What I Got Wrong
Earlier, I wrote about the different ways Canadians talk about Hong Kong migrants. Some readers accused me of importing a Western lens onto a Chinese diaspora issue. In contrast, others leaned on stereotypes about wealthy Hong Kong families doing well in B.C. province. A few only read part of it, then argued against what the rest of the post addressed. I moved back to Canada after years abroad in the United States and in Hong Kong, and I write from that point of view. What surprised me was how confidently people spoke about a community whose legal status in this country they had never bothered to check. Most Canadians who have an opinion about Hong Kong migration are picturing the wrong group of people.
The Hong Kong-Canada Story Did Not Start in 2019
The first significant movement of Hong Kong migrants to Toronto arrived in the 1960s and 1970s, driven partly by unrest from mainland China. A second, larger wave followed in the 1980s and 1990s, triggered by anxiety over the 1984 Sino-British Joint Declaration, which set out the terms for Britain handing Hong Kong back to China in 1997, and after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Between 1993 and 1997 specifically, a wave of Hong Kong investors and entrepreneurs seeking a safe harbour for their money moved to Toronto, taking advantage of the Investment Canada Act. These were people with capital, credentials, and secured Canadian citizenship before they needed it. They built the Richmond, British Columbia that most Canadians stereotype when they hear about the Hong Kong Canadian.
The newest wave is nothing like that. It began after Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong in the summer of 2020. In response, Ottawa opened new pathways, including an open work permit for recent graduates and two distinct routes toward permanent residence for people with Canadian study or work experience. Those pathways are scheduled to end on August 31, 2026.
What that means is that a large share of recent Hong Kong arrivals in Canada are on work permits, study permits, or partway through a permanent residence application. They are not citizens or even permanent residents. The federal government’s own internal briefing notes describe admission targets for Hong Kong under humanitarian and compassionate grounds as having processing times going beyond 12 months because of high application volumes. A person waiting at least a year to find out whether they can stay is living a very different life than someone who has had a Canadian passport since the 1980s or birth.
Richmond is Not North York
When Canadians who are not Hongkonger or Chinese think of a Hong Kong newcomer, they see Richmond, British Columbia, a city where the ethnic Chinese community has wealth and elected representatives in Ottawa. However, newer arrivals are increasingly settling somewhere else. North York, in Toronto, has become a place for a younger, less established Hong Kong population, alongside other parts of the country.
North York continues to absorb newcomers even as the city works out how to fund local services. Settlement agencies, such as North York Community House, describe multi-year federal funding agreements around helping newcomers with housing, healthcare, and language barriers, something a Richmond family with decades in Canada never needed. These are not the same community, and treating them as the same undermines their challenges. Part of the reason for this is that an influence campaign has shaped how Canadians feel about Chinese and Hong Kong issues. This comes from Canada’s own intelligence service and from a formal public inquiry.
One of Vancouver’s oldest and most influential civic organizations, the Chinese Benevolent Association, was a longstanding supporter of Taiwan until it shifted toward Beijing. That change matters because these organizations are the loudest voices Canadian media and politicians hear from when they want a Chinese-Canadian perspective, even when that voice does not speak for Hong Kong newcomers fleeing the government those organizations support.
The best example involves Kenny Chiu, a former Tory member of Parliament who arrived from Hong Kong in 1992. After Chiu became a vocal critic of Beijing in Parliament, China’s own former consul general in Vancouver, Tong Xiaoling, bragged about having helped defeat him in the 2021 election. An investigation by the Commissioner of Canada Elections concluded that the Chinese government had worked to turn Chinese-Canadian voters against him, framing him as anti-China and supporting anti-Chinese discrimination, through Chinese-language social media and traditional media in the city. A public inquiry led by Commissioner Marie-Josee Hogue concluded that the People’s Republic of China remains the most active state actor engaged in foreign interference against Canada’s democratic institutions, carried out through Chinese diplomatic staff operating out of local consulates.
As a result, this means that when non-Chinese Canadians hear that Hong Kong is not an issue, because people travel freely on Canadian passports and have representation in Ottawa, they are often hearing a warped narrative shaped by pro-PRC organizations with an interest in minimizing scrutiny of Beijing. That reassurance describes the 1990s Hong Kong Canadians, not the current Hong Kong newcomers on temporary status.
We Don’t Do This to Everyone
Canadians do not assume that every Ukrainian is doing ok because enough Ukrainian-Canadians hold citizenship or elected to municipal councils or provincial legislatures. Nobody points to that known Syrian-Canadian business owner in Oakville and concludes that recently arrived Syrian refugees must be doing well too. We should understand that a diaspora is not one unified community, and that legal status and local support networks shape experiences more than a common country of origin.
That mindset seems to disappear when the community is not white or does not pass as white. It is worth calling this out again because generalizing newcomer experiences into one narrative shows up whenever a racialized community gets discussed in Canada, despite being the norm in America. It is not unlike Americans in comfortable California suburbs who assume the rest of America is doing fine because they are. Unfortunately, the established group becomes the stereotype for anyone who shares their ethnicity or country of origin, regardless of how different their circumstances are.
Another and more personal frustration comes from this. Writing as a Canadian who spent years in the United States and in Hong Kong before returning invites a weird kind of hostility. Some readers responded to double standards by insisting that Western systems are the real problem, without reading what the article discussed, such as rejecting propaganda and stereotyping on all sides. Others questioned something that the article answered paragraphs later. A few implied again that returning to Canada after years abroad somehow makes someone less Canadian, or less entitled to an opinion about the country.
Questioning someone’s Canadian identity because they lived abroad is a knee-jerk and defensive reaction from people who may not have had the chance or means to live abroad themselves. Responding to a thought-out post with sources using a stereotype is not a good-faith disagreement.
This Extends Beyond One Community
Additionally, the issue where a majority group assumes good intentions on behalf of a minority group without checking affects other Canadians too. First Nations communities in Canada deal with this constantly, where decisions affecting their land, their children, or their future get made by bureaucracies influenced by stereotypes and unconscious bias within the country’s settler power structure, often without consulting the communities they affect. Writing periodically about Indigenous issues alongside immigration and diaspora issues is not a coincidence. Both are cases where Canada’s comfortable self-image, as a fair and welcoming country, depends on not looking at who is being left out.
Some Canadians who rightly identify that Western institutions carry biases stop there, offering no solutions and treating any attempt at reform as a form of surrender. A similar line of thinking shows up among Americans who argue that voting or reform accomplishes nothing, while also unable to propose any solutions. Diagnosing a broken system is valuable work, but refusing to fix it, while insisting that anyone who tries is compromised, guarantees nothing changes for people who are affected most.
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Where This Leaves Us
None of this requires us to become experts in immigration or Chinese politics. It asks for people to stop assuming that a Hong Kong Canadian’s comfortable life in Richmond tells you everything about a recent Hongkonger newcomer with a work permit in North York. It also asks readers to finish reading a post before arguing against it and to have skepticism toward comforting narratives about Hong Kong migration despite popular stereotypes of the diaspora community.
Real change is supporting the settlement agencies doing the work in places like North York, reading past the headlines, avoiding parroting propaganda, and extending to Hong Kong newcomers the same understanding Canadians already extend to Ukrainian and Syrian communities. None of it is complicated and just requires paying closer attention instead of falling back on dated assumptions.
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