By Canadian Press

Chinese Canadians warn against a repeat of the racism they faced during SARS

Jan 29, 2020 | 12:36 PM

TORONTO — Leaders of Toronto’s Chinese community said Wednesday the racist attitudes that led to widespread discrimination against Chinese Canadians during the SARS epidemic are threatening to resurface during the current outbreak of a new coronavirus.

Avvy Go, director of the Chinese and Southeast Asian Legal Clinic, said she remembers a number of human rights violations that occurred in 2003, and urged Canadians not to fall back into the same discriminatory patterns.

“I certainly hope … that we do not have a repeat of SARS, not just the virus, but the virus of racism,” Go said at a news conference. “And the only way to stop it is for … our civic leaders to speak out.”

Go said the clinic fielded numerous complaints directly triggered by SARS-related hysteria back in 2003. She recalled helping tenants turned out by fearful landlords, workers who saw their hours scaled back by misinformed employers, and even Chinese refugee claimants taken aback when lawyers refused to be in the same room to hear their cases.

Evidence suggests little has changed as medical officials grapple with a new virus believed to be related to SARS, community leaders said. They cited a petition calling for schools at a board north of Toronto to urge students who have recently returned from mainland China to “self-quarantine” for at least 17 days. The petition has garnered 9,000 signatures so far.

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Toronto Mayor John Tory said Wednesday he has heard of multiple instances of discrimination against Chinese residents as well as calls to boycott Chinese businesses, decrying them all as unacceptable.

“That kind of stigmatization is wrong,” Tory said at the news conference. “It is ill-founded, and in fact could lead to a situation where we are less safe because it spreads misinformation at a time when people are in more need than ever of real information and real facts.”

Toronto has emerged as the Canadian centre of the new coronavirus outbreak, with both of the country’s two confirmed patients living in the city. The people affected are a married couple who recently returned from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the centre of the outbreak.

Officials in British Columbia have identified a third presumptive case of the new coronavirus in that province. In all three Canadian cases, the patients are expected to recover, and health officials across the country are describing the public risk of infection as low.

The new form of coronavirus has sickened nearly 6,000 people and killed 132 in China and has spread to numerous other countries, but the World Health Organization has not declared the outbreak to be a global public health crisis.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Jan. 29, 2020.

The Canadian Press