A few years ago, my family made a decision that surprised some of the people around us. We packed up our lives in Hong Kong and moved back to Canada. Part of the reason was that my son has health problems, the Hong Kong system made caring for him harder than it needed to be, and the loss of freedoms in the city. Another part of the decision came from a growing discomfort with how casually people around us dismissed suffering that didn’t look like their own. That discomfort followed me when I started noticing how Canadians talk about Hong Kong.
I did not expect coming back to Canada would mean confronting a different version of the same problem. I had assumed that a country known for welcoming refugees would apply that welcome evenly. What I have learned is that Canada’s compassion often depends on who is asking for it.
As a recap, it helps to know a bit about Hong Kong’s recent history, because most Canadians don’t. Hong Kong spent more than a century and a half as a British colony before the United Kingdom handed control back to China in 1997. That handover came with a formal agreement between Britain and China that Hong Kong would keep its own legal system, freedoms, and way of life for 50 years under a framework known as “one country, two systems.”
It began to unravel in the 2010s. In 2014, tens of thousands of people occupied major streets in the Umbrella Movement, protesting Beijing’s grip on how Hong Kong’s leader would be chosen. Then in 2019, a proposed extradition bill that would have allowed Hong Kong residents to be sent to mainland China for trial triggered the largest protests the city had ever seen. On June 30, 2020, China imposed a National Security Law on Hong Kong that criminalized secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign forces, using definitions broad enough to sweep up journalists, activists, and critics of the government, with the law criminalizing “secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces” while providing broad definitions for these crimes. Since then, opposition newspapers have shut down, pro-democracy politicians have been jailed or exiled, and Hongkongers have watched the city they grew up in change around them.
Because Canada and Hong Kong have diplomatic ties dating back to 1923, and because Hong Kong has long been one of the largest sources of immigrants to Canada, the federal government created special immigration pathways in 2021 specifically for Hong Kong residents fleeing the security law. Canada also opened a route for recent Hong Kong graduates of Canadian institutions and another for Hong Kong people with a year or more of Canadian work experience, with the pathways taking effect on June 8, 2021, open to former Hong Kong residents who graduated from a post-secondary learning institution in Canada within the last three years. Those programs still exist, and the government has extended and adjusted them several times, with the dedicated permanent residence streams currently open and scheduled to conclude by August 2026.
On paper, this looks like exactly the moral clarity Canada likes to project. In practice, the people who came through these programs describe something much colder.
Here is the double standard as I have come to see it. If a newcomer arrives in Canada from Ukraine or from Syria, and if that person is white or passes as white to the average Canadian, that newcomer is a refugee, a victim of forces beyond their control, someone who might end up doing lower-wage work than they are qualified for, but whose story is accepted without question. Community groups rally around them, the churches sponsor them, and some neighbours help out.
Compare that to a Hong Kong person who leaves everything behind because the city no longer offers the freedoms it had. That person is met with suspicion. Some Canadians assume they must be wealthy, since Hong Kong has a global reputation as a financial hub. Others assume the person must be exaggerating the danger, since nobody is bombing Hong Kong the way Russia bombs Ukrainian cities. Moreover, a smaller but vocal group in the Chinese-Canadian communities goes further, suggesting that anyone leaving Hong Kong over political concerns really just hates being ethnically Chinese, as if fear of an authoritarian state and ethnic self-loathing are the same.
None of these assumptions hold up. They only need to be popular enough to shape how a person is treated at work, in the neighbourhood, and in casual conversation. This is a pattern that is hard to explain without acknowledging race as a factor. The empathy extended to Ukrainians and Syrians, and hostility extended to Hongkongers, track closely with whether the newcomer looks like a Canadian in their view.
Part of what encourages this is money. China remains an enormous market, and enough Canadian businesses, along with plenty of Canadians of Chinese descent who maintain family or commercial ties there, have a material interest in standing with China. That interest shows up often as a reluctance to hire someone whose resume signals they left Hong Kong, or as a tendency to wave away concerns about Beijing’s human rights by insisting the critic is not a known political analyst and therefore has no right to comment.
