du Bois, workers built a working-class consciousness around a sense of white superiority. They deeply invested themselves in a form of fetishized “free” labor, laboriously distinguished from chattel slavery and its long shadow. Roediger remarks that blackness and whiteness constituted overdetermined cultural poles: “Blackness almost perfectly predicted lack of the attributes of a freeman.” Such arguments culminated in efforts to disenfranchise blacks, described as economically and culturally unworthy of the vote.^{Footnote 4}

David Goutor draws upon this scholarship in his deeply thoughtful discussion of racialized discourse in working-class Canadian culture from the 1870s to the 1930s. Like Roediger, he concludes that anti-Asian sentiment was not rationally economic but deeply infused with cultural and moral claims. He suggests that, because Chinese immigrants were a new presence and a new enemy for organized workers, they epitomized the new threat that modern industrial capitalism posed to the dignity and autonomy of the working man. In BC, the Chinese exemplified the condition of wage slavery: they were “models of industrial slaves, highly coerced and disciplined, ‘without manhood, without ambition, and without self-respect.’ Canadian labour leaders probably used the terms ‘slave,’ ‘virtual slave,’ or ‘slave labor’ in reference to Asian immigration more than any other subject.” Goutor quotes one 1885 speaker at an anti-Chinese gathering in Victoria in the mid-1880s: “We will shed blood before we become slaves.”^{Footnote 5} Cultural rather than economic rationality explains why, despite the minuscule presence of Chinese in eastern Canada, labor leaders there endorsed and reiterated the anti-Chinese sentiments of their counterparts in British Columbia.^{Footnote 6}

The Chinese railway laborers’ tax revolt of 1881 does not easily fit into this account. Violent resistance to forcible exaction hardly fits the image of slaves lacking in manhood, ambition, and self-respect. But the episode was no anomaly. Although it belied the nascent working-class discourse of Chinese wage-slavery—the language of the 1880s—it perfectly reflected an older discourse—the language of the 1870s—which emphasized not the docility but the defiance of Chinese immigrants. The 1870s remain something of a puzzle: they witnessed a clear upswing in racialized discourse and legislation, notwithstanding the fact that the Chinese population remained relatively stable, suggesting a diminished threat to the growing European population. Anti-Chinese legislation in BC predated the emergence of organized labor and can be attributed to attitudes imported among the original wave of gold-rush immigrants. But BC was like Victoria, New South Wales, where Chinese immigrants panned for gold, often working claims abandoned by Europeans, so that there was little direct competition. Robert Huttenback argues on those grounds that the anti-Chinese sentiment in New South Wales reflected “racial animosity rather than economically motivated fear.”^{Footnote 7}

I reject a priori any such necessity to appeal to an essentialized psychology of racism. A more historical explanation lies readily to hand if we take the advice of the new political historians and “bring the state back in” as a crucial variable.^{Footnote 8} The purported defiance of Chinese immigrants during the 1870s was directed not against employers but against the state. They stood accused of evading or resisting taxation, thereby abnegating on the most basic duties of shared citizenship. As a consequence, so the argument went, they deserved to lose the benefits of that citizenship. Public officials and political reformers of the 1870s orchestrated a campaign against the Chinese around the complaint of tax evasion. We need not be surprised by this observation: tax riots by Chinese immigrants were as old as Chinese immigration itself. Tax impositions in the Philippines in 1639 provoked a violent uprising among Chinese immigrants that left thousands dead.^{Footnote 9} State officials were as ruthless as capitalists at trying to extract surplus value from the vulnerable. Everywhere the Chinese sojourned, capitalists and officials alike tried to squeeze as much money as they could, presuming upon their lack of political influence.

The liberal state being constructed in mid-Victorian Canada claimed to apply equal treatment of all before the law. Moreover, Britain was pledged to just such treatment: Sino-British treaties signed in 1840 and after pledged equal treatment before the law in all British territory, and a journalist writing in the North American Review in 1846 made the boast: “What under her [English] law is the law for the white man is the law for his black, red and yellow brother,” enforced through courts as “open to him for redress and protection as speedily and impartially as to any white man.”^{Footnote 10} This was untrue: anti-Chinese legislation spread across the British Empire during the nineteenth century. Sometimes the Chinese were able to overturn such laws: the right judge under the right circumstances might be persuaded, as I will show below. But the point I wish to make here is that, at the time, legislative impartiality seemed to privilege the Chinese, and nowhere more than in tax laws. The prevalent tax regime was thought to be quite good at taxing those of European descent but quite bad at taxing people with different habits and modes of holding property. Some modification of the tax regime was required if other “races” were to be taxed effectively.

During the 1870s and 1880s in British Columbia, a modern tax regime and racist categories of citizenship were constructed in tandem. The province lost its powers of indirect taxation when it joined the Dominion of Canada in 1871 and had to implement direct, personal taxes that it could not well enforce.^{Footnote 11} Tax collection was inefficient: tax collectors were few, partial, and often inept, and resistance was widespread. T’was ever thus: authorities tolerated considerable tax evasion among the well-to-do, well understanding that this lessened overt protest. But for the poor to evade taxes: that was altogether unacceptable. Complaints of tax resistance in BC at the time focused on the racialized poor and in particular the Chinese. Also tarred with this brush were the Indigenous people, who outnumbered all other inhabitants and used such provincial services as roads, courts, and police, but who, as wards of the federal state, paid no provincial taxes. The local state’s perceived failure to tax a large section of the local population threatened to seriously discredit it.

The problem was not simply the cultural difference or “otherness” that permitted the Chinese to defy Canadian taxes and culture. There was a deeper problem of similarity. Chinese tax-evaders were living out the fantasy of all taxpayers. Greg Dening observes that when eighteenth-century British writers discussed Tahitians, they were struck by their sexual license, a license that seemed entirely familiar: “The Tahitian were not Other at all: they were the same only worse. Even the most tenuous cultural relativism in understanding the Tahitians as they were threatened this commonsense realism.”^{Footnote 12} Taxes were like sexuality, a realm of repression, frustration, and secret envy. The Chinese immigrants’ defiance of the modernizing state in British Columbia during the 1870s amounted to a serious challenge to its still-tenuous power and authority. Individually they were hard to tax in ways that annoyed and frustrated collectors. But they also mounted collective challenges to tax impositions, sometimes through the courts and sometimes by direct action. Provincial politicians responded by escalating their racialized dichotomies of citizenship. They thundered against tax evasion among the Chinese and promised retribution.

The racism that exploded into public prominence in mid-Victorian British Columbia was, to no small degree, provoked by the establishment of a modern liberal state that posited equality of citizenship in principle but racialized its inability to tax the poorest of the poor. Two decades earlier, reflecting on the state in ancien-régime France, Alexis de Tocqueville had observed that direct taxation could create expectations of constitutional and legal equality, with dangerous results for regimes lacking the capacity to meet them.^{Footnote 13} Racialized scapegoating was, from that perspective, an easy out for office-holders from the premier’s office to the local assessor, and it was one that they did not scruple to use. As a consequence, the so-called rule of law came to resemble something closer to a reign of terror for the racialized poor of British Columbia during the later 1870s and 1880s.

