Asian Heritage Month

This poster and the videos are examples of the government's campaign to exploit and marginalize Vietnamese Canadians. They are prominently featured on the government's heritage web site and their production was funded by government.

These items have the appearance of being homages to the Vietnamese boat people who came to Canada.
That is a deception. They tell a story that is not supported by historical fact. They are political propaganda about the Vietnam war.
The message is hostile toward Canadians of Vietnamese origin because, coming from government, it is understood as direction to adopt certain chauvinistic political beliefs about the Vietnam war in order to be accepted as a Canadian.
As few are inclined to adopt those political beliefs, it marginalizes Vietnamese Canadians and excludes them from government-supported cultural, heritage, and social programs.

Asian Heritage Month

May is Asian Heritage Month in Canada. Canada uses the event to send more hostile messages to Canadians of Vietnamese origin.

Canada has declared the month of May to be "Asian Heritage Month" in Canada. Part of the declaration says:

Diversity represents one of Canada’s greatest strengths, and we strive to ensure that all Canadians have the opportunity to reach their full potential and participate in Canada’s civic life.

The treatment given to Canada's Vietnamese in this event ensures that they do not get to express their diversity and that they do not fully participate in Canada's civic life, unless they agree to accept certain partisan political statements about the Vietnam war that were not presented as conditions to their original entry into Canada.

Canada declares in May of every year that the cultural heritage of Canada's Vietnamese community is to play a role as "victims of the fall of Saigon".

This declaration is a political propaganda piece that says, among other things, "everything would have been fine in Vietnam if only the Saigon regime had been left alone to quietly rule". It is a false framing of the Vietnam war that is intended to humanize the Saigon military regime.

In order to victimize the Vietnamese for political propaganda purposes, this declaration is based on a completely false history of the Vietnamese in Canada. The fall of Saigon was not what caused Canada to admit the boat people.

It completely marginalizes the true boat people by making them disappear from Canadian history. It excludes them from civic life in Canada. It robs the Vietnamese in Canada of their cultural heritage.

The poster and video containing this propaganda first appeared on the government Heritage web site in 2015. The video, with a second very similar one added later, have appeared as a prominent feature every year until now (2020). In 2015 there was also a poster, but that was replaced some time before 2020.

This is the link to the current page. Note that the content changes every year, and the old content is not preserved https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/campaigns/asian-heritage-month.html. Other links to various archives are contained in the material below.

The poster

Posted on a government web site in 2015 with prints offered to the public.

The false history on this poster has a specific purpose: to make you believe that the boat people were victims of the fall of Saigon, that is to say, that they were all on the Saigon side in the Vietnam war.

For those who know that this is not the case, such as the 160,000 former boat people, this false history serves to de-legitimize them as Canadians.

This is supposed to explain why the Canadian government today honours the former boat people with a partisan memorial to the collapse of the Saigon military dictatorship and recognizes the Saigon regime as a legitimate government.

The fall of Saigon did not mark the beginning of a refugee crisis and especially not what is known in Canada as the boat people crisis. Canada was not at the fall of Saigon -- the escapees from Saigon were picked up by the US military and went to the US.

The story is an outright theft of the boat people's history in order to provide an historical amnesty to the former Saigon military leaders (ARVN).

To characterize the boat people as a homogeneous group of victims of the fall of Saigon is offensive and politically exploitive. The boat people were admitted to Canada on a non-partisan basis from all over Vietnam.

Consider these points about the poster's content:

Poster text	Fact check
On April 30, 1975 the fall of the city of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a major refugee crisis. Millions of Vietnamese people fled their homes looking for refuge and freedom. Many tried escaping across the South China Sea in small leaky boats.	Tying a million refugees to the fall of Saigon is a political assertion attempting to legitimize the Saigon regime. It has the effect of "de-legitimizing" the boat people because their departure was not a response to the fall of Saigon and because they came from all over Vietnam. The 1975 "refugee crisis", if you want to call it that, is not the one that Canada and the UNHCR responded to. The "1975 crisis" was substantially over within weeks, hardly time for "millions" to escape. The tag line about small leaky boats is an ambiguous juxtaposition designed to make you think that we are talking about the boat people crisis here.
Canada recognized the plight of the Vietnamese people trying to escape and immediately accepted thousands of refugees, which served as a springboard for the resettlement of the "boat people", as they became known.	Canada did not accept any refugees because they were escaping the fall of Saigon in 1975. The "springboard" is an odd semantic device attempting to connect the fall of Saigon to the boat people crisis four years later.
In July 1979 the Government of Canada under Prime Minister Joe Clark announced that it would admit 50,000 refugees to Canada. By the end of 1980, Canada accepted more than 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, many sponsored by ordinary Canadians and private organizations.	What happened in 1979 was completely unrelated to what happened in 1975. Canada and the UNHCR responded in 1979 precisely because the events in 1979 had nothing to do with the Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon. People started leaving in mid-1978 because that is when the Vietnam government started allowing them to leave. It grew to a crisis by mid-1979. The numbers quoted here are incomplete and misleading -- the actual numbers are much larger. These numbers appear to be an attempt to give undue credit to the Joe Clark government, but they give way more credit than is due to that government.^[2]
In 1986, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees awarded the Nansen Medal to Canada in recognition of the major contribution that the people of Canada have made to the cause of refugees. It was the first time that the medal was awarded to a group and the only time to an entire nation.	The text of this is literally true, but its placement on this poster is entirely misleading. The medal was in recognition of many of Canada's refugee initiatives, but a response to the fall of Saigon was not one of them because neither Canada nor the UNHCR responded to the fall of Saigon.^[5] This is called an "appeal to authority" fallacy.
The boat photographs	The fine print credits the photographs to UNHCR and as such, they would have been taken in 1979 or later. The lower photo of some boat people was taken in Hong Kong in 1981 by a UNHCR staffer.

