The diverse Vietnamese community now in Canada took the shape it did because of the decisions made by a long series of Canadian leaders that were in place prior to and at the critical times in history. These prime ministers shaped a unique national identity for Canada that enabled Canada to respond constructively^[1] to events in Vietnam.

Taking a long-term view of the period that shaped Canada’s response to events in Vietnam, the critical period was from the end of WW II in 1945 up until the end of the UNHCR “boat people” program in 1996.

In this period of 52 years, Liberal prime ministers were in place for 70% of the time. In particular, there were four strong prime ministers who are credited with shaping Canada’s post-war national identity: Mackenzie King (4 years)^[2] St. Laurent (8 years), Pearson (5 years), and Trudeau (15 years).

In the earlier years of this period, they shaped a unique place for Canada in world affairs, designed to make Canada distinct from its British origins and from its US neighbour. They made Canada a partner in the UN and a strong player in its peacekeeping activities. Pearson merged Canada’s military services and brought in the Canadian maple leaf flag. Trudeau made Canada a nation committed to multiculturalism. In stages they abandoned Canada’s racial restrictions on immigration and opened up Canada to all comers, making flexible provisions for bringing in refugees.

In world affairs, Canada always weighed its own national interests and never got involved in things for ideological reasons. This kept Canada out of Vietnam’s wars.

The two Conservative prime ministers who held power for substantial periods of time in this period, Diefenbaker (6 years), and Mulroney (8 years), did not have any grand plans to re-shape Canada’s national identity in a Conservative image. They ran their own personal agendas within the context of Canada as it was and had no opportunities to shape the way Canada was responding to Vietnam.

Taking a short-term view of the period where the critical decisions about admitting Vietnamese to Canada were made, between 1975 and 1980.

The prime minister for all but 9 months of those years was Pierre Elliott Trudeau. Although he made the critical decisions, he made them all in the context of the events of the longer period of time as described above. Under his direction, all Vietnamese were admitted on a non-partisan basis from all over Vietnam and none specifically because they had been fighting communists (i.e. none for ideological or political reasons).

Throughout these periods there was a Conservative opposition that occasionally raised questions about how these events were being handled, but Canadians in general were agreeing with the Liberal perspective on things so the Conservatives never got to set the agenda.

In that period there was one Conservative prime minister, Joe Clark, who might have changed the course of events that shaped Canada’s Vietnamese community. He was under some pressure to move his party away from the center to the right. He only managed to hold on to his position for 9 months in 1979-80. That gave him time to stop Trudeau’s non-partisan refugee programs temporarily, but the did not get time to start anything to replace it. Trudeau got re-elected in part by promising to restore his programs that Clark has cut. Canadians did not want the Conservative’s ideology affecting these matters.^[3]

All of this was fortuitous for the Vietnamese who came to Canada. But is also exposed Canada’s Vietnamese community to a political risk. Everything had been determined by the prevailing centrist perspective on Canada's place in the world. What if politics in Canada took a turn to the right?

The Liberal prime ministers that followed, Jean Chretien and Paul Martin both held the line. But when Stephen Harper was elected in 2006 the risks burst out into the open, at great cost to Canada’s Vietnamese. No one would have imagined that someone coming along almost 30 year after the Vietnamese started coming to Canada could affect their fortunes, but it did.

Harper changed everything by re-writing those 30 years of history.

Through all the post-war years 1945- 2006, both of the main political parties that held power in that period governed from the center. There were other parties on the left (NDP) and on the right (Reform/Canadian Alliance/Bloc Quebecois) that took some of the votes, but they were never able to gain power. This meant that the Canada’s national identity as it was formed during these years was never under threat.

Things began to change in 2003 when the centrist Progressive Conservative party merged with the right-wing Canadian Alliance party and became the Conservative Party of Canada. Stephen Harper, whose background was entirely on the right-wing side of the allied parties, became their first elected leader.

Harper was a great admirer of Republican politics in the US and he hired that party’s experts in negative political campaigning. This was something new to Canada at the time. With that help, Stephen Harper became Canada’s prime minister in 2006.

He came to power with some very set and very radical ideas about Canada’s national identity, and the role that an historical narrative can play in setting that identity. He abhorred everything that we itemized above as the accomplishments of Canada’s post-war prime ministers. The list we made of their accomplishments was Harper’s to do list – he planned to get rid of all of it.

It did not matter that Canadians would not necessarily agree with him. Harper was a one-man show and he used expert propaganda techniques to conceal his agenda from Canadians. Harper had enough supporters who agreed with his agenda that would work with him on it. The Harper government provided much funding to conservative groups who could help with his agenda.

Canada’s response to the Vietnam war was a particular problem for Harper. He believed that Canada should have a strong military that fought for Canada’s “principles”. By “principles”, he meant ideological beliefs, one of which was a virulent anti-communism in the American paranoid style. From that perspective, he re-framed Canada’s history with respect to Vietnam to create a new national identity for Canada. Canada became a “warrior nation” who fought communists alongside the US.

Harper’s thoughts about Vietnam combined with some of his other thoughts about Canadian identity, particularly with regard to Canada’s British origins, led to serious problems for Canada’s Vietnamese community. Harper made many changes to Canada’s tradition of open immigration, receptiveness to refugees, and multiculturalism. He was not afraid to marginalize groups that he thought were not “Canadian enough”, most famously Muslims.

Having adopted the chauvinistic American perceptions on the Vietnam war, he inevitably adopted a corollary of that perception: that anyone who did not fight with Saigon, and who did not support Saigon as a legitimate government, was a communist.^[4] This effectively redefined most of Canada’s Vietnamese as “communists”.

Harper hid most of these thoughts from Canadians, but he made sure that messages were delivered specifically to Vietnamese Canadians so that they understood what Harper required of them. He needed all to identify as nationals of the Saigon regime.

Harper’s campaign against the Vietnamese in Canada was extensive, extending over at least seven years and culminating in parliamentary bill S-219. We’ve devoted a whole major section of this web site to that.^[5]

The Vietnamese, for their part, were somewhat ambivalent to the whole thing, in part because Harper made it look like an anti-communist initiative. The community also contains a small political faction who strongly supports Harper's actions. The Vietnamese who suffered most from Harpers work are the younger born-in-Canada generations who now find that they are unable to openly express their cultural origins in Canada.