The essay focuses on discourse about Chinese tax resistance without squarely addressing the accuracy of the claim. Anecdotal evidence, some of it provided below, points in both directions: many Chinese did pay taxes; others almost certainly evaded taxes. Hidden caches of evidence to suggest collective evasion may yet lurk in the archives of Chinese-run organizations or businesses. I am a specialist in taxation, writing a provincial case study, rather than a specialist in Chinese-Canadian history. I have not been able to consult original sources written in Chinese, though I have drawn upon scholars like Timothy Stanley and Lisa Mar, who use those sources to insist on the political and economic agency of Chinese community leaders.^{Footnote 14} The Chinese in British Columbia doubtless had their own “moral economy” of taxpaying, their own sense of reasonable as opposed to unreasonable impositions, and their own sense of the likelihood that they might escape detection or be upheld by the courts if caught. But discreet, as opposed to flamboyant and violent, tax resistance necessarily escapes rigorous empirical analysis. It is utterly impossible to sustain an argument as to whether the Chinese evaded taxes more or less than other people in the province. Moreover, given the cultural overdetermination of anti-Asian sentiment, such a project would be beside the point. Rather, my goal is to apply Rodiger’s argument, that racialized discourse could serve as a compensating cultural strategy in the face of political or economic weakness, but I apply it to the state rather than the unions, as better explaining the peculiarities of the 1870s. During that decade, the province of British Columbia’s ability to collect taxes in general was weak. In 1880, for example, taxes accounted for a little over 7 percent of the province’s income. Per capita, British Columbia paid about $1 per head to their provincial government; deducting “Indians,” the rate was closer to $2 per head. The people of British Columbia in the 1870s were in general tax avoiders, not to say tax resisters. Government institutions, only recently implanted, lacked deep or legitimate roots among the people, and governments that do not have the trust of their people must struggle to collect taxes from them. Tax revolts frequently follow regime changes, as other articles in this journal issue suggest. When people believe that their legitimately constituted government collects and disperses its revenues fairly, they are more likely to pay their taxes; evidence of unfairness provokes evasion. In modern Greece, for example, clientelism long justified widespread tax evasion.^{Footnote 15} The government of British Columbia in the 1870s confronted a paradox: it could only collect taxes by demonstrating fairness, but it could only demonstrate fairness by collecting and spending money fairly. For lack of income and solidly entrenched institutions, it could not tax effectively or fairly. The civil service of early British Columbia was small, frankly partisan, and often incompetent.^{Footnote 16} By scapegoating a racially discrete and politically impotent class of tax resisters, government officials could make spectacular displays of purported fairness, even as they fatally undermined anything like genuine political, social, or economic justice or equality. The events in British Columbia during the 1870s reflect not some hard-wired psychological quality of racialization but, rather, the gap between liberal fantasies of fair, consensual governance and the rather darker, coercive process of state imposition upon an unruly, complex social world. Methodologically, therefore, as well as drawing upon public diatribes against the Chinese population in British Columbia by prominent liberal reformers, I also interrogate those government records, particularly in the Treasury and the Provincial Secretary’s office, which document the gap between fantasy and reality as it was experienced by hapless government officials and their quarry at the front line of the interface between state and society.

In the mid-1870s, the BC government, led by George Walkem, ran out of money. The province lost its tariff when it joined Confederation in 1871 and relied primarily on federal subsidies and loans. But the growing deficits began to worry bankers. In Ottawa, Prime Minister Alexander Mackenzie was understood to offer a special subsidy of $750,000 in return for reneging on the promise to build a transcontinental railroad, and Walkem seemed desperate enough to accept. Provincial expenses were heavy, primarily in the form of spending on roads. Roads blasted through mountainous terrain cost a lot of money, but there could be no settlement or industrialization without them. The Cariboo trail from Yale to Barkerville cost $1 million to build between 1862 and 1864 and in after years it had to be kept up, largely by toll charges on goods carried. Every district clamoured for more roads. There were also all the ordinary costs of government, including police, justice, education, and so forth, but above all the roads, and later the dykes, drove the cost of the state beyond what ordinary taxation could sustain. Per capita revenue versus per capita spending was massively unbalanced, so massively that Walkem thought it hardly made sense to impose taxation at all. Better, he argued, to look to future prosperity to pay present debts. But when the money ran out entirely, the Walkem government lost a nonconfidence motion and, eventually, an election on the issue of public finance. A new government led by A. C. Elliott instituted a slew of new taxes that ultimately led to its defeat and Walkem’s reinstatement in 1878.

BC inhabitants talked taxes almost incessantly through those years. They weighed the comparative claims of different regions and different occupations. But above all, they argued about race. British Columbia had fewer than fifty thousand inhabitants, half of them Indigenous and another three thousand to four thousand (almost 20 percent of the non-Indigenous population) from China. Geographers Robert Gallois and Cole Harris identify deep social and cultural cleavages “that corresponded, broadly, to the boundaries between ‘white,’ ‘Chinese,’ and ‘Indian.’”^{Footnote 17} Only six thousand people voted in the 1878 election, and this select few resented bearing the financial burdens of modernity. Indians and Chinese, the argument went, did not pay taxes. “Indians,” which is to say all those laboring under the legal category of “Indian,” were constitutionally exempt from provincial taxation. The relationship between being Chinese and evading taxes was not quite so hard-wired, but proponents were able to forge the link to their satisfaction.

Already by the early 1870s, the ideological content was in place. According to the theory, the Chinese did not pay indirect taxes because they hoarded their money and sent or carried it back to China and they did not pay direct taxes because they tricked tax collectors. The theory was common currency in January 1871, when Arthur Bunster, the member for Nanaimo, exclaimed in the legislature: “Everybody knows the Chinaman don’t pay any taxes if he can help it. . . . You go to one of ‘em for taxes and see what he’ll tell you. He’ll say—‘Me no got no money. Me work for Kwong Lee!’. . . . There must be some other way to get at them. We have to pay taxes, why don’t you make them pay.” Thomas Basil Humphreys, MLA for Lillooet, answered him: “It was quite true that Chinamen avoided paying taxes, but they were industrious and frugal and in some respects valuable.” Bunster withdrew the motion but promised to campaign on it.^{Footnote 18} John Robson, elected in Nanimo later that year, took up the campaign both in the legislature and in the British Colonist, which he edited until 1875.

In January 1872, Robson’s paper complained of a plague of Chinese peddlers. They avoided the license taxes that established merchants had to pay to both the city of Victoria and the provincial treasury and their penurious mode of life supported neither the local economy nor the local revenue.

