All photographs are copyrighted.
In 1975, Canada’s largest reception and resettlement of refugees began. From then through to 1999, close to 130,000 Indochinese refugees, including some 60,000 in 1979-80 alone, came to Canada from Viet Nam, Cambodia and Laos. We offer a range of information about that significant movement.
The Society collaborates with Ottawa’s Carleton University in an oral history project with the Department of Social Work and the MacOdrum Library. The project will create an archive of the stories of southeast Asian refugees who arrived in Canada in the wake of the fall of Vietnam in the late seventies and early eighties. In the first phase we will collect 110 ninety minute oral histories from former Vietnamese, Laotian and Cambodian refugees living in Ontario and Quebec as well as former sponsors, officials and people involved in organizations like Operation Lifeline and Project 4000. Funding permitting we will collect 100 more in the west and the Maritimes.
The current issue features a variety of articles related to Canadian immigration. Thomas Tass provides a personal account of his time as Canada's first Immigration Control Officer at the Embassy of Canada in Warsaw, Poland. Gerry Maffre summarizes historical items recently donated to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada. Doug Dunnington shares his memories of working at Canada’s Immigration Headquarters in the late 1970s. In addition, two Lifetime Achievement Award winner citations from 2012 are reprinted with permission from Citizenship and Immigration Canada: Vu Cao and Susan Leith. The issue concludes with remembrances of former colleagues who have passed away, including Christine Foley, Brian McAdam, Ann Ratcliffe, Lyse Ricard, and Hume Smith.
View