698 THE FEDERATIONS AND THE UNION [PART 1V
disqualified Japanese from voting, was not ultra vires of the
Provincial Legislature. The Dominion Parliament has power
to decide the conditions on which naturalization shall be
accorded, but the rights of a naturalized person in any
province must depend on the provincial law, a decision
which really terminates the long-vexed questions still raised
by Dominion Ministers of Justice as to legislation by the
provinces allowing aliens to hold shares, &c. On the other
hand, the Privy Council? held that the British Columbia Coal
Mines Regulation Act prohibiting Chinamen from employ-
ment under ground was not intra vires the Provincial Legisla-
ture. They decided that the power exercised was not really
a power to regulate coal mines, but to deprive the Chinese,
naturalized or not, of the ordinary rights of inhabitants
of the province, and in effect to prohibit their continued
residence therein by preventing them earning their living
in the province. This case was carefully distinguished from
the suffrage case by the Judicial Committee. This decision
seems to support the much older decision of Gray J., in the
British Columbia case of Tas Sing v. Maguire, where he held
the Chinese Tax Act, 1878, of that province to be ultra vires,
because in substance it was not a taxing Act at all, as it
claimed to be, but an Act to drive Chinese from the country,
and as such an interference with the Dominion control of
trade and commerce, of the rights of aliens, and of Imperial
treaties, though in this latter regard it may be pointed out
that there were no such treaties in existence. The same
Court held invalid the Act, 47 Vict. c. 4, to regulate the
Chinese by imposing a tax of ten dollars on each, as not being
a valid exercise of the taxing power, but really a special
discrimination against Chinese 3
Union Colliery Co. of British Columbia v. Bryden, [1899] A. C. 580.
* 1B. C. (Irving) 101, decided in 1878 ; see Provincial Legislation, 1867-
95, pp. 1061-7. The Act (42 Vict. o. 35) was disallowed thereafter as
objectionable. See also ibid., Pp. 244 b, 755 ; Lefroy, pp. 459, 460.
* See Bull v. Wing Chong, Wheeler, P- 122; Provincial Legislation, 1867
95, p. 1095, See also Quick and Garran, Constitution of Commonwealth,
pp. 601-4, which adopts the extreme federal view. But cf. Sir O Mowat