The remedy, according to the British Colonist, was to lighten the merchant’s burden and to increase that of the itinerant with a special Chinese tax. Robson was voicing the kind of tax protest that newspaper readers generally expected from newspaper editors. Other leaders in the same paper about the same time complained of “over government and undue taxation” without reference to race. The earliest complaints against the Chinese presence in post-Confederation BC occurred, thus, in the context of tax protest. The link to taxation was crucial: it gave the complaint momentum and respectability.

Robson rehearsed the arguments again on February 26, when he introduced a motion in the BC legislature recommending a $50 annual tax on every Chinese person within the province on the grounds that, “owing to the peculiar habits of the race, Chinese did not pay anything like their fair share of taxation.” Government spokesmen repudiated the proposal as illegal, and the motion was lost, six votes to fourteen, but Robson observed that government leaders did concede that white merchants were, by comparison with the Chinese, unfairly taxed. And when the Victoria Standard complained that Robson’s motion catered to an “unreasonable prejudice,” Robson insisted that the principle of fair taxation was precisely what made his complaint rational. The Chinese lived in hovels, crammed together, so they did not pay existing property taxes. The only tax they paid was the tariff, but their peculiar habits ensured that they paid very little duty, especially since the federal government had relaxed BC’s inflated rice duties. Robson extended the argument from trade to labor. “The Caucasian laborer keeps a house, raises a family, and does his part towards maintaining all the institutions of a civilized and Christian community. The Mongolian laborer emerges from his sardine-box in the morning, consumes his pound of rice and puts in his day’s work, bating naught from his earnings, save the virriest pittance he subsists on. No wife and children to feed, clothe and educate, no Church to maintain, no Sunday clothes to buy, he saves nearly all he earns, is a useless member of society while here and finally carries with him all his hoardings home to China.”^{Footnote 20} The same logic, Robson explained, mandated a ban on their employment on public works. Robson did not get his ban immediately, but just such a ban was in force from 1878 to 1958. The image of taxes being collected from whites and paid to Chinese was too much.^{Footnote 21} Public works was sufficiently broadly defined that government agents across the province had to start chopping their own firewood.

By the logic of the discourse, special taxation was not unreasonable persecution but a means of equalizing conditions made unequal not by “nature” but by ham-fisted governments who taxed businesses and property too heavily. Government taxation had created the problem and must repair it. “No general taxation can do it, for what is sauce for the Mongolian goose is not sauce for the Caucasian gander. The habits and modes of life of the two races are essentially different and they must be exceptionally dealt with.”^{Footnote 22} Of course, there was a big difference between taxation for revenue and taxing to exclude. Scholars have focused on the exclusionary federal head tax imposed from 1886, but that approach obscures the complicated negotiations over fiscal citizenship within the polity. William Novak observes that a century ago Americans fought over a gamut of privileges and responsibilities that did not necessarily add up to a holistic civic identity.^{Footnote 23} The BC debates over citizenship and race were not just about revenue: many factors documented by historians came into play.^{Footnote 24} But taxes merit more attention than they have received as a crucial conjuncture between two distinct racialization projects. Long-standing tensions around the administration of Indigenous peoples were reconceptualized in the light of the new and explosive tensions over Chinese civic and fiscal identities during the 1870s. Those confrontations provide more insight into the construction of alterity than a reified, essentialized racism that has been generically attributed to the people of British Columbia as a whole.

Discrimination did not come naturally. In 1872, Robson failed to convince either fellow legislators or his own readership that the Chinese evaded taxes. The weight of readers’ letters took the view that Chinese consumption was no more peculiar than anyone else’s—one might as well say working men should drink champagne rather than beer—and benefited the community; moreover, the wages demanded by whites were too high for most employers. Robson returned to the topic from time to time, with occasional leaders and a motion in early 1874, but without advancing the question. Sympathetic legislators invoked the constitutional objections and hostile ones argued that the Chinese did pay taxes.^{Footnote 25} MLAs were willing to deny voting rights to Indians and Chinese but not to impose a special tax upon them. By 1875, Robson was out of the legislature, repudiated by electors with other priorities.

And yet in 1878 the legislature did pass stringent anti-Chinese measures: the ban on public employment as well as a head tax of $40 per annum. That tax was overturned in the courts, but the die was cast. Anti-Chinese legislation elsewhere was one factor, labor’s complaints were another, but equally important was a tax revolution in the mid-1870s that greatly aggravated public resentment of taxes. Walkem was defeated in 1875 on grounds of recklessly mortgaging British Columbia’s future and the new government faced a depleted treasury and no obvious source of revenue. The ousted politicians predicted that lack of funds would make proper government impossible for the new Elliott ministry. So Elliot introduced a slate of new taxes on private property, income, and the person (a poll tax); revamped existing real estate taxes; and reinstated road tolls along the Cariboo Road. Robson’s British Colonist, fully backing the new regime, explained that taxation was progressive and necessary, a sine qua non of civilized government. A leading article in April 1875 pronounced that “the taxation policy is a bold and manly one”; another in early May justified the new taxes with extensive quotation from Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and described them as light, equitable, and wholesome, reflecting a bold, vigorous, statesmanlike policy. A later leader brought in all the other economic experts as well: Malthus, Ricardo, Cobden, and so forth, as expounding a “science of wealth” that explained and justified the fiscal system. Opposition MLAs quibbled over details but essentially conceded the need for increased revenue.

The new taxes imposed were direct. Inhabitants had to declare their incomes and their property holdings; they paid taxes only on whichever was higher. House furnishings and books were exempt from the property tax, but all else was subject to taxation, including merchants’ stocks, farmers’ equipment and crops, and debts. The poll tax was also direct: every inhabitant was to pay $3 as a “school tax.” Previously, inhabitants had had to pay a $2 per capita road tax only if they did not pay a tax on their acreage (from which those with less than $10 were exempted). Elliott explained in May 1876 that the new system was designed to “catch” the Chinese, saving the white population $17,000 a year of school support. Elliott rejected proposals for a $25 per capita tax on Chinese on the grounds that any such imposition would be overturned by the courts, the Dominion, or the imperial government.

