There are two widely held viewpoints on the Vietnam war that are relevant to our discussion.

These two viewpoints are relevant because:

• One is the viewpoint that got the US involved in Vietnam at the start, although it became controversial. This viewpoint is still held by some strongly conservative people, and in particular, it's the one Stephen Harper adopted.

• The other is the viewpoint that was held by Canada from 1945 to 2006 and was the basis of everything that Canada did in relation to Vietnam including the boat people crisis. This is the widely held world view and was the basis on which most Vietnamese themselves fought the war.

Harper's wish to change Canada's national identity led him to move Canada from the second, traditionally held viewpoint, to the first one. We characterize Harper's effort as "re-framing the Vietnam war".

The significance of this move is that it moved Canada from a non-partisan position to become an ally of the Saigon regime. Thus we call the result of Harper's effort his "pro-Saigon policy".

There are two parts to each viewpoint: the nature of the war, and who the Saigon regime was.

Viewpoint 1: South vs. North, world vs. communism

The nature of the war.

The first viewpoint is that it was a war of the 'civilized' world against communism, South Vietnam against North Vietnam.

This is the war the US was fighting, although not everyone agreed with it. This is the view held by Harper and some of his supporters. It is the view promoted by the former Saigon leadership, because it is in their interest that the world see it this way.

In this war, there was only a single enemy: "communists". The southern revolutionaries and nationalists that formed early resistance movements do not exist.

The nature of the Saigon regime.

In this viewpoint, the Saigon regime was a warrior nation fighting to defend the Vietnamese people against communism. This happened to be exactly the national identity that Harper was seeking for Canada.

Harper had a concept of what Canada's national identity should be and he was bothered by the fact that Canada had not participated in the war on this basis, with the US. It was an opportunity missed.

Viewpoint 2: Civil war, multiple factions.

The nature of the war.

The second viewpoint is that it was a war in which one side was trying to protect the privileged status that it had gained by being part of the French colonial administration. The other side was the people of all of Vietnam who had organized into various factions to oppose colonialism, from which the communist faction emerged victorious.

In this concept it was a civil war with no consensus among the Vietnamese as to a desired outcome other than getting rid of the Saigon regime. There were many resistance groups prior to the time when the communist forces became dominant.

The Canadian governments that were in power over the years from 1945 until 2006 either held this view or deferred to it, since it was the prevailing world view. Canada was opposed to colonialism in principle but was not prepared to intervene in Vietnam.

This viewpoint kept Canada's military out of the war entirely and away from the fall of Saigon. Some Canadians today who are not familiar with this history find it unnatural to accept that Canada did not act as an ally of the US.

The nature of the Saigon regime

The Saigon regime were the remnants of the colonial administration that the French has set up to administer and defend the colony on their behalf. Through their association with the French they had become a somewhat distinct minority group, and a rich landlord class. Their interest was to protect their privileged status against the various anti-colonial factions in the country after the French had left. The regime in no way represents traditional Vietnamese culture.

This group was organized into a nation by the US in 1955 specifically to fight the communists after the French had left. The new nation was defeated twenty years later in 1975, shortly after the US had abandoned them as corrupt and incompetent, incapable of leading the nation except by military force. For this reason, any recognition of the Saigon regime in Canada today is necessarily a partisan statement about the Vietnam war, since the regime was created for that purpose and died when it was defeated.

This is substantially the view that was held by Canada and guided Canada's actions during and after the war. Canada was non-partisan.^[7]

Harper, in his project to redefine Canada's national identity, decided that there was a perfect model in the idea of Canada being an ally of the Saigon regime in the Vietnam war. The Saigon nation was an ideal model -- totally militarized and totally dedicated to fighting communists. This idea would also put Canada in a close alliance with the US -- another of his ideals.

That model required that the war be framed as the two-sided war that pitted the Saigon regime against North Vietnam, since the other framing of the war did not make Saigon the ideal model.

For consistency, he also had to re-frame the boat-people crisis as a response to the fall of Saigon.^[8] If Saigon had been an ally, Canada would certainly have rescued the ARVN when it collapsed. As our story unfolds, you will see that this part was a major challenge and Harper spent at least 9 years writing the real boat people out of Canadian history.

