The Tyranny of Taxation Harms Chinese and Indigenous Peoples in British Columbia

"Taxation is tyranny when the tax is collected with pistols." It was a form of tyranny that Chinese and Indigenous peoples in BC knew all too intimately. Tax collectors kitted themselves out with symbols of violence to underscore their right and power to strip these impoverished peoples of their few belongings. The contact between taxpayer and collector approximated as nearly as possible pure coercion, without the cultural mediations that the liberal state ordinarily uses to conceal violence and without the discretion shown to other taxpayers.

--E.A. Heaman, Tax, Order, and Good Government: A New Political History of Canada, 1867-1917 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2017), 115-116.