Partnerships

CIHS partners with various bodies interested in furthering the knowledge and history of Canada’s Immigration and Refugee Programs.

CANADIAN MUSEUM OF IMMIGRATION AT PIER 21

We have been a staunch supporter of Pier 21, Canada’s National Immigration Museum since its inception.

Carleton University

The Society collaborates with Ottawa’s Carleton University Ugandan Archive about the 1972 expulsion from Uganda of its Asian population. This is a unique archive that gives insight into the expulsion and subsequent resettlement of over 4,000 Asians in Canada.

We have also become active partners 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 Hearts of Freedom project now has it’s own website:

https://heartsoffreedom.org/

Federal Departments and Agencies

The Society has historical ties to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada and the Canada Border Services Agency. Many of our members worked (or still work) for those departments. Our goals of preserving and publishing the history of immigration and refugee movements to Canada are of direct interest to its employees – past and present.

Hearts of Freedom

Canadians who came here under the ‘boat people’ movement are now telling their stories. CIHS is partnering with the Southeast Asian Canadian community organizations, Carleton University and others to capture the stories – many of which are now on-line, through the ‘Hearts of Freedom’ project. The project will ensure that the settlement experience of these people is preserved and becomes part of Canada’s historical narrative. CBC Radio in Ottawa interviewed one of the individuals who told his story to the project team.

Bulletin 111 December 2024

We end 2024 with Bulletin 111 which reports on CIHS activities this year:

The October 2024 CIHS Annual General Meeting, which highlighted Canada’s Operation Parasol, the evacuation of Kosovars to Canada;
CIHS participation in “Memory, Politics and Precedent”, a November 2024 conference in Toronto that commemorated the Kosovar evacuation;
A brief mention of a November book launch event held in Ottawa and attended by CIHS members;
It announces this year’s recipient of the CIHS Molloy Bursary; and
The 2024 CIHS website usage report.

We also share two accounts of Canada’s immigration history:

Two articles from the 1929 Windsor Star newspaper about staffing at the new Ambassador Bridge; and
A report on a junior visa officer’s area trip from Beirut in 1972 to conduct interviews in many countries in and adjacent to Africa.

Finally, we take note of the recent passing of former immigration foreign service program manager Jean-François Hubert-Rouleau.

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