The ARVN are a political faction, and they are free to demonstrate their politics in Canada. No one wants to deny them that right.
There are some Canadians who naively suggest that the Vietnamese who are the object of the protest ought to just accept the ARVN and do as they wish. This thought is motivated somewhat by the ARVN propaganda, which paints them as objects of pity and as people to whom Canada has moral obligations as former refugees.
Those naïve Canadians need to be reminded that the former boat people in Canada are also free to express their political views, and their view is that they do not want to identify with the ARVN in any way. Doing so would give strength to the ARVN political agendas, which go far beyond what is at stake in these demonstrations. They want all Vietnamese Canadians to appear to support them so that they can demand that governments support their political agendas. That is why they call themselves "the Vietnamese community".
Here is an simple fact that every Canadian should memorize about the origin of Canada's Vietnamese community:
Canada never, at any time in history, favoured Vietnamese refugees from any particular region of Vietnam. Canada has no moral obligation to anyone based on their place of origin or their role in the Vietnam war.
And while we're at it, another fact that every Canadian should understand:
A political faction can never, ever, represent an entire wthnic community. Politics is not culture.
If Canada has a moral obligation to anyone, it is to these former boat people who were admitted to Canada from all over Vietnam on a non-partisan basis. That is what Canadian public wanted at the time -- the ARVN were never favoured as refugees. The ARVN propaganda denies all of that all of that and replaces it with myth and propaganda that favours themselves.
The conclusion of all of this is if one wants to accommodate the ARVN, it must be done without marginalizing the Vietnamese community. Since that is exactly their aim, there is no way to satisfy them, as events in Surrey have proven.
One can do nothing more than politely tolerate their demonstrations without endorsing them.
How Surrey accommodated the ARVN
The City of Surrey put themselves in an awkward position at the outset by staging a festival that explicitly involves the display of foreign national flags. There are several political factions in Canada who consider the display of certain national flags to be a partisan political act.
When the inevitable conflict arose with the Vietnamese, Surrey compounded their problem in 2017 by allowing the yellow flag, a flag that is not a recognized national flag to participate, creating a precedent for political expression at the festival.
The decision to allow the "yellow flag" effectively raised a middle finger to Vietnam, to Canadians of Vietnamese origin, and especially to the Vietnamese group that was already participating in the festival and conforming to the original non-political spirit of the festival. It's unlikely that the festival would have gone along with this if it were not for the endorsement of the ARVN group coming from our Federal government.
Surrey decided on a logical compromise which was to allow the ARVN to have a separate pavilion in the festival. What is inexplicable about the compromise is that the Festival allowed the ARVN to formally identify as “The Vietnamese Canadian Community”, when that is precisely what they are not. In other words, Surrey not only admitted them to the festival, but denigrated and marginalized the original community group almost to the degree that the ARVN wanted.
The move did not, however, satisfy the ARVN. They were admitted to festival in 2017, but they have continued their demonstrations up to the present. There is no compromising with the ARVN. They must be the only Vietnamese in Canada.