bout de papier, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2015) — Spring 2015 // Printemps 2015, pp. 10–15
Note de la redaction: Pour souligner le 40° anniversaire de la « chute » de Saigon a la fin d’une guerre particulièrement triste au Vietnam et dans la region, bout jette un regard sur le rendement extraordinaire de nos missions et de nos agents d’immigration, la saga des réfugiés qui se sont embarqués pour un long voyage jusqu’aux rives du Canada et quelques-unes des leçons tirées au sujet de l’edification d’une nation au Canada meme. Les Canadiens ont de quoi être fiers, et les néo-Canadiens qui nous sont venus de l’Indochine ont fait honneur a eux-mêmes et au Canada. Trois articles rédigés par des membres de la Société historique de l’immigration canadienne (SHIC) se penchent sur l’histoire et les multiples facettes humaines d’un important chapitre de notre histoire sociale.
The Indochinese refugee movement was the largest refugee resettlement initiative ever undertaken by Canada, running from the fall of Saigon in 1975 until well into the 1990s. It was spawned and sustained by a wide range of push factors. Following the Communist victories in Indochina in 1975 there were summary executions, the forcing of perceived enemies into “re-education camps” and so called New Economic Zones, the unrelenting oppression of “class enemies”, ethnic cleansing of the large Chinese minority, nationalization of businesses and the Cambodian genocide. Compounding the situation were natural disasters and wars between Vietnam and both Cambodia and China.
It’s impossible to get an accurate count of all who perished in the jungles and minefields of Cambodia attempting to reach Thailand. Additionally, UNHCR conservatively estimates at least 250,000, mainly Vietnamese and Sino-Vietnamese “boat people,” lost their lives attempting to reach safety in neighbouring countries.
This movement added close to 200,000 new citizens — Vietnamese, Sino- Vietnamese, Laotian, Cambodian and members of various Indochinese minorities — to Canada’s population. Given the suffering that many experienced in making their escape, the conditions in the refugee camps, the struggle to adjust to a new Loading the last Canadian Hercules flight from S culture, climate and, often, language, and the cumulative trauma of all these, they have adjusted remarkably well. They and their descendants are found in all walks of Canadian life.
The apex of the movement for Canada occurred in 1979 and 1980. The government made an initial commitment to 5,000 Indochinese refugees in the 1979 annual refugee plan, partly influenced by the favourable publicity garnered by the acceptance of 600 refugees stranded on the Hai Hong (see Dara Marcus’ article “Canada and the Hai Hong” bout de papier Vol. 28, no. 1). The escalating rate of arrivals of boats in neighbouring countries, more than doubling from 26,000 in April to 56,000 in June caused the ASEAN countries to close their shores. Boats were pushed off or towed back to sea and thousands perished. With the possibility of asylum rapidly disappearing, the Secretary General of the UN called an emergency meeting in Geneva to respond to the crisis.
In June 1979, the new Conservative Government increased the Canadian commitment to 8,000 and asked that another 4,000 be sponsored by Canadian groups and institutions. In response to the Secretary General’s appeal for greater effort by the international community, Secretary of State for External Affairs Flora MacDonald and Immigration Minister Ron Atkey went to Cabinet to argue for a much larger effort and, when MacDonald addressed the emergency meeting in Geneva on July 21, 1979, she announced a commitment to resettle 50,000 refugees. This was comprised of the 8,000 already pledged, 21,000 to be sponsored under a new, untested Private Refugee Sponsorship Program and a matching 21,000 to be settled by the government. When the Liberals returned to power in 1980, Immigration Minister Lloyd Axworthy added 10,000 bringing the commitment to 60,000.
The response of ordinary Canadians took everyone by surprise. In June 1979, 388 groups sponsored 1,609 Indochinese refugees. By the end of the year Canadians had overshot the 21,000 target as 5,456 groups filed sponsorships for 29,369 refugees. When the program ended in December 1980 there were sponsorships on file for just under 40,000 refugees. While most churches in the country took on a refugee family it was the religious communities with strong memories of persecution and war, notably the Mennonites, the Dutch Christian Reformed Church and Canada’s Jewish community, that took the lead. Canadians were inspired by remarkable leaders like Ottawa’s Mayor Marion Dewar who called a meeting expecting dozens of citizens and had to find seating for over a thousand people. In Toronto, York University Profescar Howard Adelman invited a few
Malaysian fishing boats used initially to ferry vis on the four hour trip to the refugee camp on Pila noisy, uncomfortable.
to promote and coordinate the sponsor-shins and to organize arrangements and The refugees and the several hundred thousand ordinary Canadians who welcomed them and helped them to adjust to life here are, of course, the main elements of this story.
