An Act respecting a national day of commemoration of the exodus of Vietnamese refugees and their acceptance in Canada after the fall of Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War.

Two things are made evident in this preamble:

• Firstly, the bill creates an annual national day commemoration.

• Secondly, the commemoration celebrates the arrival of the former Saigon ruling elite in Canada.

Some important things that are NOT evident in this preamble:

• The former Saigon ruling elite are NOT the boat people.^[1]

• The commemoration that we are adopting is an existing military memorial to the Saigon military regime -- a partisan statement about the Vietnam war.

• The commemoration as it is now performed is a formal flag recognition ceremony, where in Canada formally recognizes the defunct Saigon regime as a legitimate nation and military ally. That behavior is justified by the content of the bill.

When the bill was presented in parliament this preamble was framed as an origin story for Canada's Vietnamese community. In other words, the boat people were made to disappear and were replaced with the Saigon ruling elite. As our chronology explains, the disappearance of the boat people was handled rather aggressively and so the boat people perceive this bill and the resulting commemoration as an expression of hostility toward them.

Let us emphasize that this conflict is in no way the responsibility of the Vietnamese community to resolve. Canada's government chose to abrogate its moral responsibility to the boat people and only the government can fix it.

When the bill was debated in parliament its partisan, divisive, and history-revising nature was understood, and some of the former boat people showed up to protest. The decision to marginalize the boat people and abandon Canada's moral obligations was a conscious decision of Canada's parliament, not a misunderstanding.

The best way to understand this bill is to look at it as consisting of three parts, and to look at those parts in the reverse order in which they are presented:

• The third part explicitly defines the nature of the commemoration as an homage to the Saigon military. There is added contextualization to make you think that Canada's Vietnamese community already does this or would be agreeable to it. (Clauses 7 and 8)

• The second part contains a lot of references to the boat people and to the UNHCR. There is no connection between those and the proposed commemoration because the boat people crisis was a non-partisan undertaking unrelated to the war. The boat people crisis is, however, the "origin story" of Canada's Vietnamese community. That sets the bill up to be sold as a cultural statement rather than a partisan statement about the Vietnam war. The UNHCR is here for contextualization and appeal to authority that leads you to think that there is a connection. It also contains a lot of information designed to cloud the issue with emotion that was later used to justify passage of the bill, even though it was irrelevant to the issue. In short, this section steals the suffering of the boat people to give it to the defeated Saigon military. (Clauses 3 to 6)

• The first part, probably the most important for the author of the bill, contains a completely false re-framing of the Vietnam war, declaring the Saigon regime to be a legitimate nation and, with some more contextualization, that Canada was an ally. This justifies the part of the annual commemoration where Canada formally recognizes the national flag of the Saigon regime and politicians go into parliament wearing the flag draped over their shoulders. (Clauses 1 and 2)

The bill would make an excellent case study in how to write propaganda that leads people to false assumptions and conclusions. Among the techniques used:

• Appeal to authority. The UNHCR is mentioned in 4 of the 8 clauses even though the UNHCR had nothing to do with most of the things attributed to them in those clauses and nothing to do with the fall of Saigon.

• Juxtaposition (Contextualization). Clauses that are true or partly true are placed in a context that will lead people to make assumptions that are not true. The important assumption people are being led to is that this bill is an homage to the boat people. Most clauses use this tactic but entire clauses 3-6 are good examples of this tactic.

• Omission. True statements are made with gaps in them and people are led to fill in the gaps with false information from the context. This tactic is present in almost every clause, but it is particularly important in clause 7.

• Misdirection. The bill accomplishes its stated purpose of establishing Journey to Freedom Day, but it also accomplishes several other purposes, most importantly, re-framing the Vietnam war and the various international agreements around it to recognize the Saigon regime as a legitimate nation.

• Outright false statements of history. Yes, the bill does that, too. Clauses 1, 2 and 3 are good examples of straightforward falsehoods.

Whereas the Canadian Forces were involved in the Vietnam War with supervisory operations to support the aim of establishing peace and ending the Vietnam War by assisting in the enforcement of the Paris Peace Accords of 1973;

Never before have so many falsehoods been crammed into 37 words.

By no stretch of the imagination were “Canadian Forces involved in the Vietnam War”.^[3] The few Canadian military people that were there were working for the External Affairs department, not the Canadian Forces.

The Paris accord was not a peace agreement to end the Vietnam war. Canada's role was not one of "enforcement". The purpose of the Paris Accord was to allow the American military to depart. The war was expected to continue without the Americans, and they left behind much of their equipment to that end. If Canada had been "enforcing" the departure of the Americans, that would have been a benefit to the communist side.