The new taxes were extensively debated in and out of the legislature. They initiated a more intimate relationship with the state than most inhabitants had hitherto experienced, and few liked that prospect. Walkem exclaimed: “No man liked to be asked what his income is, what it cost him to live, how he kept his wife or other searching questions of a like nature.” Some called for a graduated rather than a flat tax. MLAs from the interior denounced the reinstatement of tolls on the Cariboo Road, while their urban counterparts objected to the double taxation of property by municipalities and the province. Government MLAs defended the regime as progressive and argued that the new intimacy would help to rein in government.^{Footnote 26}

There were also practical objections. To appeal an assessment, taxpayers had to find out for themselves when a court of revision would be held and send it notice of appeal. Many missed deadlines, others never made it to the court, perhaps because the distance or the expense or the inconvenience was too great. James Pottinger, clerk of the court of appeal in Esquimalt in 1876, reported one typical session: it met at Parson’s Bridge Hotel on Tuesday October 17 and completed its sittings the next day. “The time of the Court was chiefly taken upon the first day in waiting for the complainants to put in an appearance, which the majority of them failed to do; and on the second day the Court proceeded with the cases ex parte. There were twenty appeals to be heard, which, out of about 280 names on the Roll, was not a great number. The reductions in the majority of cases were trivial, and only amounted in all to about $70.” The men who did appear included three MLAs (J. W. Williams, J. S. Helmecken, Robert Beaven), a bishop, a chief justice, a bank manager, and the chief factor of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who managed to wangle down the assessment for Constance Cove Farm from $20,000 to $10,000.^{Footnote 27} Those already skilled at dealing with court and state officials adapted well to the new regime.

One did not need to be Chinese to fear tax collectors. In the fall of 1880, a man beating for grouse near Victoria was startled to see men working in a field run away as fast as they could when he hailed them. A farmer explained that these men were new immigrants without a dollar to their names who had, doubtless, mistaken him for the tax collector, who had already called on them once. Farmers all along the Saanich Road, the huntsman learned, could not retain field workers for more than a few weeks because they were “driven out” by assessors.^{Footnote 28} But in general, requests for delay were regularly respected during unpropitious seasons. On the Saanich Road, the collector had apparently not seized the field workers’ goods on his first visit. But where taxpayers had no vote, their protests against excessive or brutal tax collection could be ignored as politically irrelevant.

Chinese inhabitants protested erroneous assessments just like other taxpayers,^{Footnote 29} but they also experienced more abusive exactions. One such incident was witnessed in Lillooet in 1883 by an outraged local doctor, Henry Featherstone. Six Chinese miners living opposite the town had paid their taxes in Victoria, but the collector rejected their certificates and also demanded a miner’s license from one of the men who was working as a cook. He seized their goods and then left town. “The poor men are now idle, losing $20 a day. This mode of collecting seems a most cruel, illegal and unnecessary one.”^{Footnote 30} When the office was vested in such an openly bigoted man as Noah Shakespeare, collector for Victoria, petty tyrannies were routine. In April 1880, Shakespeare was summoned to municipal court by one Sing Koo, a vegetable farmer, who had not yet paid his school tax for the year. The tax was officially due in January, but penalties only kicked in from June and so most people paid then. When Shakespeare demanded the tax, early in April, Sing Koo replied that the hard winter had slowed vegetable growth, so he couldn’t pay but would do so soon. Shakespeare seized the man’s horse and cart and also imposed $3.50 in penalty costs. Sing Koo’s complaint before Justice Pembury was dismissed: Shakespeare had obeyed the letter of the law, though the judge admitted undue harshness and he urged greater leniency and a reform of the law.^{Footnote 31}

Tax protests heated up in newspaper columns and public meetings. Apparently not content with having his assessed value reduced by the court in 1876, J. W. Williams, a speculator in real estate, campaigned for election in Esquimalt in 1878, exclaiming severe overtaxation had driven him to seek election.^{Footnote 32} Williams became one of the most vehement exclusionists. As well, tax collectors reported greater resistance among the Chinese and greater anger among taxpayers. In 1876, Edward Allen, who collected on the Fraser River, observed, “I have traveled over eight hundred miles in my rounds and crossed the Fraser River no less than twelve times. I have had great difficulty in collecting from the Chinamen on the River,” and that only seizure and auctioning of goods obtained results.^{Footnote 33} The next year a letter to the premier described new political tensions in the region:

Edwards wrote many more letters in the same vein. He blamed recalcitrant Chinese around Lillooet and Soda Creek when his collection fell short $350 out of $1,200: “they only laugh at the collector. They well know they are a long way from a lock-up or justice of the peace.” In 1879, he told Finance Minister Robert Beaven that “the Chinaman on the river is very obstinate and requires the law to be strictly carried out. They will not pay mining licenses or school tax unless made to do so with the strong arm of the law. Therefore if you will please let me have one man for one month I will pay his board if the Government will pay his wages, viz, fifty dollars, by this means it will establish the law for the future and bring hundreds of dollars in to the Treasury this year. I want the man to witness and identify the parties. I respectfully ask you to concede to this and the Chinamen will be easily managed afterwards.” One Chinese miner who refused to give his name to Allen was imprisoned for a week.^{Footnote 34} Edwards is not a credible witness: he lied about the presence of Chinese miners to get a special commission to collect their fees, and in 1879, when he resigned, it was to avoid being fired for corruption (he reduced taxes in return for favors). Perhaps he pocketed the taxes paid by the Chinese, reportedly a widespread practice.^{Footnote 35} But whether he was observing conditions or playing them up, Edwards’s observations of white rage at Chinese tax evasion illustrate the way that objections to taxes and to the Chinese dovetailed to become an explosive political controversy.

Other categories also drew resentment. In 1878, provincial legislators debated whether to impose new taxes on lawyers, physicians, surgeons, and land surveyors. But whereas professionals were well represented in the legislature, Chinese people had been stripped of their vote in 1872. So what might have been a debate became a lynching. Rich or poor, merchant or miner, anyone who felt the pinch of the new taxes wanted reassurance that the pain was fairly distributed, and resented any evasion. Salaried workingmen invariably paid the poll tax (worth one to three day’s pay for miners) because it was deducted from their wages, but irregular workers such as free miners and peddlers could slip through the collector’s net. Collectors were paid by commission, usually 10 percent, which utterly failed to cover the expenses of collection in remote districts. There was often what the gold commissioner in Cassiar described as a “want of energy” on the part of collectors, which, coupled with reduced circumstances of miners, resulted in only “trifling” sums for the school tax there in 1879. Meanwhile, Allen was trying to wring $22.47 in property taxes from a “completely broken down” Lillooet man unable to pay his $3 poll tax and, simultaneously, failing to extract the more considerable taxes owed by Robert Beaven on land there.^{Footnote 36}

George Walkem brought down Elliott’s government by stirring up antitaxation sentiment and joining it to anti-Chinese sentiment. These were the two defining issues in the election of 1878. After the election, Walkem had to change tactics. He quietly perpetuated most of Elliott’s taxes (he did abolish provincial property taxes in municipalities, a major concession to urban voters). His solution to the “Chinese problem” was to impose a special tax upon the Chinese, initially set at $60 but reduced to $40 in the bill that became law. The tax was overturned as illegal a month later by Justice Gray of the BC Supreme Court on grounds that it was ultra vires and profoundly illiberal. There were no exemptions for women and children, nor for poverty, lunacy, or any other mitigating factors. The penalties were imposed far too easily, on the say-so of one collector and by one magistrate; moreover, they condemned individuals to perpetual forced labor on the roads, because the labor of the condemned was valued lower than the amount that the government might charge them for board and tools. Property belonging to one person could be seized to pay the taxes of an unrelated person. Tax collectors had been long frustrated by claims that property really belonged to someone else. But no Chinese immigrant could securely hold property under such a law. The British Colonist, no friend to the Chinese, denounced the law as indefensible and noted that Walkem did not try to appeal.

