2008-04-15
In 2007 and 2008, Jason Kenney was Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity. It is his responsibility for Canadian Identity that is relevant in the events described below, for what he was doing was working on a fix to Canada's national identity. His role in Multiculturalism and his other role as Harper's outreach to ethnic communities provided cover for what he was doing.
On day one of the government's campaign to marginalize the boat people as part of a fix to Canada's national identity, Jason Kenney posted this on his web site:
"Jason Kenney, Secretary of State for Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity, celebrates the Vietnamese Heritage and Freedom Flag as the symbol of the Vietnamese community in Canada.
"Our government recognises the flag as an important symbol of the Vietnamese-Canadian community's independence, strength, and belief in national unity", said Jason Kenney, "and attempts to disparage it are a deeply troubling attack on one of Canada's
ethnic communities and on the principles of multiculturalism."
This post was accompanied by a photograph of Kenney with the national flag of the Saigon regime so that we would know which flag he was talking about. The photo showed him posed to make an official announcement of international importance, with the Canadian national flag and the Saigon national flag mounted together in a nation-to-nation pose beside the lectern.
The text of the announcement appears to conflict with that image. In the announcement, he seems to be pandering to an ethnic community with a cultural message. In the image he is making an international affairs announcement.
There is no conflict. It's a classic example of a dog whistle, one that will used throughout the campaign and is still alive and well today in 2021. The Vietnamese community receives the entire message as instructions from the government. Other Canadians, especially Canadian politicians, read the text at face value and interpret both as cultural pandering.
Canadians of Vietnamese origin would instantly recognize the demand that they identify with the Saigon flag because they had already been hearing (and ignoring) this demand for over 30 years. What is new here is that this demand is now coming from the government of Canada instead of the ARVN's political faction.[3]
The phrase "deeply troubling attack on one of Canada's ethnic communities" is particularly troubling when put into that context. The ARVN accuses anyone who does not acknowledge their flag as a "communist", so this phrase is positioning such people as continuing enemies from the Vietnam war. Kenney is bringing the Vietnam war to Caanda.
This initial message is fundamental to the whole program, and it is often references by people when they need to remind former boat people to get in line, or when they want to inform other levels of government what the policy is on the flag. In addition, our Fact checking bill S-219 explains how the same message was all packaged up to be formally passed into law by parliament.
Later in the chronology you will see how this initial announcement is used as a reference point and how the obligation to conform is spelled out more explicitly.
Three weeks later, Kenney made a speech in Toronto that revealed the reason for this threat: Canada was about to declare an alliance with the former Saigon military regime.
(Kenney, 2008)[115]
2008-05-04
On this day the former Saigon military "borrowed" the Old City Hall Cenotaph[5] in Toronto to hold one of their annual military memorial events to mark the fall of Saigon. (RVN Veterans, 2008).[414]
Jason Kenney's message of April 15, above, implies a re-framing of the Vietnam war. Today, Kenney made that re-framing explicit and he let us know that he is seriously committed to the ideology behind it.
Jason Kenney spoke at the event:
The ARVN only lost the Vietnam war because of communist propaganda in the left-wing media, anti-war protesters, and Jane Fonda. (Paraphrased).
He actually read out the ARVN's entire modern political manifesto, which positions the ARVN as the victims of the Vietnam war, not the villains that history has painted them to be.
Here Kenney begins the process of publicly revealing his government's close partnership with the ARVN as the leaders of the Vietnamese community in Canada. The concept of the Canadian Vietnamese community as a community of victims of war is a central theme of the program.
One of the things that is very well known about the ARVN political manifesto is their open hostility to people of Vietnamese origin who do not identify with them. This includes most of the boat people. In the US community the boat people are a small minority, so no government help is needed. They are the entire community in Canada. Kenney's April 15 announcement (above) was to let the community know that the government is adopting this part of the manifesto.
Note that the press release and the speaking notes that were published by the government for Kenney do not reflect what he actually said. This follows the practice of dual messaging described above with the April 15 announcement. The published material makes it look like an ethnic or cultural event. The visuals and Kenney's speech, which is what the Vietnamese see, show that it is an unusually strong partisan statement about the Vietnam war. Canada is already an ally of the Saigon military regime, long before bill S-219 got to parliament to make it official.
(Kenney, 2008)[156]
Some background
To fully understand how radical these two announcements by Jason Kenney are, you need to be familiar with this history: Canada's history in SE Asia. Kenney's intent is to discredit this history as "communist propaganda" and take Canada down a new path.
The above announcements gave the ARVN a measure of credibility as they carried Kenney's messages to the Vietnamese community. The ARVN has a network of community organizations, the VCF prominent among them, that delivered the message. Many direct references were made to Kenny's announcements. Some instances are included in the chronology below to illustrate.
