A Successful Example of Practised Multiculturalism: The Mill Town Mayo on Vancouver Island in the 1920s

In an edition of the British Columbia Magazine I found an article written by Frances Backhouse on the multicultural community of the mill town Mayo (later renamed Paldi) located in the southeast of Vancouver Island, which was established in 1917 by the Punjab businessman Maiya Singh, who was later called Mayo (an anglicized version of his name).

At the time when the mill and the settlement were built, racism and prejudice were daily occurrences, but Mayo Singh successfully set up this “multiethnic community”, in which Indian immigrants lived peacefully among Japanese, Chinese or European immigrants. Despite the restrictions of immigration specified by the Canadian government, such as the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923 and the 1908 prohibition of Indian immigration until 1919, the situation in Mayo showed that multiculturalism could be practised even at that early stage of Canadian history. Although the Multiculturalism Act only came into force in 1988 (but was first mentioned by Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau in 1971), Mayo Singh already had the ideal way of different ethnicities living together in mind and did well in creating an exemplified settlement, where this was the case.

Subsequent to working in several jobs, such as working in sawmills in the Fraser Valley, for ten years after his immigration to Canada from the Punjab region in India, Mayo Singh and his partners founded the Mayo Lumber Company in 1916 and from the beginning on hired different ethnic employees, such as Japanese people he knew from the Fraser Valley or Chinese railway workers he had met earlier, when he was working for the Canadian Pacific Railway. However, within the community the jobs available were often assigned to certain ethnicities, such as carpenters, who were mainly Japanese and who, among other buildings, built the Sikh temple in Mayo. Besides the Japanese workers, there were Chinese ones, who built a private railroad for the community, and also Punjabi and Caucasian men, who mainly worked at the mill itself, where they were paid the highest wages. This imbalance in the employment seems racist and dividing “along ethnic lines” at first sight, but it was probably rather the case that everybody within the community of Mayo and the Mayo Lumber company did the job they were best at and that they had been trained to do before they came to Mayo. It might seem that the Punjabi men were paid higher wages because the founder of the company was of Punjab origin himself, but how would that explain the high payment of the Caucasian workers?

It is more likely that people were paid according to their skills, and not according to their ethnicity, as the general situation among all residents of Mayo is described as being very peaceful and tolerant towards each other in the article. Everybody soon attended the same school, ate the same food together, and the residents even discovered similarities of their different cuisines, such as flatbread, which is called rroti in Punjab and bottera in Japanese, as it is said in the article.

Unfortunately, in the course of World War II the fall of the community of Mayo commenced, as Japanese people were removed from the West Coast in order to protect Canada. With the relocation of the Japanese residents others left Mayo, too, and when the mill closed in 1945, there were no jobs for the remaining residents left, which caused them to move away as well.

In general, I think that Mayo Singh’s concept was exemplary for Canada and its uniqueness of multiculturalism by law and by the example of this tiny community of ethnically diverse people living in the diaspora in the early 20^th century, multiculturalism can be furthered and fixed in people’s minds.  

British Columbia Magazine. Vol. 52, June 2010