A diabolical dialectic was established. The government of BC aimed at taxing the purportedly untaxable. Most Chinese were poorer than the whites around them. Chinese peddlers had fewer goods than shopkeepers; the miners worked poorer claims; the workers earned lower wages. Therefore it was hardly an act of logic that led politicians to impose higher taxes upon them. The more prohibitive the tax, the less likely it was that the Chinese in BC could actually pay it. Thus the higher the taxes imposed on the Chinese, the more agitators and politicians could complain that they were evading taxes. Tax evasion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and a reified characteristic of Chinese identity.

Tax collectors knew that unconstitutional and excessive taxes could not be collected, and when told to collect the new fee they said so. George Byrne in Barkerville remarked that existing state resources were inadequate: “You may depend I will collect all that is possible under the Act but from any knowledge of the Chinese in Cariboo district, I am sure that there will be a great many from whom it will be impossible to collect, on account of their poverty, hence I expect to have to bring them in and subject them to clause 12 of the Act, which will necessitate the appointment of overseers. The Chinese are located principally at Barkerville, Stanley, & Quesnelle at each of which places I think it will be necessary to have an overseer.” As well, agents had no incentive where there was no real expectation of payment. In Nanimo, Edward G. Prior, a future premier, demanded that the government pledge to pay the commission on those put to work on the roads. Most collectors did not even try to collect. In Lytton, George Cox observed: “The rumours are here that the Chinamen have been instructed from Victoria to refuse payment.”^{Footnote 37} The Chinese knew a legal challenge was under way and they waited to hear the verdict. Poor and dispersed though they might be, the Chinese residents of British Columbia remained informed by and connected to powerful businessmen, contractors, and fraternal associations with deep pockets.^{Footnote 38} They were better organized and informed than the tax collectors and they had imperial law on their side.

In truth, the Chinese did pay substantial taxes and could be shown to do so. The correlation between the census and the assessment rolls was not easily made and so, in 1879, agents across BC were asked to provide statistics on the Chinese in the district: how many they were, their employment, the taxes they paid, and their criminal statistics. Some agents produced precise statistics: in Kamloops, John Usher, listed every Chinese resident by name, claiming to have extracted $3 plus licenses plus arrears from all. In the Okanagan, eight of twelve recorded Chinese paid school taxes. In Richfield, 466 of the 491 Chinese inhabitants paid taxes worth $5,042. But people moved around a great deal and had often paid elsewhere. Collectors, cheated of their commission, tended to blame evasion. In Nanimo, Prior managed to collect taxes only from 237 of the 437 Chinese living there: “It is almost impossible to ascertain what men have paid & what have not. The Mine Managers themselves do not know the difference between many of them. Some of these men have most likely paid elsewhere, but still a great many must escape payment.” Around Yale and Hope, William Teague estimated forty-five Chinese, forty-one of them male, and twelve of whom paid taxes (amounting to $231). Arthur Vowell, gold commissioner in Cassiar, reported six hundred men and five women of Chinese extraction: only half paid their taxes to him and the others were unemployed and “hanging around the Chinese stores.” The Victoria agent, Noah Shakespeare, who headed an anti-Chinese association, reported 2,370 Chinese for that town, who paid $1,994 in taxes between them. He estimated that only 382 paid taxes, but inland agents often reported that miners had already obtained school tax certificates from Shakespeare, who collected the tax the instant that Chinese immigrants landed.^{Footnote 39} The estimate for New Westminster was set at 250 to 300 Chinamen and perhaps ten females; 238 of this total paid taxes worth $714. In Forks Quesnelle, William Stephenson estimated 375 males and 109 females, most of the former working as miners for about $2 per day; other activities included butchering, cooking, farming, carpentering, washermen; also thirty-six without obvious occupation and three who lived “chiefly by gambling or any other rascality.” Together, the Chinese community in Quesnelle Forks paid $1,205 in taxes, nearly all of it ($1,100) in school taxes, and only eight individuals paid property taxes.^{Footnote 40}

The inquiry tended on the whole to prove payment rather than nonpayment of taxes. Collectors might gripe about the difficulty of collecting from Chinese, but they would not be wise to admit to wholesale evasion in their district for fear of being replaced. That documentary evidence was hard to obtain reflected shoddy practices from 1873, when, as attorney general, George Walkem encouraged agents to “waive the strict letter of the law” where it served the province’s interests to neglect documentation of Chinese from whom taxes were collected.^{Footnote 41} Agents would issue receipts for the poll tax under the name “Chinaman” and it cannot have come as a surprise that some might traffic in these generic certificates. Precise statistics were, thus, rendered impossible as much by the lax behavior of collectors as by any evasiveness on the part of their quarry, and of course the imprecision only further fueled the archetype. Truth be told, the collection of taxes across the country could not withstand close scrutiny. Districts were taxed unevenly, with some assessors freely forgiving arrears that others imposed to the utmost. Taxes were due in the early spring, long before miners began to work their mines or farmers began to harvest. As one collector in Kamloops remarked in 1881, “Money is so very scarce here this spring that it is impossible to collect the School Tax due for the year 1880 and the present year until later in the summer. I can obtain the tax at an earlier date by adopting measures of a stringent character, but this course would be productive of a bitter feeling of enmity towards the Govt. which two or three months delay would avoid.” He had already collected taxes from the Chinese in town; their enmity was politically irrelevant.^{Footnote 42}

BC politicians did not need evidence; they acted without it, though the ultra vires ruling caused them to focus on petitioning Ottawa. But the lack of evidence served the federal government well. Pressured to block Chinese immigration, in 1879 the recently restored Conservative prime minister, John A. Macdonald, named a committee of investigation. Amor De Cosmos, a fierce opponent of Chinese immigration, chaired the committee, which heard witnesses in April and May 1879. The committee’s preliminary report recommended restricting immigration and public employment, but, with the CPR construction under way, Macdonald was not disposed to agree. The Select Committee was closed down.^{Footnote 43}

