Canada and the Vietnam War

Canada did not officially participate in the Vietnam War. However, it contributed to peacekeeping forces in 1973 to help enforce the Paris Peace Accords.

Privately, some Canadians contributed to the war effort. Canadian corporations sold materiel to the U.S. government. In addition, at least 30,000 Canadians volunteered to serve in the U.S. armed forces during the war. At least 134 Canadians died or were reported missing in Vietnam. After the war, tens of thousands of Vietnamese boat people were also admitted and became a unique part of Canadian life.]]

At the start of the Vietnam War, Canada was a member of the International Control Commission (ICC) overseeing the implementation of the Geneva Agreements, and thus attempted to maintain an air of neutrality. However, the Canadian negotiators were strongly on the side of the U.S. One representative (J. Blair Seaborn, younger brother of Robert Seaborn) was even involved in secretly exchanging messages between the U.S. and North Vietnam on behalf of the U.S., with the approval of the Canadian government. Canada also sent foreign aid to South Vietnam, which, while humanitarian, was directed by the U.S.

Canada tried to mediate between the warring countries, aiming for a conclusion that could allow the U.S. to leave the conflict honourably. It has also been commonly believed, as reported at the time, that the Canadian government of Prime Minister Lester Pearson publicly criticized U.S. war methods. Yet, the text of a speech which Pearson delivered at Temple University in Philadelphia on April 2, 1965, has debunked this widespread rumor, with Pearson even stating "The government and great majority of people of my country have supported wholeheartedly the US peacekeeping and peacemaking policies in Vietnam."

Meanwhile, Canadian industry exported military supplies and raw materials useful in their manufacture, including ammunition, napalm and Agent Orange, to the United States, as trade between the two countries continued without interruption or hindrance. In total, Canadians firms sold over $12.5 billion of war materials to the US during the war, including machinery, munitions, clothing, food, and raw materials. Testing of Agent Orange also took place in Canada.

As the war escalated, however, relations between Canada and the United States gradually deteriorated. In his Temple University speech, while stating firm support for U.S. policy, Pearson also called for a pause in the bombing of North Vietnam. In a perhaps apocryphal story, when a furious President Lyndon B. Johnson met with Pearson the next day, he grabbed the much smaller Canadian by his lapels and talked angrily with him for an hour. After this incident, the two men somehow found ways to resolve their differences over the war and had further contacts, including later twice meeting in Canada. With the federal elections of 1968, which brought Pierre Trudeau to the prime ministry, Canadian policy changed radically to one of unrelenting criticism of U.S. policy in Vietnam. Trudeau called for immediate negotiations between the U.S. and North Vietnam and offered on at least one occasion to serve as mediator in the negotiations, annoying President Richard Nixon, who succeeded Lyndon Johnson after his own election to the U.S. presidency in 1968.

Assistance to the U.S. war effort

thumb |upright=1.2 |right |alt=Large airplane descending over tarpaulin-covered area |A [[de Havilland Canada DHC-4 Caribou transport plane on landing approach, Vietnam War, 1971]]

Canada's official diplomatic position in relation to the Vietnam War was that of a non-belligerent, which imposed a ban on the export of war-related items to the combat areas. Nonetheless, Canadian industry was also a major supplier of equipment and supplies to the U.S. forces, not sending these directly to South Vietnam but to the United States. The goods included relatively benign items like boots, but also aircraft, munitions, napalm, and commercial defoliants, the use of which was fiercely opposed by anti-war protesters at the time.

In accordance with the 1956 Defence Production Sharing Agreement, Canadian industry sold $2.47 billion in materiel to the United States between 1965 and 1973. Canada also allowed their NATO ally to use Canadian facilities and bases for training exercises and weapons testing as per existing treaties.

Canadian diplomats covertly supported US counterinsurgency and espionage efforts in Vietnam, justifying these actions as a counterbalance to similar activities conducted by its Eastern bloc peers on the International Control Commission and the International Commission of Control and Supervision.