It also shows up as the idea that Canada has no real choice but to support China because past prime ministers, whether Justin Trudeau or those before him, and the pressures of dealing with Donald Trump, left the country in a rut. That framing has gotten weaker to defend, given Prime Minister Mark Carney has spent much of his time arguing that Canada does have another path. Carney argued that middle powers should stop competing for favour with larger nations and instead combine their strength through partnerships, noting that Canada and the European Union together have a defence budget twice the size of China’s, and noting that Canada and the European Union have a combined population more than that of the United States. He described Canada as “the most European of non-European countries” and has pushed toward deeper ties with Europe rather than dependence on Washington or Beijing. This invalidates the excuse that Canada has no room to take a stance on China.
The other thing keeping this double standard alive is outdated information. A familiar talking point says China lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty, so criticism of the government is overblown. China’s economic reforms beginning in the late 1970s did produce one of the largest poverty reductions that it created after the war. However, the reform era ended years ago, as Xi Jinping’s government has spent the past decade centralizing power, tightening control, and rolling back space for independent business and civil society.
A related talking point holds that authoritarian control is simply the price of managing a large, diverse population, pointing to China’s high-speed rail network as proof. Japan has operated bullet trains since the 1960s while remaining a largely open, democratic society, and nobody points to Japanese infrastructure as evidence that Japan needs to suppress freedoms to exist. Nor do the people making this argument about China extend the same generosity to Russia or Israel, two other governments frequently accused of repressing minorities or dissenting populations. The inconsistency is about which authoritarian state a person has decided to excuse.
There is also a popular myth, held by a large number of Canadians, that Hong Kong remains some kind of freer alternative to Canada. The reality tells a different story. International investment and business activity have declined since the security law took effect, as global firms moved to Singapore or elsewhere in the region. The nightlife that once defined Hong Kong has dimmed while restaurants that operated for decades have closed. The job market offers no clear advantage over Canada’s. Moreover, the city has grown much more dependent on mainland China economically and demographically, as longtime residents leave and mainland transplants take their place.
What made Hong Kong distinct a hybrid of Cantonese tradition, British institutional values, and a freewheeling press and civil society, no longer exists. This is a description of a trend that journalists and researchers covering the region have documented since 2020, and it stands as a plausible outcome. This is why the fantasy of Hong Kong as an escape from Canada no longer holds.
I did not write this because I think Ukrainians or Syrians deserve less. They deserve every bit of it, and Canadians who have organized to support them should be proud of that. I wrote this because the same instinct should extend to Hong Kong people, and right now it does not. If Canadians believe in freeing Tibet or standing with Ukraine, that same logic points toward standing with Hong Kong, since the principle in all three cases is the same: people should not lose their freedom because a more powerful state decided they were expendable.
Pretending Hong Kong’s situation is less serious because no bombs are falling on it, the way they fall on Ukrainian cities, misses the point of what solidarity means. It also reveals a bias where sympathy is about how closely a victim resembles the person extending it. Wearing that indifference as a strength, the sense that apathy is sophisticated might be considered clever in the United States or in parts of Alberta. Nonetheless, it is not a Canadian value.
Hong Kong newcomers are already here, working through the pathways Canada made for them in 2021, and they are doing it without the community support that Ukrainian and Syrian newcomers have. Many spend their years in Canada in survival mode, taking low-wage work and focusing on stability, because the diaspora community remains fragmented and because building a support network takes time they no longer have. While Ukrainian and Syrian newcomers are often met with warmth, Hong Kong newcomers more often hear a version of “we don’t care, go home” from Canadians.
Closing this gap does not require a policy overhaul. Canadians who already support Ukrainian or Syrian newcomers could extend that same energy toward Hong Kong community organizations, many of which are small, underfunded, and starved for volunteers that other groups take for granted. Employers weighing two similarly qualified candidates might ask themselves honestly whether hesitation around a Hong Kong applicant is about business risk in China or unconscious bias. Most of all, anyone who catches themselves repeating a Chinese propaganda talking point should spend a few minutes checking whether that talking point is verified or outdated.
None of this asks Canadians to abandon the compassion they show toward other newcomers. It only asks that the compassion for people whose danger is quieter and whose faces are less familiar, but whose loss of freedom is no less real.
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