Tensions grew in British Columbia in the early 1880s, as thousands of Chinese laborers were brought in by Andrew Onderdonk to build the CPR: about six thousand from China directly and seven thousand from California. The provincial government and Onderdonk played a cat-and-mouse game over the taxation of these workers, all of whom were expected to pay their school tax, often when they received their first paycheck. The laborers came to Canada on the promise of $2 per day in pay, but deductions by the contractors who recruited them and also for board and lodging reduced the pay to about seven cents per day.^{Footnote 44} They received news of the school tax badly. In June 1881, Frederick Hussey, agent at Lytton, reported that neither engineers nor Chinese laborers would pay school taxes. Engineers claimed exemption as federal employees, while the Chinese simply refused to accept their paychecks if the school tax was deducted from it.^{Footnote 45} On July 12, payday, Officer Kirkup was sent to the camps to collect the tax from railway paymasters. The paymasters told him to collect from the men directly. Kirkup tried to seize the money from a CPR foreman directly but was set upon by the coolies and beaten back. Onderdonk refused to intervene, insisting that the laborers were not his employees but, rather, were under contract to a boss in San Francisco, Lee Chuck, to whom the tax collectors should apply for payment. Onderdonk warned that bloodshed would result if the government tried to enforce the law in either the white or the Chinese camps. The Yale collector, Walter Dewdney, who spent many days sitting ignored in CPR offices, ruefully remarked, “With the small force we have here it is useless to attempt it.”^{Footnote 46} Cables and letters flew back and forth along the line and in July, when Dewdney summoned Lee Chuck’s local agent, Lee Soon, for failing to provide a list of employees, a $100 penalty was imposed. Onderdonk was let off a like fine on grounds that he was laboring under a misapprehension. Even then, Lee Soon would only agree to collect the tax if the government sent thirty special constables.^{Footnote 47} Eventually a deal was done with Onderdonk whereby the CPR paymasters would receive a 5 percent commission for collecting the tax. After that, the tax was collected harmoniously, though government collectors resented the loss of commission and requested that the North West Mounted Police enforce direct collection.^{Footnote 48}

The Chinese railway workers paid their taxes when collection was made remunerative to the CPR. Corporate bureaucracy here stood in for an inadequate state bureaucracy (as in the old days under James Douglas’s governorship of the colony).^{Footnote 49} Tax evasion could not, for the moment, fuel the political debate. Instead, concerned citizens worried about what would happen when the railway works closed and the Chinese dispersed. Their increased numbers and perceived tax advantages threatened to reduce white laborers as a whole to their level of penury. White hostility went far beyond economics to encompass morality and culture more generally, but it was the economics of the situation—the evasion of taxes coupled with the low wages—that was seen to make BC society as a whole vulnerable to the threat.

The numbers were very real to British Columbians. Taxpayers in BC were considerably outnumbered by nontaxpayers, voters by nonvoters, and numbers were continually bandied about in political debates. Some of the sparsest regions paid the highest taxes. Cassiar had no MLAs but yielded $20,608 in 1878, whereas Kootenay, which had twenty-nine voters and two MLAs, paid $1,112 in taxes, and received $1,600 in revenues.^{Footnote 50} Amor De Cosmos was furious when Edward Blake, Liberal party leader, remarked that his speeches drew crowds larger than the propertied population of BC. After Blake corrected his figures upward from two thousand to ten thousand, De Cosmos remarked that, apparently, British Columbia paid more taxes per capita to Ottawa than did Ontario, an older and richer province.^{Footnote 51} The figure was absurd and only proved that unpropertied, disenfranchised inhabitants paid taxes too. But, and here was the rub, they paid them to Ottawa. If the imposition of direct taxation was tinder for a fire, Macdonald’s National Policy of tariff protection, enacted in 1879, was a lit match. The early returns showed that BC paid more than half a million dollars per year into the federal treasury. It appeared that Ottawa was successfully taxing Chinese and Indigenous peoples by taxing consumption, and doing so with relatively little trouble or expense, while British Columbia’s government took great trouble and expense to obtain a fraction of that amount: licenses, road tolls, and taxes together came to less than $100,000 in the year ending June 1880.

Introducing the provincial estimates in March 1881, Robert Beaven now coupled Natives and Chinese together as tax evaders: “Under the system the Chinese and Indians escaped direct taxation while the Dominion reaped large results from the dutiable goods consumed by the two classes. The Chinese evade the payment of taxes and they cannot assimilate with the white race—cannot become beneficial citizens. The Chinese laborers were in the position of slaves and if the province could devise a method for making the Indians and Chinese contribute towards the revenue in proportion with the white population the problem of sustaining the provincial government by direct taxation would be solved.”

Indigenous and Chinese peoples evaded taxes in different ways. When BC politicians pontificated about the need to tax “Indians,” they assigned taxation a key role in the civilizing process. Lord Durham had argued in 1838 that municipalities served as schools for self-government by levying local taxes and spending them on local needs. So, too, taxes could train Indigenous peoples to civic spiritedness. That logic was applied to British Columbia by the Durhamite radical Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who occupied the Colonial Office in 1858 and advised BC’s governor, Sir James Douglas, that, settled in villages, local Indian tribes should be persuaded to consent to “some light and simple form of direct taxation, the proceeds of which would be expended strictly and solely on their own wants and improvements,” while their purchases would bolster the colony’s revenues.^{Footnote 52} On one hand, on similar principles, William Duncan’s guide for his Utopian Christian community of Tsimshians at Metlakatla, near Prince Rupert, included payment of a village tax as one of the fifteen required rules of behavior. On the other hand, Duncan protested provincial taxes imposed on Indigenous people illegally.^{Footnote 53}

Originally, British Columbia did tax Indigenous peoples. Presented with a complaint in 1871, the attorney general insisted that Nanimo Salish on Vancouver Island paid the road tax “cheerfully” where they worked in competition with white men and that by taxing them, the province was raising them up to white standards. Political reality changed with Confederation. Six chiefs signed a petition complaining that “they have taken our land with coal, timber, and grass, and we have had nothing in return for it, and now they ask us to make roads for them; last year we all had to pay $2 and if not our canoes were to be sold to raise it.” This time, the government decided it was “not expedient” to impose the tax and ordered the $20 refunded.^{Footnote 54} Native peoples were more taxing than taxed: in 1877, one J. Rabon, who was unable to pay his taxes, was surprised when “I had a roll of papers brought to me by Indians. I asked the Indian if he was the assessor he said all the same as white man.”^{Footnote 55}

Walkem resented the constitutional exemption. In May 1879, he fumed when confronted with a chit for the expenses of a constable sent to investigate a dispute on a reserve: “I am of opinion that the above and other charges for like services in connection with Indians residing on their Reserves should be paid by the Dominion Department of Indian Affairs. … In the Eastern Provinces each band of Indians as I read the Act has to sustain the charges incidental to the administration of justice amongst them—in this Province however the local Government has had to bear the whole cost although they have no control over the Indians or their lands and are not allowed to tax them and thus make them pay a share of the expense of looking after them which I think should not be cast upon the Province.”^{Footnote 56} Economic competition also fueled the resentment. Indigenous people often worked off reserve, for lower wages than did whites, and the tax exemption only increased the threat to white labor. It was no stretch for BC politicians to extend their platform—that of demanding the federal government tax the untaxable—to Indigenous people. They deeply resented federal obstruction to provincial projects of nation-building. Macdonald was particularly aggravating, on the one hand privately advising premiers not to try to tax Chinese, on the other hand claiming publicly that no one had ever drawn BC’s Chinese problem to his attention.

