It’s a Parliament Hill whodunit.

Ten years after former prime minister Stephen Harper was presented with the Last Spike — a historic symbol of the hardship the Chinese Canadian community endured during the dark age of the head tax and official discrimination — the six-inch commemorative iron has gone missing.

Is it perhaps being used as a door stopper by a parliamentarian, as the spike’s former owner, late renowned Canadian author Pierre Berton, once joked? Or did it get lost when Harper moved out of the PMO last fall, or accidentally tossed into the recycling bin to become part of someone’s wheel rim?

“The Last Spike symbolizes our community’s history, which is tied to building the Canadian Pacific Railway,” said Avvy Go, a member of the decades-long Chinese head-tax redress campaign that successfully lobbied Ottawa for an official apology to the Chinese community, which was delivered in Parliament on June 22, 2006.

“Mr. Berton, who wrote the book, The Last Spike, had two of the spikes presented to him by a union. They came from the section of the CPR when it was last completed 130 years ago. He told me at the time he was using the other one as a door stopper. We need to find out where ours is now.”

According to Go, 300 ceremonial spikes were presented to guests at the historic completion of the CPR at Craigellachie, B.C., on Nov. 7, 1885, an event the Chinese railroad workers were banned from attending.

Since January, Go and her group have been trying to locate the spike — a gift from Berton to the campaign in 2003 that was supposed to have been on display in the PMO — hoping to borrow it for the upcoming 10th anniversary of the redress.

They contacted Harper’s office on March 8 but only heard back on Friday, after the Star’s inquiry, that staff “did look into it but they don’t know where the spike is.” Harper did not respond to the Star’s interview requests on the spike’s whereabouts.

Go said the spike was presented to Harper by now deceased head-tax payer James Pon in 2006, and the community was told it would be on display in the Prime Minister’s Office.

Chinese labourers were brought to Canada in the 1880s to build the CPR, work considered too dangerous for Canadians. When the project was completed in 1885, Canada passed the Chinese Immigration Act to discourage more Chinese from coming to Canada, and imposed a head tax on Chinese migrants: first $50, and in 1903 raised to $500. The head tax was finally abolished in 1923, when the Chinese Exclusion Act was passed, virtually cutting off immigration altogether.

Harper was asked about the spike in 2010, when Vancouver Sun columnist Stephen Hume wrote that Canadians would like to see it put on display in the Railway Committee Room in the Parliament Buildings.

“It’s in the PM’s Langevin Block office ... not lost at all!” the Harper government’s then-director of multiculturalism, Melissa Bhagat, wrote in an email at the time. “It has been on display since the PM received it, but he is happy to give it up to the railway room if need be.”

Go also knocked on the door of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, hoping he might have inherited the spike from his predecessor.

“After careful research, we were unable to locate it,” Trudeau’s correspondence manager, Jean-Luc Marion, told Go earlier in March. “We can only assume that the spike was not kept at the Prime Minister’s Office or that it was not left in the office following the transition to our current government.”

Prime Minister’s gift protocol

Many Canadians choose to offer gifts to the Prime Minister. The security regulations and the Federal Accountability Act passed in 2006 by the Harper government prevent and preclude the Prime Minister and his family from accepting many gifts.

All monetary gifts and gift certificates are returned to the sender. Some items, such as perishable goods, cannot be accepted for security reasons. Other items may be severely damaged due to security screening processes.

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Gifts the Prime Minister receives are recorded by Library and Archives Canada only if they are sent to the department.

On his homepage, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau asks Canadians not to send him or his family any gifts. “This goodwill would be better directed towards community, charity and family.”

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