Almost Destroyed: Chinese Canadian records at Library and Archives Canada

June Chow

This post is a sequel to The right to remember the past: Opening Chinese immigration records in Canada’s national archives published on March 27, 2025. It is adapted from a presentation made on June 11, 2025 at the Association of Canadian Archivists conference held at Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) to an audience that included Librarian and Archivist of Canada, Leslie Weir.

In an earlier blogpost, I shared a firsthand account of how my community worked with its national archives to open racist government records needed to understand and confront the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act. Over and above the law’s ban on Chinese immigration was its mandatory registration of every Chinese person residing in Canada within twelve months of the Act coming into force. ‘C.I. 44’ forms document this tried-and-true tactic of a state’s criminalization of law-abiding residents through round-up strategies, a modern-day version of which is playing out under the directive of President Trump through U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A century after the Chinese Exclusion Act introduced its requirement for mass registration, the records created in this hostile context are being used to pursue collective healing, grounded in the personal, painful work of recovering ancestors who lived through the shame and regret of exclusion in silence. Any sum of the Chinese head tax pales in comparison to the price paid by those like my great-grandfather who endured a lifetime of separation from his wife and children.

My earlier blogpost showed how my community’s right to remember this past could move our national archives to open the Restricted historical government records documenting the truth of this racism. Public access to the restricted C.I. 44 records was initiated by an ATIP request submitted in 2021 that was reinforced by broad community endorsement. Within a few months, the records were opened by Library and Archives Canada (LAC) using block review, a process to facilitate proactive opening of more archived federal government records under the auspices of Canada’s Access to Information Act and Privacy Act. Block review is among a list of corporate strategies and initiatives of the institution aimed to improve services to Canadians; its success is reported in the many millions of pages of Canadian government records that have been opened. 

That which is lost cannot be recovered. Recognizing this, the community mobilized to unearth the slivers of surviving memory needed to piece together this past. But unbeknownst to members of the Chinese Canadian community and to the Canadian public, the very records documenting this history lay at risk at our national archives. In an ironic twist, the initiative to Open the Restricted C.I. 44 records would save them from being inadvertently destroyed. This post reminds communities to remain watchful over their records and those entrusted to steward them. It demonstrates how holding a national archives accountable as custodian is an ongoing task; this is my account of trying to do so.

As commemorations of the Chinese Exclusion Act rolled out as scheduled on July 1st, 2023, and through the following year, I found myself coming upon five years of working with this history and its traumas, documented in paper trail after paper trail. Naively, I had also taken up my community’s decades-long struggle with a national archives that seemed always to hold our records just out of reach. In my attempt to close a personal and professional chapter, I submitted what I intended would be a final ATIP request to LAC. I had my own account of how things happened, but wanted to verify it against the institution’s account: How did the C.I. 44 records become Open where they had been previously Restricted by law? My ATIP request – assigned file number A-2024-04572 – returned a 1,600-page release package; its interdepartmental emails checked out against my recollection of events – until I reached page 000456. There, I came face-to-face with an email chain with the subject line: Microfilm set for destruction.

The thread recounts that when block review was decided upon as the course of action, a reel from the set of microfilm was ordered from the vault to undertake the sampling exercise. The order was cancelled by the collections manager of microfilm at the Digital Operations and Preservation Branch; all 29 reels had been removed for destruction and were slated for disposition. The questions and concerns voiced by the various archivists involved would come up empty. The email of the lead archivist of the Government Archives Branch in charge of the Immigration portfolio reads: 

Just to confirm that this material has not been identified for removal/destruction by an archivist. I have seen no indication that they were recommended for destruction in MIKAN either, so I don’t know when, why or by whom they were identified as such… (emphasis in the original retained)

A flurry of emails later, the reels were retrieved and no further questions were asked. But urgent questions remain about when, why or by whom the records were removed for destruction, particularly as answers would appear to be well-documented by the institution. According to the federal government’s Directive on Removals from LAC Holdings (6.1), “[a]ll recommendations and decisions for removal of documentary heritage are fully documented in the LAC corporate recordkeeping system,” with ultimate responsibility held by the Librarian and Archivist whose approval of all removal decisions is based on subject matter experts’ analysis and recommendations. The only explanation offered by the collections manager of microfilm chalked it up simply to “Mistaken identity I guess.” The reels were batched with and mistaken for divisional copies meant to be disposed. They’d been sitting around for “several years” (plusieurs années) waiting to be destroyed.

Alongside retrieval of the reels from destruction, a further sigh of relief came with the location of a print master. Consistent with archival microfilming standards, the production of at least three copies is required: one production master (from which all copies are printed), one storage copy, and one use copy. Each copy has its function; none are extraneous. LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) is an information management principle particularly pertinent to microfilm; this is because original records are often destroyed once filmed, leaving only copies. The then-new technology was popular in the post-war era for being exponentially more compact and durable than paper; greatly reduced photographic images of documents and printed materials are held on high-resolution film, most commonly, in rolls (on reels) or sheets (as microfiche). The preservation format has been critiqued since for its inherent damage to cultural heritage given the resulting massive loss of information and destruction of original records. 

Chinese immigration records are no stranger to being microfilmed by our national archives and subject to such damage. In 1963, over 120,000 original ‘C.I. 9’ travel registration forms were destroyed once filmed. Of significant value in each form is a photograph of a Chinese person at the time of their outward travel, most typically, a man on a return visit to China to fulfill his duties as a son, husband and/or father. Overwhelmingly, these infrequent trips were the only way a Chinese man in Canada could participate in the making of family; restrictions in the Chinese Immigration Act prevented his family members from joining him in the country. LAC’s description of the records admit that the microfilm images are of poor quality; arguably, loss of information is felt most acutely in the rare portraits of the early Chinese in Canada who from all walks of life and against all odds strived to engage in the intimacies of family. The depth lost in their photographs would move York University Professor Lily Cho to restore this dignity and humanity by painstakingly reconstituting digital reproductions of the microfilm records to “re-take” their photos. Of similar form, function and time period to the C.I. 9 records are the ‘C.I. 44’ registration forms of 58,000 Chinese people residing in Canada at the time the Exclusion Act passed; likewise, the original paper records were destroyed once filmed. Ordered by serial number, another indicator of the destruction and carelessness that characterizes microfilm is the loss of almost 1,500 forms from the end of reel T-16174 to the start of the next (T-16175), with each form representing a Chinese person.

What has already been lost and what was almost destroyed are both measurable and immeasurable. The attention I draw is to the risk under which records of a community are held at our national archives, particularly when those records remain restricted, inaccessible, and hidden from that community. One policy of block review seeks to open archived government records; another policy directive is removing them for destruction, seemingly without due process. Where requests for access to information appear to have been exhausted, it is time to seek an inquiry instead: When, why and by whom were my community’s records removed for destruction?

June Chow is an archivist, archival scholar and award-winning heritage worker practicing across Chinese Canadian communities and specializing in the histories and contemporary challenges of Chinatown neighbourhoods. She has been archivist of The Paper Trail to the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act for the past five years. She currently works at University of Toronto Libraries, Special Collections in its Richard Charles Lee Chinese Canadian Archives.

Resources

June Chow, “The right to remember the past: Opening Chinese immigration records in Canada’s national archives,” https://activehistory.ca/blog/2025/03/27/the-right-to-remember-the-past-opening-chinese-immigration-records-in-canadas-national-archives/

June Chow, “New to Chinese Canadian genealogy: C.I.44 records of registration,” https://thediscoverblog.com/2023/06/29/new-to-chinese-canadian-genealogy-c-i-44-records-of-registration/