The organization named on the bottom of the poster is a group that defines "Vietnamese" as "a Republic of Vietnam national". Among their activities is to teach young school children to sing the national anthem of the defunct Saigon regime.

The link to the poster has been removed from the government web site but you can still see the full poster here.

The first video

Posted on a government web site in 2015 and still highlighted as Asian Heritage.

The purpose of the video is to conflate the fall of Saigon with the boat people crisis and thus stereotype the boat people now in Canada as victims of the fall of Saigon. That implies that the boat people were all on the side of the Saigon regime in the Vietnam war. For the actual boat people, who know that this was not the case, it is a message to them that they are not legitimate as Canadians.

That in turn gives Canada an excuse to recognize the defunct Saigon regime as a legitimate government by defining it as a "domestic" issue.

The boat people actually were admitted to Canada on a non-partisan basis from all over Vietnam in an event that had nothing to do with the war or the fall of Saigon. To characterize the boat people as a homogeneous group of victims of the fall of Saigon is offensive and politically exploitative.

A transcript was posted with the video.

Transcript	Fact check
On April 30, 1975, the fall of the city of Saigon marked the end of the Vietnam War and the start of a refugee crisis.	Some refer to the event as a refugee crisis, but neither Canada nor UNHCR did. Canada did not respond to this event.
Millions of Vietnamese fled their homes seeking refuge and freedom, with many trying to escape across the South China Sea in small leaky boats.	This is a description of the boat people crisis of 1979-1997, not of the events in 1975. This was not a response the fall of Saigon, obviously.
Canada recognized the plight of the Vietnamese and immediately accepted thousands of refugees.	As this is a reference to the events of 1975, it is not true. Canada accepted no refugees from Vietnam in response to the fall of Saigon. If this were a reference to the 1979 boat people crisis, it would be true.
In July 1979, the Government of Canada, under Prime Minister Joe Clark, announced that it would admit 50,000 “boat people”.	True. This was a combined total for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos -- three different crisis that are commonly lumped together as "the boat people crisis". The reference to Joe Clark signals a political agenda. The response to the boat people crisis did not belong to Joe Clark.^[2] This commitment was made at an international UNHCR conference that recognized the boat people crisis as a refugee crisis specifically because it was NOT related to the war or the fall of Saigon.
By the end of 1980, Canada had accepted more than 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, many of whom were sponsored by Canadian families and private organizations.	True if you include Cambodia and Laos and only the years 1979-1980. Canada admitted 165,000 boat people from Vietnam between 1979 and 1997. The cutoff at 60,000 comes from the author's lack of knowledge about the program.
For their contributions, the People of Canada were awarded the Nansen Medal by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in 1986. This marked the only time the medal has been awarded to an entire nation.	For their contributions to what? It was certainly not for a response to the fall of Saigon, and it was not exclusively for the boat people crisis. This is meant to imply that the UNHCR and Canada recognized the fall of Saigon as a refugee crisis, which neither did.^[5]

The second video

Currently posted on a government web site. This one is bilingual.

This video re-frames both the Vietnam war and the boat people crisis to humanize the Saigon military regime.

The boat people were admitted to Canada on a non-partisan basis from all over Vietnam in an event that had nothing to do with the war or the fall of Saigon.

A transcript was posted with the video. This is the preamble introducing the video on the web page and the text from the transcript:

Preamble and transcript	Fact check
Preamble:After the fall of Saigon in 1975, thousands of Indochinese were forced to flee. Hear from some of the Indochinese “boat people” who found safety in Canada.	This summarizes the political agenda in 27 words: conflate the evacuees from the fall of Saigon with the boat people. The political message here is "everything would have been fine in Vietnam is the Saigon regime had been left to rule" and "Canada was sympathetic to the plight of the failing Saigon rulers".
Narrator: 40 years ago, the fall of Saigon forced thousands of Vietnamese people to flee their homes. Many left in small boats, braving the South China Seas in the hopes of finding refuge.	Conflates the fall of Saigon with the boat people crisis in a heroic way. The two sentences describe different events, four years apart. The first group was transported by the US military.
Narrator: Over the following few years, Canada resettled 60,000 Indochinese “boat people,” most thanks to the generous support of private sponsors. It was a dramatic beginning for CIC’s Private Sponsorship of Refugees Program.	Both the sponsorship program and the boat people crisis started in 1979 and had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon. The 60,000 number just reflects the ignorance of the author whose only interest is in connecting it with the fall of Saigon - it serves no useful purpose to mis-state the actual number of 165,000.
Tuyet Lam: Having escaped from my country that we had no future, nothing, and sacrificed everything just to be here in search for freedom. To accept the number of refugees like every year and also increased the number of private sponsorships, I think these things that define Canada. And CIC is playing an important role in promoting these values.	We can't tell when this person left Vietnam, but if she is correct in crediting the boat people program, she was not a victim of the fall of Saigon. See last row, below.
Lan Ton (translated from French to English): Canada really did a lot for refugees. For Vietnamese refugees in particular, Canada received an award for its humanitarian efforts. All Canadians came together to welcome the Vietnamese people many years ago.	The point of this seems to be to mention the Nansen award, which had nothing to do with the fall of Saigon.
Tuyet Lam: Thank you, Canada. Lan Ton: Thank you, Canada.	In the "fall of Saigon" propaganda the refugees are always portrayed as grateful for receiving their "safety in Canada", but still loyal to the homeland - the Saigon regime.

BoatPeople.ca

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

Asian Heritage Month

Canada declares the fall of Saigon caused the boat people crisis

Asian Heritage Month

The poster

The first video

The second video