The boat people program was an international program coordinated by the UNHCR. It started in 1979 with a specific goal to empty the refugee camps in SE Asia. Since people were still arriving in the camps, it was not known how many refugees would be involved. Canada committed to the program and stayed with it until the goal was met.

It took until 1996 to achieve that goal and by then Canada had admitted 201,000 boat people.

Parameters of the program were adjusted from time to time by international agreement, in order to adjust to changing conditions. Nevertheless, there is no way to rationally divide the program up and come up with a sub-program that admitted 50,000 or 60,000 refugees. The objective of the program was never adjusted -- it was a single program.

The refugees themselves can be categorized in various ways: country of origin, ethnicity, which refugee camp the passed through, and means of travel (they did not all travel by boat). There is no category that produces the number 50,000.

There is one significant division in the program: of the 201,000 refugees, 162,000 came from Vietnam.

Further reading

The full story of the boat people program, with citations and bibliography, is laid out in the first half of the Community page.

Most people who divide the boat people program up at 50 or 60,000 are doing so for political reasons. They assert that the selection criteria for this first group was political and that they came from the south of Vietnam. For the remainder, they either deny that they existed, or if they acknowledge them, admit that the admission criteria for them was not political. Fact: the admission was non-political for the entire program and was never limited to the south.

A further change made for political reasons is to assert that the program started in 1975 instead of 1979. Political sources who do admit the delay usually avoid making up an explanation for the delay so that we will assume that it was still a response to the fall of Saigon. Fact: Canada did not respond to the fall of Saigon as a refugee crisis.

When Saigon fell in 1975, Canada responded by agreeing to admit family members of Canadians, wherever they were. Except for a brief interval in 1979, this commitment held indefinitely. Canada refused to respond to the event as a political issue because that was held to be a US problem. From 1975 to 1977 about 5,000 Vietnamese were admitted to Canada with no reference to their political background.

The ethnic Chinese exodus from Vietnam began in mid-1978. The world took notice on the basis that it was not an exodus of the Saigon's ruling elite. Canada brought it to the attention of Canadians by responding to the Hai Hong incident at the end of 1978. Canada then cooperated with UNHCR to formulate a world response to the crisis and to prepare Canada's response.

In the middle this, Canada had an election and the Trudeau Liberal government was replaced with the Clarke Conservative government. In the first months of his mandate, Clark went off to Geneva and told UNHCR that Canada would admit 50,000 refugees, all the preparations for this having already been made by the Trudeau government. That number included refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The announcement was designed to attract attention in part to encourage other countries to join the program. No one believed that Canada would sustain that rate of admission year after year.

When Clark found out that the UNHCR program was not targeting Saigon's ruling elite he defunded the program. The commitment of 50,000 was not fulfilled. This is why some revisionists stick to this number today -- because it was made in the belief that it was a response to the fall of Saigon and the revisionists want to pretend that this number was admitted in response to the fall of Saigon.

Nine months after Clark was elected there was another election and Trudeau was returned to power. In the election campaign Trudeau made another splashy announcement to fulfill the original commitment and added another 10,000 to it for 1980.^[3] This is where 60,000 comes from.

These numbers have nothing to do with how many were actually admitted. If you are using newspapers or press releases as your source, you will never find the final numbers.

As the project progressed, Canada decided to make annual commitments: incremental commitments toward fulfilling the project's objective because no one knew how long it was going to take to meet the objective of emptying the refugee camps. These commitments were made as a normal part of routine immigration planning and they were public information that not many people paid attention to. There is no record of a commitment to take in 201,000 because such a commitment was never made.

There are two traps that are catching unwary researchers into assuming that the program ended in 1980. If they had examined the program's goals they would not have made that mistake, but instead they went by the splashy commitments and reports that were made to attract attention and support to the program.

The first of the two traps is a major government progress report issued in 1982, the Axworthy report. The report covered 1979-80 in two parts. (Canada Immigration, 1982).^[11] (Canada Immigration 1982).^[10]

This report was interesting because it had a very detailed breakdown of who was being admitted to Canada.

In 1980, as it happened, the project was only about 25% complete. Too many people assumed that it was a final report because the report did not address "next steps". It was entirely a backward-looking report.

This report reported 60,000 boat people, total from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, to the end of 1980, 45,000 of those from Vietnam. That happens to agree with the splashy commitments made by governments in 1979 and 1980, so some researchers do not look any further.