Between January 28, 1973, and July 31, 1973, Canada provided 240 peacekeeping troops to Operation Gallant, the peacekeeping operation associated with the International Commission of Control and Supervision (ICCS) Vietnam, along with Hungary, Indonesia, and Poland. Their role was to monitor the cease-fire in South Vietnam per the Paris Peace Accords. After Canada's departure from the commission, it was replaced by Iran.

Canadians in the U.S. armed forces

thumb |upright=1.2 |right |alt=Large brown house behind Canadian and American flags |The [[Canadian Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Windsor, Ontario, commemorates Canadians who died fighting alongside American forces in Vietnam.]]

thumb|right|alt=Head shot of a confident-looking young man in an Army uniform.|Toronto-born [[Peter C. Lemon served with distinction in the U.S. Army in Vietnam.]]

In a counter-current to the movement of U.S. draft evaders and deserters to Canada, about 30,000 Canadians volunteered to fight for the U.S. in Southeast Asia. Among the volunteers were 50 Mohawks from the Kahnawake reserve near Montreal. U.S. Army Sergeant Peter C. Lemon, an immigrant from Canada, was awarded the U.S. Medal of Honor for his valour in the conflict. This cross-border enlistment was not unprecedented: Both the First and the Second World War saw thousands of Americans join the Canadian military before the U.S. officially declared war on Germany.

In 2015, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) produced a story remembering the Canadians who fought and died in the war. According to that story, a Canadian veterans association estimates that 20,000 Canadians enlisted in the U.S. armed forces to fight alongside the Americans, while some historians put the number as high as 40,000. In Melocheville, Quebec, there is a monument dating from October 1989 funded by the Association Québécoise des Vétérans du Vietnam.

U.S. war resisters in Canada

U.S. draft evaders (often referred to by the disparaging term "draft dodgers") and military deserters who sought refuge in Canada during the Vietnam War would ignite controversy among those seeking to immigrate to Canada, some of it provoked by the Canadian government's initial refusal to admit those who could not prove they had been discharged from U.S. military service. This changed in 1968 with the installment of Pierre Trudeau as prime minister. On May 22, 1969, Ottawa announced that Canadian immigration officials could not ask about immigration applicants' military status if they appeared at the border seeking permanent residence in Canada. Estimates of the total number of U.S. citizens who moved to Canada due to their opposition to the war range from 50,000 to 125,000 This exodus was "the largest politically motivated migration from the United States since the United Empire Loyalists moved north to oppose the American Revolution." Major communities of war resisters formed in Montreal, the Slocan Valley, British Columbia, and on Baldwin Street in Toronto, Ontario.

They were at first assisted by the Student Union for Peace Action, a campus-based Canadian anti-war organization with connections to Students for a Democratic Society in the U.S. Canadian immigration policy at the time made it easy for immigrants from all countries to obtain legal status in Canada. By late 1967, draft evaders were being assisted primarily by several locally based anti-draft organizations (over twenty of them), such as the Vancouver Committee to Aid American War Objectors and the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. As a counselor for the Programme, Mark Satin wrote the Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada in 1968. It sold nearly 100,000 copies overall. In 1970, Canadian singer Gordon Lightfoot recorded his song "Sit Down Young Stranger" to express his views on Canada's acceptance of American draft evaders.

thumb|right|alt=Joyful-looking male couple holding a wedding bouquet|Quebec gay rights advocate [[Michael Hendricks and René Leboeuf|Michael Hendricks (right) is one American war resister who affected Canadian life.]]

The influx of these young men, who, as mentioned earlier, were often well educated and politically leftist, affected Canada's academic and cultural institutions, and Canadian society at large. These new arrivals tended to balance the "brain drain" that Canada had experienced. While some draft evaders returned to the United States after a pardon was declared in 1977 during the presidential administration of Jimmy Carter, roughly half of them stayed in Canada.

Prominent draft evaders who stayed in Canada permanently, or for a significant amount of time, have included:

Mike Fisher – founding member of Heart, notable rock/pop band
William Gibson – science fiction writer, winner of a Nebula Award
Jim Green – Vancouver city councillor and mayoral candidate
Michael Hendricks – gay rights advocate
Michael Klein – activist physician, spouse of Bonnie Sherr Klein, father of Naomi Klein
Harry Yates – human resources manager at the Ministry of the Attorney General of British Columbia

Deserters

thumb|upright=1.2|right|Interview with Mike Tulley, an American Vietnam War deserter who emigrated to Canada. (For interview, click on gray arrow at lower left of photo.)