In the following chronology when we make references to "the revisionist project", we are referring to the changes to Canada's history that Kenney announced here: that Canada is an ally of the Saigon regime, and that Canada's involvement in the boat people crisis was a politically-motivated effort to rescue the Saigon leadership, and therefore the origin of Canada's Vietnamese community lies in the Vietnam war and specifically in Saigon's ruling elite. The community is, from here on, painted as victims of war.
In case it isn't obvious already, let us point it out explicitly: Jason Kenney and the Government of Canada are not pandering to the Vietnamese community. They are exploiting it.
2008-07-30
"... the Vietnamese Community in the Montreal region asks you to grant us a privilege, one to hoist our flag at City Hall. This flag is officially recognized by the Federal Government since April 2008 as representative of Canadians of Vietnamese origin." -- Petition to City of Brossard. (translated from French).
(VCF, date unconfirmed)[2]
"...Vietnamese Canadians, are former political refugees who fled the Communist regime in Vietnam after South Vietnam was taken over by Communist troops from North Vietnam in 1975. Therefore, allowing the Vietnamese Communist regime to spread its propaganda at the festival would be an utmost affront to them and would bring back the painful memories of their sufferings under the Vietnamese Communist regime." -- Press release aimed at a cultural event organizer who was refusing to politicize the event with the yellow flag.
(VCF, 2008).[174]
Both of these messages are representative examples of how Kenney's original messages are carried out to have the desired effect on the Vietnamese community. It is essential to Kenney's plan that all Vietnamese Canadians identify as nationals of the Saigon regime and so he will suppress anyone who does not. His origin story will be exposed as a fake if Vietnamese people are putting on cultural events without the yellow flag. In these examples, he (via ARVN spokespersons) is engaging other levels of government to join his plan.
The scary "affront" in the second is to see someone in the community providing evidence that the Vietnamese Canadians do not habitually identify as nationals of the Saigon regime. Such people are always framed as "communists", which is a serious (and paranoid) affront in a community that consists entirely of escapees from communism. This harks back to the way the US used McCarthyism to frame the Vietnam war in the 1950's.
The second one also illustrates the tactic of borrowing the traumas suffered by the boat people and giving them to the victims of the fall of Saigon and claiming that it is triggered by seeing people who are not identifying as nationals of Saigon. This was likely a significant factor in the ultimate approval of bill S-219.
The program depends heavily on the story of trauma. A little analysis show it to be full of holes. The trauma suffered by the victims of the fall of Saigon was from their loss of wealth and power. Most did not experience communist rule because they left before it took hold. The trauma suffered by the boat people was from their journey, not from their exposure to communism. In Canada they would more likely be traumatized by the sight of a yellow flag, not the absence of the flag, they having been led to believe that they were leaving the war behind when they came to Canada.
All of these themes run throughout all government communications aimed at the Vietnamese community right up to the present. It illustrates very clearly the meaning of Jason Kenney's pronouncements. There are many more examples in Canada suppresses cultural expression.
2008-09
First group of Kenney's own "victims of the Fall of Saigon" admitted from SE Asia.
When Kenney became Minister of Immigration, he started admitting more Vietnamese "refugees", only this time he made sure that the admission criteria were political. The people admitted had to be connected somehow to the fall of Saigon. This was the first of several groups or individuals admitted over the coming years.
Perhaps Kenney was hoping that by applying political criteria now, people might assume that this is how it was done in the 1979-1996 program.
These were people that the UNHCR had rejected as refugees and were lined up for repatriation to Vietnam around 1995, but they chose to remain where they were despite having to become stateless.
Kenney detailed his efforts as an aside in a Senate hearing on another topic.(Canada Senate, 2014)[358] Some of the other groups appear later in this chronology with newspaper clippings that show them identifying with the Saigon regime.
There was gossip in the community that these people were fakes who had just bought the ID that Kenney wanted. A CBC investigation seemed to bear that out. (Szeto, Loiero, & Common, 2019).[430]
2008-12-04
The Canadian Forces was remarkably successful at resisting all of Harper's attempts to get them involved in politicizing the Vietnam war and the refugees. Harper put on several Vietnam-related events with military themes, but no Canadian military ever showed up. (He got the Toronto police to show up at one, and some Korean war veterans at another. There is no such thing as a Canadian Forces Vietnam war veteran).
It is therefore surprising that their public web pages have been politicized. Perhaps they are maintained by civilian bureaucrats.
"After the fall of Saigon in 1975,
significant numbers of Indochinese (predominately Vietnamese, Laotian and Kampuchean) citizens fled the region for fear of retribution under the new
Communist regime."
Introduction to the Canadian Forces web page about the 1978 boat people crisis, dated 2008-12-04 (CF, 2008)[188]
There is a better-documented case of a government web page being updated in 2009, and there are many government web pages that were politicized when they first appeared. Details follow as they occurred.