What is much less known is the story of how the refugees got here. That is the story of how, in 1979 and 1980, 20 or so young Canadian visa officers, led by three remarkable young managers, operating in remote, hot, humid, smelly, hard to reach camps throughout Southeast Asia identified, interviewed, selected, processed and transported 60,000 refugees to Canada on 181 charter flights with never a seat left empty. It is the story of the two impressive reception centres that the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Employment and Immigration Commission (CEIC) organized on military bases in Edmonton and Montreal to receive, orient and document the refugees and give them a few days rest after their journey. It is the story of how a little group of clerks, supported by a stove-sized computer and a system inspired by the Berlin Airlift, matched 32,000 refugees with 7,000 sponsors. And finally, it is the story of how CEIC employment and immigration staffers played a critical role in coordinating the sponsorship movement, settling 25,000 government assisted refugees and dealing with the myriad problems that eventually arose after arrival.
The book
Three years ago, with the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon approaching on 30 April 2015, a group of those young immigration, employment and visa officers, now in their 60s and 70s, decided it was time to tell their part of the story under the auspices of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society. Drawing on almost 1,000 documents from Library and Archives Canada and from the UNHCR Archives in Geneva, the CIHS writing team (Peter Duschinsky, Kurt Jensen, Michael Molloy and Robert Shalka), have teased out the story of the upheavals in Southeast Asia between 1975 and 1980. They have described and analysed the events, the policy considerations, the political and bureaucratic decisions, and the operational innovations that made it possible to move so many people from so far away so quickly to Canada. The story of how it was done is told in the words of over 40 former CEIC, RCMP and National Health and Welfare employees, one stalwart Foreign Service wife and a doughty Scottish sea captain. These stories, sometimes shocking, sometimes funny and always quietly inspiring, make up two thirds of the book tentatively titled Running on Empty: The Canadian Employment and Immigration Commission and the Indochinese Refugee Movement 1975-1980. It should be published later this year.
The conference
Originally the book was slated for release in April 2015 but the writing team took a detour. York University’s Centre for Refugee Studies (CRS), which grew out of the Indochinese program, heard about the CIHS book project and suggested the two organizations co-host a conference on the Indochinese movement. The conference The Indochinese Refugee Program 1975 to 1980 and the Launch of Canada’s Private Refugee Sponsorship Program, was funded by Citizenship and Immigration’s Multicultural Branch and was launched with a one day workshop that examined Canada’s current Private refugee sponsorship program.
The conference, held between 21 and 23 November 2013, heard first-hand accounts and testimony from three refugee panels, plus panels comprised of former visa officers and other federal, provincial and municipal officials, sponsors, community organizers, and media representatives. Keynote speakers included Udo Janz, the Director of UNHCR’s New York office and Senator, The Honourable Thanh Hai Ngo.
The refugee panels, featuring representatives of the Vietnamese, Sino-Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian communities, were particularly gripping. Stories of dangerous sea voyages or treks though jungles, pirate attacks, hunger, thirst, privation and the horror of losing children along the way left the 100 plus participants in shocked silence. The panel on first contact between newly arrived refugees and their sponsors demonstrated that in most cases the sponsorship program worked well. The conference also heard a sobering account of what happened when a sponsoring group was not up to the task. The final refugee panel about settling here demonstrated the importance of family, hard work and the resilience of the human spirit.
The conference proceedings were videoed along with 21 hour long interviews. These can be found at www.indochinese. apps01.yorku.ca/conference. The conference web site also includes a 30 minute documentary and a series of shorter thematic mini documentaries compiled from the proceedings.
Follow up
In January 2014 a post conference workshop designed an ambitious program to stimulate further research and make information on the Canadian experience with the Indochinese refugees more widely available. The first priority was to establish a presence on the internet www.Indochinese.aps01. yorku.ca. Work has begun on a docudrama based on the experiences of one of the conference participants.
The Centre for Refugee Studies is developing materials for use in high schools focusing on the Indochinese refugees and how Canadians assisted them. The materials should be online before the 40th anniversary of the fall of Saigon.
Consultations are under way with York University Library to create an online archive of documents and other materials relating to the Indochinese refugee movement and the Canadian response. The documents collected by CIHS in researching the book will constitute the nucleus of the new archive. The Society remains very interested in collecting documents and memorabilia from the Indochinese refugee movement and if you have such materials and are looking for a home for them contact us through cihs-shic.ca.
