It was a story the media couldn’t resist: UBC study discovers that employers discriminate against applicants with non-English names.

It generated a ton of coverage, as it should have. The researchers sent 6,000 mock resumes in response to 2,000 on-line job postings in the Greater Toronto area. Those with English-sounding names like John Martin or Jill Wilson were called back 40 percent more often than those with Asian names, such as Sana Khan or Le Li.

This should put an end to any suggestion that we live in a postracial society in Canada.

The reality is that Canada was well on its way to becoming a multicultural country in the 19th century. There were many former slaves who moved to Victoria. Chinese and Japanese immigration was adding an Asian dimension to the population.

Bill Chu of Canadians for Reconciliation told me recently that 20 percent of the nonaboriginal population in B.C. in the 1881 census was Chinese.

South Asians, primarily from Punjab, moved to B.C. where they helped build the forestry and agricultural industries.

Then there was the backlash. Legislation was passed requiring immigrants to make a “continuous journey”. This made it illegal for people to come from South Asia because you couldn’t travel from the Indian subcontinent to Canada without stopping for provisions. It culminated in the Komagata Maru incident, when a boat full of Indian immigrants was turned aside from Vancouver's harbour.

It wasn't just the South Asians who were targeted. In 1908, the Canadian government secured an agreement with Japan to limit immigration to less than 1,000 people per year.

By now, we all know about the Chinese head tax, which was designed to discourage people coming from China. It started at $50 in 1885 and eventually reached $500. When that didn’t achieve its objective, the federal government virtually banned Chinese immigration from 1923 to 1947.

So what was all this about? It was white supremacy, plain and simple. People of Chinese, Japanese, and South Asian descent weren’t allowed to vote. They weren’t allowed to join the professions. And they weren’t allowed to take their rightful place in our country.

Similar discrimination was heaped on aboriginal people, who were rounded up and placed on federal Indian reserves.

Canada could have become a very multicultural country 100 years ago, but the Anglo-Canadian establishment stopped this from happening. As a result, we squandered untold human capital.

The country has never fully acknowledged that the end of the 19th century and much of the 20th century was Canada's era of white supremacy. This white supremacy wasn’t like that of the Ku Klux Klan in the southern United States. People weren't lynched because of their race.

Nor did it resemble the white supremacy witnessed in Nazi Germany, where victims were sent to the gas chambers.

No, this was a different form of white supremacy. We should never forget that it was very pernicious and it held people back from achieving their potential.

This latest study from UBC on discrimination by employers is proof that we still have a ways to go before we’ll erase this blemish from our country. The first step along the way is to call it by its proper name.

The second step is for the media to look at other areas where this type of racism exists, such as in our at-large method of electing city councillors, park commissioners and school trustees. In Vancouver, this has resulted in tremendous discrimination against qualified candidates of South Asian descent.

It stuns me that nobody in the legislature sees this as an issue worthy of their concern.