The grievance grew more acute during the early 1880s as trouble broke out at Metlakatla, where Duncan waged a private war with officials from the Church Missionary Society and rival priests. Violence threatened the polarized community. The federal government recommended that a stipendiary magistrate be stationed there (his salary a provincial affair), while the province demanded that a federal Indian agent be stationed in what was a “purely Indian settlement.” Walkem’s successor, Beaven, was voted out in 1883 but the new premier, William Smithe, along with his provincial secretary, John Robson (his time come at last), reiterated the old complaints in a report on Metlakatla in October 1883 that was published as a sessional paper: “The Indians in this Province do not contribute to the Provincial Revenue, yet a great portion of the costs of the administration of justice is caused by the Indians. They fill the Provincial gaols and are a continual source of expense and trouble.” Smithe demanded better federal supervision and the right to tax. Fiscal and moral imperatives dovetailed. Federal politicians were not unsympathetic to the fiscal argument. Sir Alexander Campbell, federal Minister of Justice, observed: “The Indians off the reserve are much on a level with the ordinary laboring classes in this part of the country, and there is no reason why they should not pay such tax as Mr Robson speaks of. Men who can and do earn $20 and $30 and $40 a month should have no objections to contribute in so small a degree to the revenue of the country.”^{Footnote 57} The federal government drew up a draft bill to extend the poll tax to Indians living off reserve but the project stalled when officials couldn’t agree on what counted as habitual domicile. Moreover, Ottawa’s chief Indian Agent in BC, J. I. Powell, warned that taxing the “hardworking and self-reliant Indian” would be difficult and contrary to the civilizing program, although, he thought, parents might welcome the tax if they could then send their children to the common schools.^{Footnote 58}

In 1884, BC politicians demanded action on both Chinese and Indian taxation, and in April Macdonald signed a memo that conceded many of their demands. Immediately, the minister of finance directed tax collectors to begin collecting the poll/school tax from Indigenous peoples living off reserve. But when armed uprising broke out on the northwest plains in 1885, federal officials reconsidered the wisdom of the tax. They also heard a warning, from a missionary at Lillooet seconded by the Bishop of New Westminster, that the tax was inhumane, imprudent, and immoral. The reserve there was so small that people could barely eke out a living without going off reserve to work. Those who sought work were, the missionaries exclaimed, good Indians who might yet be incited to rebellion by bad government: “After it has ignored the title of the Indians to their land, after it has allowed the Indians only small and poor reserves where generally they die of hunger if they are forced to remain there, to impose upon them taxes and licenses when they go elsewhere than on their Reserves to obtain the wherewithall to feed and clothe themselves, the Indians in their good common sense regard it as unjust and cruel.” Further advice from officials in the Indian Office confirmed that the tax bore heavily, while provincial schools remained closed to aboriginal children. By the spring of 1887, as tax season got under way, seventeen chiefs came to New Westminster to protest the $3 tax and they promised that violence would follow if the tax collectors came again “hunting us from tent to tent and from shanty to shanty, with their revolvers sticking out of their back pockets.”. . . We want to live in peace, but if fight is forced upon us, fight we will.” Officials took the threat very seriously. Deputy superintendent of Indian Affairs, Laurence Van Koughnet, warned Macdonald by cable that “if collecting persisted in, serious trouble may be expected,” while in BC, Powell described instances of great hardship following seizures of property for taxes. Collectors were quickly told to desist and the province did not again try a systematic collection of school taxes.^{Footnote 59} From 1895, again with federal approval, it did begin to tax “Indian” property off reserve. Into the twentieth century, intermittent efforts were made to tax “Indians” themselves working off reserve. Whereas the Department of Justice regularly pointed out that such taxation was unconstitutional, the Department of Indian Affairs took the province’s view: “The Department does not feel disposed to take much exception to the doctrine that an Indian who may leave his reserve and enter into business competition with other members of the community renders himself liable to lawful taxation.”^{Footnote 60}

As to the “Chinese problem,” Macdonald’s memo of April 1884 agreed to initiate an investigation and, if possible, legislation to restrict or regulate Chinese immigration to Canada. This was the signal for the Royal Commission on Chinese Immigration that reported in 1885. By pleading a need for more information regarding conditions in British Columbia and the diplomatic or constitutional obstacles to legislation, Macdonald was able to delay legislating a head tax until the completion of the transcontinental railway. The fact that John Hamilton Gray, the same Justice Gray who had overturned the 1878 Chinese tax, was one of the two commissioners (the other being Joseph-Adolphe Chapleau, Macdonald’s Quebec lieutenant), suggested that Macdonald wished to damp down the anti-Chinese ardor rather than cater to it, and some anti-Chinese organizations boycotted the commission for that reason.

Early witnesses before the commission raised the complaint of tax evasion. Charles Wilson, a lawyer and MLA for Cariboo, attributed low receipts for poll taxes in the Cariboo districts entirely to the Chinese population, on the grounds that the tax collectors “know every white men residing in them.” W. K. Bull, tax collector in Victoria, claimed that only 750 of 3,000 Chinese resident in Victoria had paid the poll tax that year. A fire that destroyed many Chinese homes had made many homeless and impoverished and, therefore, nearly untaxable: “Many are now so poor that there is nothing to seize in case they will not pay their taxes but a table or a chair.” Richard Jones, another tax collector, complained that the Chinese payments were “a drop in the bucket” in proportion to white payments: he obtained taxes only from 140 out of 3,500 to 4,000 Chinese living in the city. Jones claimed that he often had to distrain on their property to get payments, and that they lent their receipts to one another, “and once I put three in the chain-gang for the offence. They are difficult to recognise as they all dress so much alike and are similar in features.”^{Footnote 61} But after several sessions, the commissioners drew up a list of twenty-seven questions for witnesses; taxation was not one of those questions. Later witnesses, therefore, no longer mentioned taxation. Walter Stephenson, tax collector for Forks Quesnelle, a town with a large Chinese population, complained that they evaded the law whenever possible but did not mention difficulties in collecting taxes, though he registered that complaint in treasury correspondence.^{Footnote 62}

