WOMAN JAILED FOR HAVING A
CHINESE LOVER
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your mouse over the words that are underlined, you will get more infortmation.
Velma Demerson was an author and lifelong social activist who died of throat cancer on May 13th, 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1897, a since-repealed law that allowed authorities to jail women for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 That Act was repealed until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prison before the Act was repealed.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.
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