Who revised Canada's history and why?

Canadians are attracted to the story of how the Vietnamese came to Canada for many reasons, and the story is often repeated.

Unfortunately the significance of the story has made it attractive to people who want to exploit it for political reasons. Among the most successful exploiters is the government of Canada.
The government's interest is in the way the story reflects Canada's national identity. When a government wants to change the national identity, the story of the Vietnamese boat people also has to change.
Today's dominant political version of the story is hostile toward Canadians of Vietnamese origin. As a researcher or writer, you will have a moral responsibility to avoid repeating the divisive and offensive stereotypes in that version.
The best way to start your research is to get a basic understanding of who is exploiting the history and why. It will then be easy for you to spot and screen out questionable ideas.

The attractiveness of the story

The migration of the Vietnamese to Canada set many milestones in Canadian history. People are often attracted to the story, but for a variety of reasons.

Here are three reason that the story is important to Canadians.

As a proud moment in Canadian history

Most Canadians know that Canada’s Vietnamese community had its origins in a refugee crisis.

Between 1979 and 1996, Canada worked with the UNHCR to bring 162,000 Vietnamese to Canada, from all over Vietnam, on a non-partisan basis. The effort set several precedents for Canadian immigration and became a model for later efforts in Canada and elsewhere.

Among other things, Canada had only recently removed barriers to non-European immigration to Canada as well as other barriers to taking in refugees. This was he first large program to test the will of Canadians to stick with those ideas. It was also the first time that there was private sponsorship for refugees.

When the refugee crisis was developing at the end of 1978, Canada took the initiative to accept the first lot of refugees and with the UNHCR, led the way for other nations to follow suit.

The “boat people crisis” of 1979 is still one of Canada's largest and most well-known humanitarian undertakings in terms of numbers of people settled in Canada. Canadians had enthusiastically adopted all the new developments in immigration policy. Thousands of Canadians financially sponsored and directly assisted Vietnamese families to settle in Canada.

Canada takes pride in a national identity that welcomes refugees and immigrants into a tolerant multicultural society. In 2021, Canada and Australia are the only two countries in the world not experiencing major populist backlashes against immigration.

As an origin story, a part of one's personal identity

This "origin story" for Canada's Vietnamese community forms a part of the identity of those who made the journey to Canada as well as the two new generations who have been born in Canada into the families of the original migrants.

"[I am] a former refugee, a “boat person” ... My family’s escape from Vietnam was an opportunistic one, as my family had no allegiances to either side of the war but saw the chance to flee the current violent, impoverished, and oppressed climate of post-colonial and post-war Vietnam" (Ngo, 2019, p. 60).^[478]

Very few of the migrants perceive themselves as “victims of the fall of Saigon”. They are a diverse group of people, having come from all over Vietnam, having left for a variety of reasons, and having had a variety of experiences in the journey. Canada accepted them all.

Today, their Vietnamese identity has been made into a political issue. Twenty years after the refugee program ended, many started noticing a conflict between the way Canada officially remembers the boat people and the stories that their families tell. Canada appears to be expressing some hostility toward those who do not conform to the official history.

It is often of interest to those new generations, as Canadians, to know who the boat people were and to understand how and why Canadians undertook this effort to bring their families to Canada. The first generation of refugees are not necessarily aware of all of the factors from Canada's perspective.

As an expression of Canadian national identity

Up until the end of WWII in 1945, Canada identified as a colony of Britain. After that, Canada was developing an identity as a nation independent from Britain at the same time that Vietnam was throwing off its French colonial masters. The difference is that Canada did not have to fight wars to do so.

In 1945, Canada signed the UN charter that opposed colonialism. Canadian citizenship has existed as a legal status only since 1947. Canada got its own flag in 1965. The movements that led to official multiculturalism began in 1969 and became more formalized when Canada got control over its own constitution in 1982. Between 1967 and 1976 immigration law developed to accept more non-European immigrants and more refugees because Canada wanted more immigrants.

In parallel with this, Vietnam’s efforts to become independent from France were first formalized in 1945. Vietnam then had to fight a series of wars to get rid of France and its proxies. There were more than two sides in the early days of this conflict, but by 1954 was starting to look like Ho Chi Minh's people were going to prevail against the French.

But then independence was delayed because the Americans took over from the French and kept France’s Vietnamese colonial administrators and military in power until 1975. The delay was not the choice of the Vietnamese, it was arranged by western nations.

Canada perceived Vietnam wars as civil wars in which it had no national interest. Canada could not have got involved to help the Vietnamese nationalists because of the complexities of cold-war relationships and its ties to both France and the US.

For 36 of the 52 years between 1945 and the end of the boat people crisis in 1996, Canada was led by Liberal prime ministers. Two of those, Lester Pearson and Pierre Trudeau, were in power for 20 years over the period of the American war and the boat people crisis. These two prime minsters were responsible for most of the key events in developing Canada’s national identity, as described above, as well as for how Canada responded to events in Vietnam.

In the brief intervals where Conservative prime ministers were in power, they added some of their own ideas, but they did not challenge the ideas of the Liberal prime ministers because they were popular with Canadians. Canada’s national identity was and is very much based on “liberal” ideas.

The net effect was that Canada responded to Vietnam's conflicts, and later the Vietnamese refugees, in the way it did because of specific liberal ideas about what Canada stands for.

When the refugee crisis came along in 1978 it was one of the first opportunities for Canada to apply some of these ideas. The way the refugee crisis was handled was a strong expression of Canada's national identity as well as a fulfillment of what Canada had believed about Vietnam since 1945.

Although this conception of Canada's national identity prevailed over a long period of time, there were always some conservative groups around who did not agree with it. These groups did not have a lot of influence at the time because the Pearson-Trudeau model was popular with Canadians.

That changed in 2006.

Canada gets a new national identity

A new national identity means a new historical narrative.

In 2006 a pair of conservative leaders arrived on the Canadian scene who had an obsession with Canada's national identity: Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney. They strongly disagreed with what Pearson and Trudeau had done to Canada's identity and they set out to change it.

They believed the way to achieve this was to replace Canada's history with a new historical narrative.

They wanted to restore Canada's original identity as an offshoot of the British empire. They also believed that the US today set the example for what they wanted to Canada to be. They saw the US as another offshoot of the British empire, but one that had not compromised its principles. They wanted Canada to be a militant, warrior nation who fights wars to defend "conservative" (read "white colonial-like") principles.

This meant trouble for Canadians of Vietnamese origin, whose origin story was an obvious target for Harper's national identity project. Canada's responses to Vietnam and to the Vietnamese refugees had very much been driven by how Pearson and Trudeau had conceived Canada's national identity. The new Harper-Kenney regime intended to permanently wipe those concepts from Canada historical record.

The history of the Vietnamese migration to Canada was turned into a hostile attack on Canada's Vietnamese community. In the new concept of Canada, Canada had admitted the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

Stephen Harper was not alone in holding these beliefs. He was just the first to get into a position where he could do something about them. He had a number of allies outside of government who helped his project along. Among those allies is the former military leaders of the Saigon regime. Harper's project gives them considerable political benefits.

The presence of these allies also gave Harper's project considerable benefits, specifically, longevity. They are still here to defend the project long after Harper is gone from Canadian politics.

BoatPeople.ca

Người Canada Gốc Việt: A History of the Vietnamese in Canada