During the 6 months that Canada was there after the Paris accord, Canada had a ship waiting off shore that would quickly extract the Canadian contingent if the war flared up again before the Americans got out. (Canadian Forces, 2016).^[185] Peace was not an expected outcome.

Since this clause is factually total nonsense, we have to assume that the purpose of putting it here was to present the phrase "Canadian Forces were involved in the Vietnam war", in hopes that people would misread it as Canada was involved with the Saigon side. That would give reason for Canada to support war refugees as claimed in a later clause.

Whereas on April 30, 1975, despite the Paris Peace Accords, the military forces of the People’s Army of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front invaded South Vietnam, which led to the fall of Saigon, the end of the Vietnam War and the establishment of the Socialist Republic of Vietnam Government;

This is a key clause because it recognizes the Saigon regime as a legitimate nation -- something that the Paris accord did NOT do.

There is no "despite" the Paris accord; this was the fully expected outcome of the accord. The Americans left Saigon to its entirely predictable fate. The Paris accord explicitly recognized Vietnam as a single nation, which effectively recognized the Vietnam war as the civil war that it was.

The purpose of this clause is to read into Canadian policy and law a statement that the Saigon regime was a legitimate government overthrown by outside invaders. It implies that the present government of Vietnam is not legitimate. This is a concept that no other nation in the world ever subscribed to, not even the US.

This legitimizing of the Saigon regime is one of the things that makes the bill a statement of foreign policy and the reason Vietnam officially protested the bill. By taking a side in what was fundamentally a civil war, Canada is dividing its own Vietnamese community.

It’s true that Saigon fell in 1975. This just leaves out around 100 years of history that would shed a completely different light on what happened in 1975. In short, the fall of Saigon marked the end of a 100-year fight to rid Vietnam of the mandarinate and colonialism.

Oddly, the National Liberation Front (NLF) mentioned in this clause was not a foreign invader, but was the organized indigenous resistance to the Saigon military regime. More support for the argument that it was a civil war.

Whereas the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has reported that these events and the conditions faced by individuals in Vietnam, including deteriorating living conditions and human rights abuses, contributed to the exodus of approximately 840,000 Vietnamese people, who were referred to at the time as “Vietnamese boat people”, to neighbouring countries in the ensuing years;

The UNHCR said no such thing. This is an attempt to tie UNHCR and the boat people to the Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon. It is a completely false relationship. The fall of Saigon was left to the US as their problem to solve.

Tying the boat people to the fall of Saigon is critical to the political agenda behind this bill, and several clauses are devoted to the attempt. For this purpose it is not enough that they were "fleeing communism"; they had to be fleeing the fall of Saigon because that would make them all nationals of the Saigon regime. The "problem" was that most arrivals in Canada probably came from the north.

The UNHCR had nothing to say about the Vietnam war and its outcome, apart from the humanitarian issue caused by the huge number of internally displaced persons inside Vietnam, in both the north and the south. UNHCR and Canada offered assistance to Vietnam on that, and a couple of years later Canada provided massive food aid to Vietnam.

The humanitarian crisis that Canada and the UNHCR responded to as the "boat people" crisis started in 1978 and was prompted by events in Hong Kong, the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, and Indonesia. The boat people were leaving from all over Vietnam (the UNHCR and others actually said that "most" came from the north) because the Vietnam government was allowing or even encouraging them to leave and those countries were threatening to push them out to sea. The crisis ended around 20 years later when Vietnam agreed to allow repatriations.

The UNHCR never made any finding of human rights abuses in Vietnam and in fact in the end decided that much of the exodus was for economic reasons and in the final stages of the crisis 80% of the boat people were being denied status as refugees because of this.

Whereas the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has reported that at least 250,000 Vietnamese people lost their lives at sea during the exodus of the Vietnamese people for reasons that included drowning, illness, starvation and violence from kidnapping or piracy;

This clause does not contain anything that connects it to the subject of the bill -- a memorial to the fall of Saigon. It is left entirely to the reader to make assumptions. This is a propaganda technique called "contextualization".

This may be a true statement, but the people who lost their lives were not fleeing the fall of Saigon. The actual number is controversial. See clause 3 regarding the UNHCR involvement.

This clause is here purely to evoke a sympathetic reaction and cloud the issue with emotion. There was actually not a lot of loss of life associated with the fall of Saigon. Saigon collapsed without a final battle, and the US military whisked the Saigon elite away.

It's like putting a dare in front of the MP's who have to decide on this bill: "I dare you to reject this bill"

Whereas the sponsorship refugee program in Canada, assisted by the efforts of Canadian families, Canadian charities, religious groups and non-governmental organizations, contributed to Canada accepting more than 60,000 Vietnamese refugees, among whom it has been estimated that 34,000 were privately sponsored and 26,000 were assisted by the Canadian government;

This statement makes no connection to the fall of Saigon or its former military leaders to whom this memorial is dedicated. This is more "contextualization".

