WOMAN JAILED FOR HAVING A CHINESE LOVER                 

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Velma Demerson was an author and lifelong social activist who died of throat cancer on May 13^th, 2019 at the age of 98 in a hospital in Vancouver, British Columbia. While she was alive, she fought to have the government acknowledge the injustice of the Ontario Female Refuges Act,                                                                     

As far back as 1939, —I was six then living in Toronto —when Velma was a young eighteen-year-old white woman in love with a Chinese man At the age of 18, she met Harry Yip in a Yonge Street Chinese cafe where he worked as a waiter. Finding him handsome, she attracted his attention and they began dating and she, soon after, moved in with him in his apartment.  Later, they  had a  baby on the way.

When her father found out that she was involved with a Chinese man, he took a train from Saint John, New Brunswick to Toronto in order to seek the intervention of the Toronto Police.

Meanwhile, she was engaged to be married to Harry Yip and  because they lived together, it was considered as an indiscretion that was against the law in that era.

Velma was eligible to be arrested under the Ontario Female Refuges Act of 1897, a since-repealed law that allowed authorities to jail women for "incorrigible" behaviour such as promiscuity, pregnancy out of wedlock and public drunkenness. 

Under that Act, any person, including any parent or guardian, could bring before a judge any female under the age of twenty-one years who were deemed unmanageable or incorrigible by the adult person, so that the judge could decide Velma’s fate.

Velmawas arrested at the home of her fiancé, Harry Yip by police acting on a tip from Velma’s parents who disapproved of their daughter's actions. Pregnant with Yip's baby, she was convicted of being "incorrigible" under an 1897 law the Female Refuges Act. It allowed the government to arrest and institutionalize women between the ages of 16 and 35 for behaviour such as promiscuity, pregnancy out of wedlock and public drunkenness.  As to be no surprise, in those years, the man would not be arrested.  That Act was repealed until 1964. I knew a woman in 1963 who was incarcerated  in  that prison before the Act was repealed.

Velma was first sent to the Belmont home for young girls and then a few months later she was transferred to the Mercer Reformatory for Women, which is basically like a federal prison for women but it was operated by the provincial government of Ontario.  It was opened in 1872.

Based on the Ontario Female Refuges Act, many young women who were labeled troublemakers by officials or who might have been unwed mothers were sent to reformatories where they were held against their will and subjected to questionable medical experimentation. The Mercer Reformatory was one of the institutions they were sent to and where many medical experiments were performed on these women against their will.

At times the Mercer Reformatory also housed female offenders under age sixteen in a separate part of the building. These separate areas were distinctly known as the Industrial Refuge for Girls from 1880 to 1905 and the Ontario Training School for Girls from 1952 to 1960. The young woman are now serving their time in a reformatory in Brampton, Ontario.

One evening in the 1960s, I arranged for entertainers to do a show for the women at the Mercer.  One of the female guards was a woman who I worked with when we were both supervisors at an Indian Residential School in Kenora, Ontario in 1959. A female friend of mine took my TV set from my apartment and sold it. She was caught and sentenced to 18 months to be served at the Mercer. She died from TB six months after she was released. I and a friend attended her funeral.

Despite its promising beginnings, the Mercer Reformatory for Women would become the centre of controversy with allegations of torture, beatings, experimental drugs, and medical procedures, all in the name of reform. It was closed in 1969. Now back to Velma Demerson’s  story.

Velma was incarcerated at the Mercer Reformatory for Women in Toronto for a period of ten months. While incarcerated she gave birth to her son, Harry Jr., who at three months was taken away from her until her release.

She was also subjected to several involuntary medical procedures by a reformatory doctor, a leading eugenics practitioner searching for evidence of physical deficiencies contributing to the moral defectives of "unmanageable women" Good luck on having success on that task in that era.

Upon her release from the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women in 1940, she married her fiancé, Yip, but the marriage ended in divorce three years later. She said that her son was subjected to constant racist insults so she moved to Hong Kong with him, hoping to shield him from bigotry.

However, she found herself in financial distress and sent him back to Toronto to live with her father who, unable to care for him, gave him up to foster care. The boy became estranged from his mother and drowned in a swimming accident at the age of 26.

Velma returned to Canada and settled in Vancouver where she remarried and had a daughter and a son. After separating from her second husband, she raised her children as a single parent and worked as a secretary in government and legal offices until her retirement.

Her marriage with Yip had resulted in her having committed an act which she soon found out had stripped her of her Canadian citizenship under the 1946 Canadian Citizenship Act, in which women who married a non-Canadian were deemed to have taken their husband's citizenship. Further.  her application for Chinese citizenship was denied by Chinese embassy officials and she remained officially stateless until 2004. Under the terms of the 1947 Citizenship Act a woman who applied to have her citizenship returned would receive it. Velma Demerson applied for it on November 13, 1948. She was finger-printed and given a Declaration of Intention to sign. This was an incorrect form signed by at least four persons. She was then denied Canadian citizenship. Nowadays, she wouldn’t be dened Cnadian citizenship because Canada lime many countries don’t adhere to making citizens stateless.

After retiring, she moved back to Toronto in the late 1980s and began searching through government documents and researching her case in order to come to terms with what had happened to her in her youth. No lawyer was willing to help her until she met  lawyer, Harry Kopyto who became interested in her case and conducted legal research into the Female Refuges Act under which she was imprisoned, and came to the conclusion that as a provincial law, it violated the Constitution by legislating in criminal law, which is an exclusively federal responsibility.

In 2002, she sued the Ontario government for $11 million for pain and suffering during her incarceration. The Ontario Superior Court refused to hear the case, citing that the Ontario government is immune to lawsuits stemming from incidents prior to 1964.  That is a stupid law.

In late 2002 however, she settled out of court, receiving an apology from the Attorney-General of Ontario and financial compensation in an undisclosed amount from the provincial government.

Velma Demerson was one of the only few survivors who, 60 years after her incarceration at the Andrew Mercer Reformatory in 1939, received compensation from the Ontario government. She was 81 by then.  In 2018, MP Hedy Fry apologised to her on behalf of the Canadian government for the loss of her citizenship. Velma  Demerson returned  to Vancouver and died there in 2019.

Canada has a Charter of Rights that guarantees that wrongs similar to those committed against Velma Demerson won’t happen again to people like her and others like her. 

2004, she wrote a book about the events, titled Incorrigible, a part of the Life Writing Series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press. In 2002, she was awarded the J.S. Woodsworth Prize for anti-racism by the New Democratic Party of Canada.She wrote a second book in 2017, Nazis in Canada, 1919-1939 and a satirical novel based on actual characters, based on her experiences in the Andrew Mercer Reformatory for Women.

I am most fortunate that I met my Japanese-born wife in 1975 when I was a speaker at the Fifth United Nations Congress on the Prevention of Crime and the Treatment of Offenders held at the UN Headquarters in Geneva Switzerland. I had no trouble bringing her to Canada and her getting her Canadian Citizenship. We have been married 44 years at the time of the writing of this article and we have two daughters with the oldest being an inspector of prisons in Ontario and the youngest being a chartered accountant. My wife and I also have  five grandchildren.

It was most unfortunate for Velma Demerson had to suffer the way she did during those terrible years she was mistreated so badly. Fortunately, those days are long gone.