Notes: This poster was originally posted on the government's Asian Heritage Month web page in 2015. That page is updated annually and the link to the poster has since been removed from that page. One of the worst offenders when it comes to falsifying the history of the boat people is our own Government of Canada. On this poster our government claims that it was Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon that brought the boat people to Canada. That re-framing of our history changes Canada's response to the refugee crisis into a political decision and has divides our Vietnamese community into those who identify as victims of the fall of Saigon (legitimate refugees, according to the poster) and those who do not (what are they?). This marginalizes the boat people and it is understood by them to be a hostile act on the part of Canada's government, an attempt to make them disappear. Why does Canada want to remove the former boat people from Canadian history? Answer: because Canada has recently adopted a partisan position on the Vietnam war that is not compatible with the idea that the boat people were admitted to Canada on a non-partisan, humanitarian basis. |