When the government decided on next steps for after 1980, one of the things they decided was to "go underground". Canada had made a big splash at the beginning in part to set an example for other nations and to get them to help out. After that, Canada worried that there might be a backlash to an on-going project. Canada was determined to work with UNHCR to the agreed objective and decided that lowering the profile of the project was advisable.

Setting annual quotas became a quiet, routine procedure. There were no more splashy commitments made. You have to find the statistics reporting on what was actually done. The statistics are less satisfying than the detailed government report.

At this time Canada also largely wound up the sponsorship program, so the number of Canadians interfacing directly with the refugees fell dramatically, although family sponsorships continued.

The second trap was set by Canada's publishing industry.

There was very strong public interest in the boat people project in the first few years. The government had revved up the interest and made that splashy commitment to admit 50,000. The new idea of private sponsorships had also needed supporters and the government got them.

This meant that books could be sold and many were written between 1980 and 1982. Today these books are critical historical resources because they tell the story as it was understood then, not the way the revisionists want you to understand it today.

The problem is the project was only just starting at that time. After that it went underground and nothing else was written. Too many people assumed that there was no more project.

If you want to find the rest of the story you have to go to books published outside of Canada and at later date. In most cases, it's hard to find details that relate specifically to Canada. You also have to look in contemporary government sources like routine annual reports. It's hard work.^[4]

Both of these factors also lead researchers to conclude that the program ended in 1980. There is one way to find out this is wrong:

Pick anyone who identifies as a former boat person and ask them what year they came to Canada. There is a 75% chance that the date will be well into the 1980's, or even later.

What we refer to as the "revisionist" history is the history that is in common circulation today Their primary goal was to establish the former Saigon ruling elite as a distinct community in Canada. They wanted to define that community as a community of "true" refugees who were rescued from a fate at the hands of communists, and who were rescued because they were allies of Canada.^[1]

Their initial number of 50,000 refugees is only one of many elements of their revised history. Here we only deal with the number of refugees.^[2]

The revisionists used this number initially for a few reasons:

• They made the same mistake as everyone else, as described above.

• The wanted to credit a past Conservative government with responding to the boat people crisis, as described above.

• 201,000 refugees coming in over 18 years was not plausible as a response to the fall of Saigon.

During the initial states of the revisionist's efforts they stuck with the number 50,000. In later years other things began to appear to account for more Vietnamese in Canada but without making them part of the special group of Saigon elite. The number 60,000 has appeared as well as some "wave" theories.

The wave theories

Most Vietnamese came to Canada after 1980. This could be explained away as normal immigration after 1980, but it becomes a problem for the revisionists when those later entrants insist on identifying as "boat people".

The revisionists do not want to see their 'special' group of 50,000 expanded because it would be hard to justify them as "victims of the fall of Saigon" if they came so long after the end of the war.

One tactic they use is to talk about "waves" of refugees, as if there were later programs. They often refer to these later "refugees" as "economic refugees" so as to keep them separate from their special group.

There was only one refugee program and that was the boat people program., and it lasted until 1996.

Right at the beginning of the program, Canada recognized that most of the boat people were economic refugees and made formal provision to admit them into the program. Some may have feared retribution from communists, but that is not the reason they were admitted into Canada.

Wave theories take advantage of the fact that minor changes were made in the implementation of the program along the way. The admission criteria were never changed.

The revisionists made their final commitment in the formality of bill S-219 in 2015. The revisionists numbers live on. The other quotes are all from after Harper was defeated:

"... the efforts of Canadian families, Canadian charities, religious groups and non-governmental organizations, contributed to Canada accepting more than 60,000 Vietnamese refugees ..." from Bill S-219 (Statutes of Canada, 2015).^[155]

"Over the following few years, Canada resettled 60,000 Indochinese boat people, ...” (Canada.ca, 2019).^[375]

"But Canada led the world away from indifference to caring by accepting over 60,000 refugees with open arms ..." (Canada Senate Debates, 2018-05-01).^[287]

" ... but for over 60,000 people, Canada proved to be a safe haven." (Canada Senate Debates, 2018-05-01).^[287]

Further reading

Read the full story of why and how Canadian history was revised, with full citations and bibliography, on the first half of the Government page. The second half of the page concerns how it is being sustained today.