In 1973 the US gave up on the Saigon regime, acknowledging what so many had believed from the start: that nationalism would inevitably win in Vietnam. Nevertheless, the US wanted to distance itself from the inevitable failure of Saigon.

In 1973 the international community again got together, this time in Paris, and drew up an accord by which the US would withdraw from Vietnam. The accord basically left it up to the Vietnamese to determine what would happen next. It was not a political settlement, but merely a military agreement defining how the remaining US troops would be withdrawn.

Canada was reluctantly convinced by the US to take on a role on another international monitoring commission, but Canada insisted on having an option to quit after 6 months, and did so. With the risk of nuclear escalation gone, Canada then directed its attention to humanitarian aid.

After the US left in 1973, Canada began giving humanitarian assistance to organizations that were dealing with large numbers of internal refugees and other economic issues. On March 27, 1975 Canada announced a large donation to several aid agencies including UNHCR, with a promise of more to come. (Canada, 1975).^[41] On April 4, Canada followed up with an announcement of much larger donations, but also clarified that Canada would not be making a political response to the situation. The statement indicated that Canada would help relatives of Canadians (i.e. not political refugees). (Canada, 1975). ^[42]

As the North Vietnamese Army pushed toward Saigon, UNHCR, UNICEF and other international organizations mounted an emergency relief operation to bring in more than 22,000 tons of food, medicine, clothing and temporary shelter material. (Robinson, 1998, p. 21). ^[193]

Canada deliverd its support through these agencies in part so there would be no political question of which side the aid went to. The agencies delivered aid to anyone who needed it.

The US withdrew its military personnel and its money, but left behind all its hardware. No one expected Saigon to survive, although there were some who thought the fault was purely political:

Only a narrow circle of military analysts knew at this time that Saigon had more than enough equipment and supplies ‘in the pipeline’ to meet its immediate needs in repelling the DRVN invasion. What [Saigon] lacked then was what it had always lacked: internal political cohesion, efficiency, and genuine popular support from the people it controlled. (Ross, 1984, p. 375).^[260]

Apart from the military withdrawal, the US did not want to take any action that made it look like it was abandoning Saigon. Consequently, the US began to evacuate its remaining personnel from Saigon only at the very last minute. As a result the evacuation was carried out in a panic, resulting in many people taking matters into their own hands.

There was some controversy in the US over whether or not the US should help evacuate Saigon government and military personnel who wanted to flee, particularly because the US has purposefully abandoned them to their fate in 1973. In the end, the US accepted a moral responsibility to protect their former allies. The US military helped evacuate around 150,000 of them from the South. This moral commitment to its former allies was extended, through a series of programs, right up to 2009.

Naturally the UNHCR and Canada did not feel any such obligation. The evacuation was not considered an international refugee crisis and UNHCR did not get involved with it. People displaced by war, including fleeing defeated militaries, are not considered refugees. It would have been a partisan political act to help. That did not stop the US from trying to get others help:

The United States clearly wanted to establish that the Indochinese in Thailand and elsewhere were not displaced persons outside their countries, but refugees. The point, in an obvious sense, was political: these people were not fleeing an old conflict, the Americans were saying, but a new fear of reprisal at the hands of the communist regimes and that should be acknowledged by UNHCR and the international community. (Robinson, 1998, p22).^[193]

Canada considered the Saigon regime to be a colonial regime, destined to fail.^[1] Canada had never supported the regime and therefore had no moral obligation to it when the regime collapsed in 1975.

Throughout April, 1975 the opposition party in parliament badgered the government about making a political response to the fall of Saigon, i.e., rescuing masses of people from "communism". It's not clear who they expected the government to rescue, as Canada had no ally in Vietnam. The government always had a carefully measured response, pointing out on more than one occasion that the UNHCR had not declared a refugee crisis, and that Canada is responding in other ways, through aid programs and work to retrieve relatives of Canadians.^[2]

On May 1, the cabinet formally approved the admission of relatives of Canadians and a response to the US request for help which involved the admission of 3,000 further refugees. (Canada LAC, 1975)^[48] In the course of the discussion a couple of points were made regarding how the public might assess the decision: a fear of admitting war criminals,^[5] and the fact that the Vietnamese at this time did not meet any normal definition of "refugees".

In a similar vein, Canadian media was not as tactful as government on the nature of the Saigon regime. For example, Macleans published an article on how some of the regime's massive corruption was brought to Montreal in 1975. (McDonald, M. , 1976)^[401] The article suggests that the people being admitted to Canada at this stage were the same sort being admitted to the US, i.e. members of the Saigon military and government elite.

As it happened, the May 1 decision with some minor tweaks made to it later, was the full extent of Canadian help offered to resettle evacuees from the fall of Saigon. The effort ended in 1977, just as another issue was emerging out of Vietnam's relationships with China and Cambodia.

To facilitate the aid and family reunification programs, Canada formally recognized the new government of South Vietnam on May 15, 1975 and established diplomatic relations on June 26.

Canada continued to work with the new government to get family members of Canadians out of the country (with little result in the short term). In the meantime the US began an embargo that lasted for almost 20 years.

Records show that Canada took in a total of 5,031 Vietnamese from 1975 and 1977 ^[3] and then considered the commitment to the US fulfilled (the number was higher than the commitment because of the relatives being admitted).

In 2015, Canada's government passed an act of parliament declaring that Canada had, after all, supported the Saigon regime as a legitimate government and had stepped in to help them in 1975, if not before.