As the original Indochinese refugees age, the CIHS-CRS partnership is making plans for a workshop in the fall of 2015 to bring together representatives of institutions that collect immigrant and refugee oral histories. The objective is to encourage institutions across Canada to collect and preserve the firsthand accounts of the refugees as well as those of sponsors, host families, and others.
A special edition of Refuge: Canada’s Journal on Refugees on the Indochinese movement will be issued before the end of 2015. In addition an edited volume examining aspects of the Indochinese movement not covered in CIHS’s book is planned.
Michael Molloy is a Senior Fellow at the University of Ottawa and president of the Canadian Immigration Historical Society. He was involved in the Czechoslovakian and Ugandan Asian refugee movements, helped design the refugee elements of the 1976 Immigration Act and was Senior Coordinator of the Indochinese refugee movement 1979 and 1980. Postings included Tokyo, Beirut, Minneapolis, Geneva, Amman, Damascus, Nairobi and Toronto. He was Ambassador to Jordan (1996 —2000) and Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process (2000-03). He is currently co-authoring a book on the Canadian Immigration department and the Indochinese refugee movement.
Don Cameron was on temporary duty at the Embassy in Saigon in April 1975 and was on board the aircraft in which the Canada-based employees were evacuated on 24 April 1975. From 1979-81 he was responsible for the selection of Vietnamese refugees in Malaysia as the Deputy Immigration Program Manager in Singapore.
Chronology – Canada and the Indochinese Refugees 1975–1980
SSEA — Secretary of State for External Affairs
DND — Department of National Defence
UNHCR — United Nations High Commission for Refugees
Early 1975: Pathet Lao and Khmer Rouge take over
Laos and Cambodia.
April 6 1975: Indochinese orphans arrive in Canada.
April 1975: Effort to evacuate relatives of Canadian
Vietnamese thwarted by strict exit controls.
April 24, 1975: Canadian staff of Saigon Embassy
evacuated.
April 30, 1975: Saigon falls to Communist forces.
130,000 people rescued by US Navy.
May 1, 1975: Canada will accept 3,000 Indochinese
refugees plus all sponsored by relatives.
May—December 1975: Canadian teams process
1,401 Vietnamese refugees from Guam and thousands
more from military bases in southern USA. General
Quang controversy.
October 1976: Canada to accept 180 “boat people”.
August 1977: Cabinet authorizes resettlement of
450 “Small Boat Escapees”.
January 13, 1978: Canada will accept 50 “Small Boat
Escapees” families per month.
July 20, 1978: Cabinet approves monthly program for
20 overland refugee families in Thailand.
November 1978: Freighter, Hai Hong, with 2,500 refugees
arrives off Malaysia. Canada takes 604.
December 7, 1978: Indochinese Designated Class
Regulations simplify selection rules.
December 20, 1978: Canada’s first Annual Refugee Plan
will admit 5,000 Indochinese.
Admissions 1975-1978: 9,080
March 1979: Mennonite Central Committee signs
refugee sponsorship agreement. Forty churches and
organizations follow.
April to June 1979: Boat arrivals in SE Asia escalate:
April 26,602, May 51,139, June 56,941.
June 1979: Clark government increases 5,000 target
to 8,000. Voluntary sector to sponsor 4,000.
Late June 1979: ASEAN governments announce they
WILL not accept new boat arrivals.
July 20-21, 1979: At United Nations conference in
Geneva Canada announces 50,000 refugees: 8,000 from
June plus 21,000 sponsored privately matched by
21,000 govt. assisted refugees.
July 1979: New organizations to promote sponsorship —
Project 4000, Operation Lifeline, etc.
July-August 1979: Reception centres established at
DND bases, Montreal and Edmonton.
November 1979: Sponsorships by private groups surpass
government’s target of 21,000.
December 1979: Government abandons pledge to match
privately sponsored refugees with equal number of govern-
ment assisted. Diverts savings to Cambodian refugee relief.
April 2, 1980: Liberal government adds 10,000 government
assisted refugees. New total 60,000.
December 8, 1980: Charter #181 arrives with the last
of 60,049 refugees.
Totals:
Privately Sponsored 32,281
Government Assisted 25,978
Relative Sponsored 1,790
Statistical Source: Employment and Immigration Canada:
The Indochinese Refugees: the Canadian Response, 1979 and
1980 (1981, Department of Supply and Services)
Originally published in bout de papier, Vol. 28, No. 4 (2015) — Spring 2015 // Printemps 2015, pp. 10–15. Read the rest of this issue →
