Komagata Maru

The Komagata Maru many people don’t know about it and many people do know about it. The Komagata Maru incident is one of the more blatantly racist events that has happened in Canadian history or more specifically the history of British Columbia . It starts with the continuous journey law, this law made it so you can not come from India unless you took one boat with no stops. This was only made because India and were both under British rule this means that the Canadians could not just say no you can not come into our country so they had to make this rule. This boat successfully came to Canada without breaking the continuous journey law. Now how did this affect us and what should we remember. At a very quick glance this event does not seem as significant as it is but what you look more into it you see that it is actually a very important event in Canada and more specifically British Columbia. The way it effects us the most is that Canada mostly built up of immigrants. So if you look back at what happened if you let what happened continue less people would be able to come to Canada making Canada grow a lot slower, so when you look at it from an economic prospective you can see how stupid it is to reject the people that want to help grow your country. And from a humane view it was also very wrong almost everyone on the Komagata Maru got treated very poorly when they got to Canada despite being part of the British empire and when they got back to India. “The government of the British Raj saw the men on Komagata Maru not only as self-confessed lawbreakers, but also as dangerous political agitators.” And as you would expect from events like this the people affected are expecting an apology. They got one from Steven Harper 94 years after the incidence but it was very informal. The apology was given in Surrey, BC with a crowd of about 8,000 people. But in 2016 Justin Trudeau gave a formal apology in the House of Commons. Like with most things/events an apology does not solve the whole problem, while it is the first step in most cases it does not mean that once you have apologized you are done. Usually you need to follow up on things like this, actually take action. It’s like how most political things work. They give an apology people do think they are doing the right thing but a lot of the time they are not actually following up and actually helping out the communities that are effected. So in conclusion most of these incidents that happened in the past against people that are not white are wrong for several reasons. Both on the economic side and the humane side. For the economic side a lot of the time the people that are punished are trying to help Canada grow and for the humane side a lot of the time the peoples punishments could have been done in a much more humane way or could have just not happened.