Refugee program marks 40th anniversary

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/03/2019 (2442 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Forty years ago, when the “boat people” fleeing Vietnam were in peril, Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) and the federal government created a program to help resettle them in Canada. It was so successful it became the template for more than 100 groups in Canada to privately sponsor 300,000 refugees from around the world.

As the anniversary is marked, one of the program’s creators remembers vividly the compassion and the compulsion to help.

“In the fall of ’78, the daily news was filled with stories of people from Vietnam on the sea, heading to the neighbouring countries of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia,” said Bill Janzen in Ottawa.

“It was heart-rending,” said Janzen, who was the director of the Mennonite Central Committee’s Ottawa office at the time.

“Mennonites had a strong feeling that we had to do something.”

The push came from church members whose families were chased out of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, and the MCC’s close connection to Vietnam through the relief work it had been doing there since 1954.

“Those things affected the Mennonite mind in Canada,” Janzen said.

He worked with the assistant deputy minister of immigration, Calbert Best, to come up with a plan to bring Vietnamese refugees to Canada. “We both wanted to move ahead quickly, so it didn’t take too long,” he said.

At that time, a group of five people could sponsor refugees, but they had to be willing to assume the full financial liability for the refugees, Janzen said. That was a daunting requirement for many people who wanted to help, but worried about taking on that much responsibility.

The MCC came up with a plan to take responsibility for the refugees if their sponsors couldn’t.

“What we did as a national organization is we would assume the liability,” Janzen said. The federal government agreed, and Canada’s private refugee sponsorship program was born.

It allowed, for example, a Mennonite congregation that wanted to sponsor a family of Vietnamese refugees to seek authorization from the Winnipeg-based MCC, then ask Canadian officials at the nearest embassy — who had the final say — to process their refugee applications.

It worked across Canada for more than 100 faith groups and organizations that went on to privately sponsor 300,000 refugees.

“It’s sometimes said that regulations or policies are drawn up in Ottawa, but don’t always fit in other parts of the country,” Janzen said.

“Here was an agreement that did work. It was simple enough and straightforward enough and, with enough goodwill, people really wanted to do this. I had a part in getting the mechanism needed for it to be done,” said Janzen, who also helped sponsor refugees with his Mennonite church congregation in Ottawa.

“Most of us, we kind of hope at some point we could make a little difference for some people,” said Janzen, 75.

The private refugee sponsorship agreement he helped create made a huge difference for Winnipeg’s Hoa Chau, who was among the first wave of Vietnamese boat people who came to Canada in 1979.

Chau and his wife’s family fled Saigon on-board an overcrowded 18-metre-long boat for the three-day journey to Malaysia, where they spent nine months in a refugee camp. Chau and his wife and seven of their siblings and in-laws were sponsored by the Mennonite church in Lowe Farm and arrived there Aug. 25, 1979.

“They rented a little house at Lowe Farm for us, but it was big enough,” recalled Chau, who was 26 at the time. “We were so happy.”

In the Malaysian refugee camp, the family was crammed in a single tent. There they learned Canada and its MCC sponsors were the only ones willing to take the whole family together, said Chau, who refused when Australia offered to take just him and his wife.

“I’m glad we got to go together and we lived together,” Chau said. He had a job within a week of arriving in southern Manitoba, working as a painter, and was soon supporting his family. He and his wife moved to Winnipeg and have children and grandchildren. Chau studied at Red River College and Bible college.

Now 65, he’s retired from MacDon Industries and serves as the pastor of the Vietnamese Mennonite Church in downtown Winnipeg.

Chau holds services in English and Vietnamese every Sunday. He’s grateful to have survived and thrived and to be serving his congregation here in Canada.

“The church helped a lot.”

carol.sanders@freepress.mb.ca