In this bill, we are being asked to make an homage to the refugees who were victims of the fall of Saigon. That is not the refugees referred to here. Canada admitted no one solely because they were a victim of the fall of Saigon.

Canada's assistance to the refugees began in 1979 and it was specifically based on the condition that it was not related to the Vietnam war and the fall of Saigon. It was carried out on a non-partisan basis -- no one was asked what their role had been in the Vietnam war and the refugees came from all over Vietnam.

Canada actually admitted 165,000 Vietnamese refugees over the full 18-year course of the crisis. There was no break or modification to the substance of the program that would justify breaking out 60,000 refugees as a distinct group.^[4]

What changed after the first 60,000 is the pace of the program. The first 60,000 were admitted at an unusually rapid pace -- not because of a war, but because the purpose was to empty the refugees camps that had been filling up since mid-1978. As the pressure on the camps was relieved the pace of admissions slowed. Nothing else changed.

Like clauses 3 and 4, this is here to evoke a sympathetic reaction and cloud the issue with emotion. This clause also sets the stage for "selling" the commemoration event as the "origin story" of Canada's Vietnamese community. That in turn sets it up as a cultural event, rather than a partisan statement about the Vietnam war. That's how the bill got passed.

Whereas the major and sustained contribution by the people of Canada to the cause of refugees was recognized by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees when it awarded the Nansen Refugee Award to the “People of Canada” in 1986;

This clause is here to reinforce the earlier assertion that the UNHCR recognized the fall of Saigon as a refugee crisis. It did not.

The medal was not awarded for Canada's response to the fall of Saigon. Canada was not there. Neither was the UNHCR.

This clause therefore has nothing to do with the people to whom the commemoration is dedicated. It'a a gratuitous appeal to authority, another opportunity to imply that UNHCR had something to do with the fall of Saigon by putting it into a bill whose purpose is to establish a memorial to the fall of Saigon. More contextualization.

And whereas April 30 is referred to by many members of the community of displaced Vietnamese people and their families in Canada as “Black April Day, or alternatively as “Journey to Freedom Day”, and is, therefore, an appropriate day to designate as a day to remember and commemorate the lives lost and the suffering experienced during the exodus of Vietnamese people, the acceptance of Vietnamese refugees in Canada, the gratitude of Vietnamese people to the Canadian people and the Government of Canada for accepting them, and the contributions of Vietnamese-Canadian people — whose population is now approximately 300,000 — to Canadian society;

Read carefully: "many members" is a vague quantifier. It's not 300,000, it's not 165,000, and it's not 60,000 -- all numbers mentioned in this bill.

Read carefully: this clause does not mention the boat people. Those are not the "refugees" referred to here. Here we are talking about the refugees that the preamble refers to -- the "victims of the fall of Saigon".

This clause serves two distinct purposes:

• To establish that the commemoration being adopted as a national day in Canada is an existing event. In that respect the clause is accurate and essential. It establishes that the event is a partisan statement about the Vietnam war conducted by the Saigon military -- an outright statement of hostility toward the boat people.

• To imply, with vague numbers and emotional obfuscation, that the former boat people and all of the Vietnamese community observe, or ought to observe, that existing commemoration. They do not and will never do so and Canada should not expect them to do so because it is a partisan political event. The Vietnamese community will exercise its right of free speech.

This is an attempt to use the government of Canada to force the boat people to recognize the Saigon military regime. In that respect, the bill and the memorial day are hostile toward the boat people.

The former boat people know what's up here, they don't even have to read the bill. The designation of the event as a means of expressing gratitude to Canada is intended to intimidate the Vietnamese people into recognizing the event and by implication recognizing the Saigon military as their leaders. This is a culmination of a long process where this message of intimidation was explicitly and repeatedly delivered to the Vietnamese community over the seven years prior to tabling of the bill. Journey to Freedom Day now institutionalizes that intimidation.^[5]

In no one's imagination would 300,000 Vietnamese Canadians willingly make a political statement in favour the Saigon military regime, even with all the emotional language put around it in this bill.

Now, therefore, Her Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate and House of Commons of Canada, enacts as follows:

1. This Act may be cited as the Journey to Freedom Day Act.

2. Throughout Canada, in each and every year, the thirtieth day of April shall be known as “Journey to Freedom Day”.

3. For greater certainty, Journey to Freedom Day is not a legal holiday or a non-juridical day.

The boat people had gotten rid of the military dictatorship long before they left Vietnam. They certainly did not expect to come across it in Canada.