At the end of his project, in order to establish this alliance as a permanent part of Canada's identity and policy going forward, he also decided to declare that the alliance with Saigon was a living policy, that the Saigon regime was still a legitimate nation today. He visibly engaged official Canada with the uniformed Saigon military and their national flag and set up an annual national day for them.

To do all this, Harper had to confront two problems:

Convincing Canadians

Canadians historically held an "antiwar" opinion on the Vietnam war. This is what the government of that day was responding to when it avoided involvement in the war and the fall of Saigon.

30-odd years later, when Harper started his project, Canadians largely held a pragmatic stance on the war: "it's over". This was also the Harper government's public position on foreign wars from Canadian immigrants' past: "don't bring them to Canada". (Kenney, 2011).^[477]

Canadian immigrants in general hold similar views. (Mosaic Institute, 2014).^[16] Vietnamese Canadians in particular had reason to avoid the subject, as the war had been controversial and families were split over it, so there was no point in carrying this into Canada.

Harper would have to convince Canadians that there was some reason to reactivate the Vietnam war and bring it to Canada.

The boat people

Another problem Harper had to deal with in re-framing the war was the presence in Canada of 162,000 former Vietnamese boat people and two generations of their descendants in Canada. They were living proof that his re-framing of the Vietnam war was wrong and counter-productive.

Canada never had partisan criteria for admitting people from Vietnam. Furthermore, Canada had refused to respond to the fall of Saigon because that would have been a partisan act.^[1] When the boat people crisis arose four years after the end of the war, Canada first assured itself that a response could not be perceived as a partisan act. Throughout the program anyone could come to Canada regardless of their prior associations. These were all the same principles that Canada's partner, the UNHCR was following.

There was already ample evidence that the former boat people would never agree to pose as the former Saigon elite to support Harper's version of the war and the aftermath.

If Harper's reframing of the was was to stand up, the ARVN would not only have to make an appearance in Canada, they would have to constitute essentially the entire Vietnamese community -- the boat people would have to disappear.

Harper's advantage

Canadians also have an aversion to rewriting history, but Harper had some advantages on this one.

Few Canadians alive to day would have first-hand knowledge of the war time. Since Canada had no involvement in the war and no involvement in the fall of Saigon, there is no institutionalized memory of those events. Since the American involvement is known to everyone through Hollywood and US media, and since US is generally an ally of Canada, Canadians tend to assume that the Canadian experience matched the US experience.^[2] That is exactly what Harper needed because it matches his rewritten history for Canada.

In addition, there are many Conservatives around who were there at the time and felt that Candada had done it wrong. They were happy to see Harper's work.^[3]

Harper came up with one solution to both problems - convincing Canadians to go along with his pro-Saigon policy and making the boat people disappear.

He rewrote the history of the boat people so that the origins of Canada's Vietnamese community lay in the fall of Saigon. He rewrote it to say that Canada had rescued the ARVN from their fate, and the real boat people just disappeared from Canadian history as refugees.^[4]

Harper then formed an alliance with a small political faction in Canada that consisted of former ARVN military people.^[6] They agreed to pose as "the Vietnamese community" to support Harper's revised history. To support this, the government adopted a policy of never referring to the Vietnamese community in any way without including words like "Saigon", "Fall of Saigon", or "Vietnam war" in the reference, and using partisan symbols of the war as "cultural" symbols.

The ARVN political faction in Canada has always been very well organized, politically astute, and able to marshal support from the much larger US faction to put on shows of force in Canada. They met all of Harper's expectations.

Canadians today are convinced that the ARVN is the Vietnamese community, including Vietnamese Canadians themselves.^[5]

The last issue was to keep real the real boat people from revealing the truth. About all Canada had to do there was announce the new alliance with the ARVN. That made the former boat people the enemy, no longer legitimate Canadians. Most just kept quiet -- there was no need to get involved in Harper's war anyway, although this also created real problems for those who wanted to express their culture in public.

With the origin story for Canada's Vietnamese community based in the fall of Saigon, Harper's re-framing of the Vietnam war became untouchable. With the Vietnam war now an "ethnic" or "cultural" issue, no politician would dare challenge it. It still survives today, six years after Harper left the scene.