Most North Americans, at least of a certain age, identify the fall of Saigon in April, 1975, with the news footage of Americans being evacuated from the roof of the United States embassy by chopper as North Vietnamese troops claimed the city.
Forty years later, the commemoration of a day that turned the hinge of history 14,000 km away has become a serious irritant between Canada and Vietnam, a partisan flashpoint on Parliament Hill and a source of division within Canada’s Vietnamese community that some observers say is being exploited for votes by the federal Conservatives in an election year.
For the Vietnamese who fled the ravaged country and made their way to Canada after the April 30th, 1975, communist victory, the date is known as “Black April Day.” Which is why Sen. Thanh Hai Ngo’s private member’s bill commemorating the exodus that brought him to Canada in 1975 was originally titled, the “Black April Day Act.”
“With our electoral system, you don’t need everybody, you just need enough to win. Some of our communities have upward to 40, 50, 60% people who are on board. Never mind second generation.”
Then, the current communist government of Vietnam, mindful of much of the Vietnamese diaspora’s before-and-after version of the country’s repressive post-1975 history, protested vehemently to the Harper government. The bill is now called the “Journey to Freedom Act,” and it continues to fuel tension between Ottawa and Hanoi.
But Bill S-219 is also the cause of another rift, between the Conservatives on the one side and the Liberals and NDP on the other. When it was initially tabled in the Senate last fall, some Liberal senators voted against it, though it ended up passing. In the House of Commons last month, Bill S-219 passed first and second reading but not without opposition from MPs recommending that it be referred to committee in the hope that it would be amended.
That is because, soon after the relatively obscure bill, which may have initially looked like a no-brainer, was debated in the House, oppositions MPs such as NDP MP Rathika Sitsabaiesan say they started receiving emails and phone calls from people saying the bill did not represent the views of the whole Vietnamese-Canadian community.
NDP MP Anne Minh-Thu Quach, one of the two Vietnamese-Canadian MPs to ever sit in the House of Commons, explained to iPolitics that the community is generationally divided, mainly between those who left when Saigon fell — including some associated with the old regime — and were welcomed to Canada as “boat people” in the 1970s, and those who’ve come to Canada more recently as students or economic immigrants and maintain ties with the communist state.
Some observers say the bill is a textbook case of targeted political pandering for ethnic votes ahead of what is shaping up to be a close-fought federal election.
As a result, Julie Trang Nguyen, who leads the Canada-Vietnam Association — a group opposed to the bill and in favour of maintaining ties with Vietnam — says that people like her feel ostracized. “You are not supposed to do anything with Vietnam. That is the attitude. Even the flag, when you have an event then it must be the old Saigon flag. If not, they will come and question you on how come you don’t have that flag up there” Nguyen told iPolitics.
Nguyen and other representatives of the association told reporters in a press conference that they felt insulted by the fact that the bill advocated for April 30th as a commemoration date, fully knowing it’s the same day as Liberation Day in Vietnam. They were in Ottawa to ask the House heritage committee, which was studying the bill, to consider an alternative date and to change the wording of the bill to remove references to the war.
MP Anne Minh-Thu Quach, who supported the bill, said she had hoped that the committee would indeed consider dissenting voices, but only two opposing witnesses were heard and no alternative suggestions were deemed acceptable. “It’s regrettable, I find that it’s a bill that divides more than it unites people” Minh-Thu Quach says.
NDP MP Hoang Mai agrees, saying the bill’s benefits are mostly symbolic. “Why is the government bringing something forward when, for example, people in my riding are already celebrating on April 30th?” Mai says that if the government wanted to show real leadership, it could have put forward a bill that addresses human rights in Vietnam. “The way they have brought it forward, I do find divisions within the Vietnamese community” says the NDP MP.
Nguyen, after testifying in committee, said she was disappointed by the manner in which Senator Ngo and his party had dealt with the issue. “By taking this side that is already imposing their view on the rest of the community, in a way the Conservatives are putting a stamp on it, saying this is a view that we endorse.”
Some observers say the bill is a textbook case of targeted political pandering for ethnic votes ahead of what is shaping up to be a close-fought federal election.
Alberta-based political strategist Stephen Carter says, “This is being done in essence to gather support from those people in the first generational subset. It absolutely is being done for votes, there is no other way around it.”
Veteran poll analyst Paul Barber says that, among multiple strategies that parties use to woo ethnic votes is the use of “overarching symbolic things that are connected to their homelands.”
Senator Ngo’s office refuted the accusation that the Senator’s intent with this bill was to play into ethnic politics, and said that he only wanted to have a day to commemorate the Vietnamese boat people’s saga and pay tribute to Canadians who assisted them.
But a former Liberal strategist told iPolitics that this scenario is typical of the Conservatives, who he says have a history of targeting subgroups within larger ethnic communities. “I think of Hong Kong Chinese versus mainland Chinese, I think of Sri Lankans, or people of Indian descent; Conservatives are good at targeting subgroups within immigrant communities.” he says.
Phil Triadafilopoulos, a professor of Political science at the University of Toronto who has researched the Conservative Party of Canada’s “ethnic outreach” strategies, also says that Canada’s electoral system facilitates these types of approaches. “With our electoral system, you don’t need everybody, you just need enough to win. Some of our communities have upward to 40, 50, 60% people who are on board. Never mind second generation.” he says.
As to those who wonder how the Conservative government is threading the thin line between courting communist Vietnam as a trade partner and commemorating those who fled its brutal communist regime, Carter says “You do it very carefully.”
Republished in partnership with iPolitics.ca
