Speech of Douglas Jung on the address in reply to the speech from the throne

The first speech of Member of Parliament (MP) Douglas Jung before the House of Commons in which he addressed the importance of Canadian leadership in relations with Pacific Rim countries. Jung was the first Chinese Canadian to become an MP. He called on the Canadian government to apply equal standards for Chinese and European immigrants. He sympathized with Chinese immigrants who had been living in Canada without legal status due to the discriminatory Chinese Immigration Act; he supported an amnesty that would allow undocumented Chinese immigrants to obtain citizenship and would end the trade in fraudulent immigration documents.

Jung was born in Victoria, BC, in 1924 during the Chinese Exclusion Act which denied legal status to Chinese in Canada. The military service of Jung and other Chinese Canadians in the Second World War helped win the vote for all Chinese Canadians in 1947. Jung went on to study and practice law in BC. He was the first Chinese Canadian to run for a seat in any Canadian legislature in 1956, winning the seat for Vancouver-Centre in Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's government in the 1957 federal election.