VANCOUVER—There are more Canucks living in Hong Kong than almost anywhere else outside of Canada.

As tensions between pro-democracy protesters and Hong Kong authorities continues to grow, the Canadian government says it is working on a plan to assist the 300,000 Canadians who call Hong Kong home.

Hong Kong has one of the largest Canadian diaspora in the world, second only to the United States, where about a million Canadians live. The United Kingdom has the third largest Canadian diaspora, with 73,000 Canucks.

If transplanted into the Vancouver area, the Canadians living in Hong Kong would create the third largest municipality in the Metro Vancouver region — larger in population than Burnaby, but smaller than Surrey.

“We do have these historic connections with United States and the United Kingdom, but right behind that, it’s Hong Kong,” said Andy Yan, a data analyst and urban planner with Simon Fraser University.

That relationship largely began during the Second World War when Canadian soldiers were taken prisoner in Hong Kong while fighting Japanese forces, said Yan.

Back then, Hong Kong was a British colony.

When Hong Kong was handed over to the Chinese government in 1997, tens of thousands of Hong Kongers immigrated to Vancouver. Some of them eventually returned to their place of birth, but not before becoming Canadian citizens and developing strong ties with the country.

That’s why there are so many Canadians living in Hong Kong, said Yan.

According to a 2011 report by the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada, seven in 10 Canadians living in Hong Kong have family in Canada and one in four still retain Canadian professional credentials. More than 60 per cent plan to return to Canada at some point, according to the report. And 25 per cent vote in Canadian elections.

Most Canadians living in Hong Kong were born in Hong Kong and only lived in Canada for four to five years, according to the foundation’s report.

In May, the Hong Kong government proposed an extradition amendment bill that would allow people accused of crimes to face trial in China. In response, millions of pro-democracy demonstrators in Hong Kong have been on the streets for more than two months, protesting against what they characterize as increasing control by the Chinese government.

Hong Kong is a special administrative region of China and not subject to the same restrictions on rights like free speech as mainland China.

The unrest has sparked protests in Vancouver as well, with hundreds of demonstrators on both pro-Hong Kong and pro-China sides confronting each other over the weekend, one block away from city hall.

Both the Immigration and Global Affairs departments say there’s been no surge in call volumes to the consulate, nor a sudden spike in applications for passports or any other immigration documents despite ongoing protests.

“We stand ready to provide consular assistance to Canadians who are in Hong Kong as needed,” Global Affairs said in a statement.

The department has been working on contingency plans to assist the 300,000 Canadians in the region for some time, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland said last week, but what those plans might look like is unclear.

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According to Yan, Hong Kong and Canada have a special link and time will tell what impact that has had on people’s values.

“It’s about cross pollination of culture,” he said. “For the time that these folks spent in Canada, what kind of values and what kinds of perspectives did they take in terms of civic life?”

With files from The Canadian Press

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