Canada admitted roughly 120,000 Vietnamese refugees in the early 1980s

Vietnamese Toronto

The fall of Saigon in 1975 and the 'boat people' crisis that followed brought one of the largest refugee resettlement waves in Canadian history to Toronto — built substantially through ordinary citizens sponsoring families directly.

The Toronto skyline — Toronto skyline — Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0

The first Vietnamese presence in Toronto was small: a handful of students attending the city's universities in the 1950s and 1960s. The community's real founding moment was the fall of Saigon in April 1975, which sent an initial wave of a few thousand refugees to settle in Toronto in the late 1970s.

The boat people crisis

This was followed by the much larger "boat people" crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s, as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese fled by sea to refugee camps across Southeast Asia. Canada mounted one of the most generous Western responses to this crisis, admitting roughly 120,000 Vietnamese refugees nationally in the early 1980s, with Toronto alone receiving on the order of 18,000 boat-people refugees. Much of this resettlement ran through Canada's then-new private sponsorship program, in which churches and community groups sponsored refugee families directly.

Little Saigon

The Vietnamese Association, Toronto was originally established in 1972 and formally incorporated as a non-profit in 1979, positioning it to lead settlement work through the peak refugee years; it remains headquartered on Dundas Street West and continues to provide settlement, language and cultural-preservation services. Vietnamese-owned pho restaurants, groceries and businesses concentrated along Dundas Street West, an area popularly known as "Little Saigon."

Sources

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