By the mid-1880s, anti-Chinese sentiment was becoming decoupled from taxation. During the mid-1870s, in the absence of formal political parties or a highly organized labor movement, taxation was one of the few topics that could rouse people to political indignation. By the mid-1880s, the “Chinese problem” had become primarily one of wages, morality, and hygiene. But taxation was far from written out of the equation. In 1884, frustrated by Ottawa’s inaction, the BC legislature tried to impose a new tax or license of $10 to be added to all existing licenses. Chinese miners, for example, would be charged $15 for a license rather than the usual $5. That winter was a harsh one and the poor suffered terribly. When collectors were ordered to start collecting the license in the spring of 1885, they fully understood the inhumanity and difficulty of the project. Marshall Bray in Nanimo asked for additional help in the form of an assistant collector to spend his whole time at the work. Henry Nicholson in Osoyoos declared: “I feel convinced that the Tax in this section will be resisted by the Chinese to the utmost, and doubtless before the collection of the tax can be successfully accomplished, some striking examples will have to be made of the determination on the part of the authorities to carry out the law, so that at the outset of the collection the Chinese may realize the fact that one and all have to pay.” He asked for instructions regarding “the disposal of Chinamen whose property may not realize sufficient to pay the taxes.” In Lillooet, Charles Phair warned that “nearly all the Chinese in this District are poor miners from whom it will be impossible to collect $15, so a large number of them will have to be imprisoned. The gaol here is too small & unfit for prisoners, so I will send them to Clinton unless otherwise ordered.” Phair was quickly instructed by cable to use “any means other than imprisonment in collection of Chinese taxes.” John Mollett in Alberni demanded a posse to round up fleeing miners: “If it is your desire that the provisions of the Chinese Regulation Act be carried out, it will be necessary for you to allow me the assistance of at least four or five other men in order to prevent these people from running away to the woods as I understand they usually do. It will be necessary to take a camping outfit up the creek and remain there for one or two days until our work is through.” He would not accept the commission without a promise of the extra expenses required, as he well understood that he could not collect the full amount from every Chinese miner.^{Footnote 63} Frederick Hussey, an experienced officer at Spence’s Bridge, warned that collecting taxes from Chinese miners scattered along riverbanks was too difficult and expensive to be worthwhile. “They are hard to find and it is difficult to obtain money from them. It is a mistake to charge $15 in this District for Chinese Mining Licenses as the majority of Chinese so employed are making small pay and therefore refuse to take out Mining Certificates. It does not pay the collector to distrain as in most cases their goods if seized are not worth the amount of the taxes and the owners are willing to forfeit them in preference to paying even if they had the money to do so. It may be different in districts where claims are more valuable.” Hussey did not have to collect the Chinese miners’ license since the courts overturned the act in August 1885. But the difficulties of collecting even the usual licenses and taxes continued to require extraordinary efforts in harsh times, like the spring of 1887: “I have collected from Chinese miners on Fraser River about $588.00 for Licenses and Prov. Rev. Tax. The costs of collection are heavy, about $90.00, as I had to levy by distress in almost every case and afterwards make the best bargain possible with the Chinese. To do this I employed Indians to assist me and without their aid one half the sum would not have been obtained.” Allan Graham, agent at Lorne Creek, had no such trouble because he had already chased out of town the six Chinese miners who came to his district, warning them that local miners and Indians were hostile to them. He considered those actions “wise and not inconsistent” with the ordinance.^{Footnote 64} The imagery is haunting: poor, frightened men running through the woods, hunted by armed bands of government agents who could seize everything they possessed, or run out of town on the mere grounds that they were Chinese.

Native and Chinese people in British Columbia confronted a tax regime very different from that encountered by residents of European descent, one powerfully marked by casual brutality that voters would not have tolerated. Tax collectors marched into Native households with guns ostentatiously poking out of their back pockets; they hunted down Chinese in armed bands that looked more like brigandage than law enforcement. Such behavior was shocking then as now. The fight between Kirkup and the coolies that began this account ended in a confrontation that horrified one newspaper correspondent. According to a report: “Supt. Chas. Todd accompanied by Messrs. Roycroft, Thorndyke, Wright, McCann, Sweeny, Fitzstubbs, Allison, Blackstock and Goudy proceeded up the railway to collect the school tax. . . . Capt. Todd placed his men in battle array, all well armed with first-class revolvers. This caused the Chinese to weaken, and becoming docile they paid their taxes like little men.” The letter writer, “Point Blank,” was outraged by the very principle of a poll tax as both unfair and susceptible to fraud by collectors. But he was also outraged by the use of force: “Taxation is tyranny when the tax is collected with pistols.”^{Footnote 65} It was a form of tyranny that Chinese and Indigenous people in BC knew all too intimately. Tax collectors kitted themselves out with symbols of violence to underscore their right and power to strip these impoverished peoples of their few belongings. The contact between taxpayer and collector, which was sometimes the only contact that these subjects had with their provincial state, approximated as nearly as possible pure coercion, with none of the cultural mediations that the liberal state ordinarily brought into play to conceal violence and none of the discretion that tax collectors showed other people who were genuinely unable to pay. To tax people requires familiarity with their habits and their relations of property. Provincial tax collectors refused to acquire the necessary familiarity. It was easier to call the Chinese evasive or too filthy to permit scrutiny. Ideological and cultural arguments remained closely intertwined with political and economic reasoning and with relations of power exercised intimately upon the bodies and possessions of Chinese and Aboriginal people.

BC was determined to tax the poor. Later premier and minister of finance J. H. Turner admitted as much in 1897, in an exchange of letters with a priest seeking relief from taxation who proclaimed that no Christian country aimed its taxes at the poor. Turner corrected him: that was how they all did it: “As a matter of fact all taxes have the same effect, and are usually paid by the last and poorest person.”^{Footnote 66} The early Walkem government sought to avoid taxing people and property in any way that required serious scrutiny of those people and their property or that demonized poverty. Walkem did not want to build up the state apparatus to the necessary degree. Once Elliott had started the province down that path, there was no going back, but it became increasingly apparent that the minimal state that existed in BC was incompetent to tax a poor that was, increasingly, racialized. Two groups in particular, among the poorest of the poor, systematically denied representation, became object of a tax vendetta from which, in the absence of a sympathetic judge, there was no appeal. Poor Caucasians were taxed as well, but they had more avenues of protest and were less likely to experience taxation as a direct and personal attack performed at gunpoint.

The federal head tax of $50 imposed on all arriving Chinese immigrants from 1886 was different from the BC legislation: it was designed to keep new immigrants out rather than to terrorize the existing population. BC legislators then scaled back their legislative persecutions around taxation, although petty officials, no doubt, maintained petty persecutions in enforcing existing regulations on the Chinese in Canada. Taxation of Aboriginal peoples working off reserve permitted other kinds of petty persecutions and eased other tensions. The sense of an economically and fiscally beleaguered middle class in British Columbia did not disappear by the end of the century; instead, it mutated to focus on a new panacea, the “single tax,” a tax on land values aimed against speculators and tax-exempt corporations with large holdings. The earliest confiscatory taxes on “wild” or undeveloped land were passed by the BC legislature in 1873, only to be vetoed higher up; then successfully revised, though they brought in only small sums. From 1890, the single-tax movement in BC was taken up even by political veterans like Robert Beaven; it too became a culturally overdetermined, politically explosive, and economically irrational fiscal program widely enacted across the province. But that is another story.^{Footnote 67}