The Chinese head tax. The Komagata Maru incident. Japanese internment camps. Aboriginal residential schools.

These tragic events from B.C. history are taught regularly in higher education and public-school classrooms. B.C’s primary-grade teachers began instructing their students this fall on the abuse of young aboriginals in church-run residential school system.

Sharing a history is about choosing which past stories to emphasize. So where do British Columbians place residential schools? The fee levied only on early Chinese migrants? The 1914 rejection of a ship full of asylum seekers from India? The internment of ethnic Japanese during the Second World War?

These four events are often highlighted by academics and activists as the key elements of B.C. history; illustrating how the province’s residents were essentially racist. The narrative has been disseminated by politicians, educators, journalists and even real-estate developers.

It’s hard to determine which things in B.C. history are dominant in the minds of people who live here. How many think about the arrival of Captain George Vancouver, the Gold Rush, the blossoming of Haida art or that the wife of Governor James Douglas, the so-called “Father of British Columbia,” was part Cree?

Given the weight the media typically gives to the controversial head tax, the Komagata Maru incident, the Japanese internment camps and residential schools, I suspect these four acts of race-based discrimination would come out near the top of a poll asking British Columbians to rank the province’s most significant historical events.

It must have been a surprise to many last month, given such a context, when a noted international think-tank named Canada as the freest and most tolerant country on the globe.

Out of 142 nations, the Legatum Institute declared, Canada stood out as the “freest country in the world” for tolerance of immigrants, minorities, freedom of expression and beliefs.

The Institute found an overwhelming portion of Canadians, 92 per cent, agreed their country is a good place for immigrants. Another 94 per cent said they believe they have the freedom to choose the course of their own lives.

Has Canada, including B.C., suddenly gone from a land poisoned by rampant racial hatred to the world’s most open and accepting region?

Or should British Columbians revisit their understanding of history?

Any racism is too much racism. Race-based policies have obviously caused serious damage to many people in B.C., particularly aboriginals. We owe something to the victims.

Yet B.C., especially Metro Vancouver, has for a long time been the chosen destination of more immigrants per capita, compared to its population, than any other region of Canada.

How does past racism in B.C. compare to other parts of the globe?

One’s breath is taken away by the massacres, mayhem and systematic hatred that fill books such as Racism: A Global Reader, edited by Kevin Reilly et al, and Racisms: From the Crusades to the 20th Century, by Francisco Bethencourt.

These books detail the horrors of Germany’s Holocaust, which took six million Jews and others. They explore the “Rape of Nanking,” in which Japanese in the 1940s savagely abused and murdered more than 300,000 Chinese.