Joseph Hope (Low Kwong Joe 刘光租)

Joe Hope was born in Victoria in 1896. In 1914, he helped found the Chinese Canadian Club (CCC) in Victoria, BC, the first organization of the Canadian-born Chinese. The club members invented the term “Chinese Canadian,” affirming that people could be both Chinese and Canadian at a time when it was widely believed that Chinese people could never be Canadian.

In 1919, the club unsuccessfully lobbied for the right to vote for the Canadian-born Chinese Canadians and for Chinese war veterans. In 1922, under Hope’s leadership, the CCC initiated a year-long students strike against the Victoria School Board, which had ordered the racial segregation of all Chinese students. Hope, the CCC president, emerged as the major spokesperson for the striking students and their parents. Years later, he remembered the Students Strike as the key moment that created the unity that allowed the Chinese Canadian community to endure the exclusion era. Meanwhile, a talk that he gave in Victoria that in 1923 later led Kew Dock Yip, the first Chinese Canadian lawyer, to seek the repeal of the Exclusion act.

In 1923, he went to Ottawa with representatives of other Chinese Canadian communities, when they successfully lobbied the Senate to remove some of the most draconian aspects of the Exclusion bill. The Senate amended several provisions of the bill, including removing one
that required all Chinese non-citizens to pass a language test to stay in the country, a measure that would have led to the deportation of tens of thousands of people.