Distinct from draft resisters, there were also deserters from the U.S. armed forces who also made their way to Canada. There was pressure from both the United States and Canada for the deserters to be arrested, or at least stopped at the border.

The deserters have not been pardoned and may still face pro forma arrest, as the case of Allen Abney demonstrated in March 2006. Another similar case was that of Richard Allen Shields, who had deserted the U.S. Army in Alaska in 1972 after serving a year in Vietnam. Twenty-eight years later, on March 22, 2000, while he attempted to drive a lumber truck across the US-Canada border (in Metaline Falls, Washington) he was arrested by U.S. Customs agents and jailed at Fort Sill.

He was discharged from the Army with an Other Than Honorable discharge in April 2000.

Other noteworthy deserters from that era include the following:

Andy Barrie – former host of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation Radio's Metro Morning in Toronto

Missing-text controversy

In February 2009, text on how both draft evaders and resisters of the Vietnam War were ultimately allowed to stay in Canada suddenly vanished from the website of the Department of Citizenship and Immigration Canada."

Originally, the Government of Canada website had contained the following statements:

<blockquote>... Starting in 1965, Canada became a choice haven for American draft resisters and deserters, ... Although some of these transplanted Americans returned home after the Vietnam War, most of them put down roots in Canada, making up the largest, best-educated group this country had ever received. A month and a half later, on March 30, 2009, the House of Commons of Canada again voted in a non-binding motion 129 to 125 in favour of the committee's recommendation.

After the war

thumb|right|alt=Refugees crowded together on a boat|After the war, Canada admitted many [[Vietnamese boat people as immigrants.]]

Canada was affected after the war.

Vietnamese boat people

After the fall of South Vietnam in April 1975, hundreds of thousands of refugees, called boat people, fled Vietnam and adjacent nations. According to Canadian immigration historian Valerie Knowles, from 1979 to 1980 Canada admitted an estimated 60,000 of these refugees, "most of whom had endured several days in small, leaky boats, prey to vicious pirate attacks, before ending up in squalid camps". Knowles says it was the highest number of boat people accepted by any nation, including the United States, during that period.

Agent Orange in New Brunswick

In 1981, a government report revealed that Agent Orange, the controversial defoliant, had been tested at CFB Gagetown, New Brunswick. In June 1966, the chemical was sprayed over nearly <span style="white-space:nowrap">600 acres (2.4 km<sup>2</sup>)</span> of forest inside the base. There are differing opinions about the level of toxicity of the site; but, in 2006, the Canadian government said it planned to compensate some of those who were exposed. As of 2011, some claims have been paid but the administration of the compensation program has been criticized.

References

External links

The war

Canada's Secret War: Vietnam. Digital archives, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Canadian Vietnam Veterans Association
Canadian Vietnam Veterans Memorial Association
Vietnam Veterans With a Mission . Information and pictures.
Vietnam War Bibliography: Canada. Compiled by scholar Edwin L. Morse.
The Vietnam War: Canada's Role, Part One. Transcript of a CBC Radio broadcast.

War immigrants

Jack Pocock Memorial Collection, in the Discover Archives at the University of Toronto. Material from the Toronto Anti-Draft Programme and similar organizations, mostly from 1969 to 1975.
Mark Satin Papers, in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at University of Toronto. Has materials on Toronto Anti-Draft Programme from 1967 to 1968. Retrieved August 31, 2025.
Manual for Draft-Age Immigrants to Canada. Narrative and excerpt.
Seeking Sanctuary: Draft Dodgers. Digital archives, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.
Toronto Anti-Draft Programme. Self-description from 1968.
The Vietnam War: Canada's Role, Part Two: The Boat People. Transcript of a CBC Radio broadcast.
Vietnam War Resisters in Canada , hosted by Vancouver Community Network. Annotated guide to texts and websites from the 1960s to the present. Compiled by scholar Joseph Jones.
Vietnamese Community in Canada. Overview by Statistics Canada.