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Andy Huynh came to Canada as a teenager in the 1980s as one of about 70,000 Indochinese refugees who were granted entry to the country. The story of his journey, and all of the memories associated with it, recently resurfaced unexpectedly when Huynh spotted a photograph of himself in a CBC article about Canada’s role in the Indochina refugee crisis. An excerpt of the article follows.
Visa officers at forefront of Canada’s ‘most ambitious resettlement effort’ describe diplomatic adventure
By Jennifer Clibbon
In the fall of 1979, Margaret Tebbutt, a 31-year-old Canadian visa officer from Calgary, boarded a small plane headed to the east coast of Malaysia for what would turn out to be a historic assignment.
From there, “we loaded ourselves and the cases of files — this was pre-computer era — onto a fishing boat, and sailed an hour or so to the refugee camp on Pulau Bidong island.”
Tebbutt was one of just a few dozen Canadian immigration officials sent after the Vietnam War by then prime minister Joe Clark’s Conservative government to remote locales in Southeast Asia with the objective of bringing tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people to Canada as refugees. After the fall of Saigon in 1975 to the Communist Viet Cong, there was a mass exodus of people out of the country.
Ron Atkey, Canada’s immigration minister of the era, called it “the largest and most ambitious resettlement effort in Canada’s history,” and many believe it inspires today’s program for Syrian refugees. The story of the Vietnamese boat people and the role of Canadian immigration officers has also been made into a Heritage Minute, released last week.
“As we approached Pulau Bidong island, we saw wrecked wooden boats on the shore and United Nations tarps on the hillsides which were makeshift shelters,” recalls Tebbutt, who is retired and living in Vancouver. “We set up at tables and did interviews, with volunteer translators. We stayed overnight, sleeping on our interview tables.”
Tebbutt’s story and those of the other Canadian immigration officers are told in a new book, Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975-1980. The immigration officers, mostly in their 20s, brought in 70,000 Vietnamese refugees over five years, most of them in the first 18 months. Read full article >
By Michael J. Molloy, Peter Duchinsky, Kurt F. Jensen and Robert Shalka
Foreword by Ronald Atkey
A powerful history of how Canada rescued 70,000 Indochinese refugees between 1975 and 1980.
The fall of Saigon in April 1975 resulted in the largest and most ambitious refugee resettlement effort in Canada’s history. Running on Empty presents the challenges and successes of this bold refugee resettlement program. It traces the actions of a few dozen men and women who travelled to seventy remote refugee camps, worked long days in humid conditions, subsisted on dried noodles and green tea, and sometimes slept on their worktables while rats scurried around them – all in order to resettle thousands of people displaced by war and oppression. Read more >
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