Politician Ron Atkey opened Canada’s doors to boat people

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In 1979, Canadians watched with horror as hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese refugees packed barely seaworthy boats and cast off into the treacherous South China Sea. It was the biggest peacetime exodus the world had seen. Many would drown fleeing the Communist regime. At the same time, a world away, two young Toronto historians made a copy of a manuscript they had written and mailed it to Ron Atkey, the immigration minister in the new government of Joe Clark. The academics, Irving Abella and Harold Troper, had documented Canada's woeful record of turning away European Jews before, during and after the Second World War; the manuscript was later expanded into a book that took its title from the remark of an immigration official who was asked how many Jews would be allowed into Canada after the war. He replied, "None is too many."

The authors enclosed a note: "We hope Canada will not be found wanting in this refugee crisis the way it was in the last." They expected no reply.

Only later did they learn that the deputy immigration minister, John Manion, had read the manuscript and after showing it to Mr. Atkey, declared, "This should not be you."

Mr. Atkey needed little prodding. Disturbed by the historical parallels between Jews fleeing Nazism and the "boat people" from Indochina, he later said the article "stiffened my resolve to be bold" – a resoluteness that would reappear decades later in another migration of exiles, these from Syria.

True to his word, Mr. Atkey, working with his friend and cabinet colleague Flora MacDonald, began hiking the number of refugees from the region that Canada would admit. Just two weeks into his job in June, 1979, he announced an increase from 5,000 to 7,000 a year. This country, he averred, would use international forums to denounce the "genocide" taking place in Vietnam and show "the world that we are a compassionate nation."

In a letter to The Globe and Mail a few weeks later, Mr. Atkey said the number had been revised upward to 8,000 a year. Another 3,000 were expected to arrive via private sponsorship, and yet another 1,000 through the family-reunification program. By the end of July, the target was 3,000 a month.

But all those numbers were eclipsed. In the end, Mr. Atkey's department, with an assist from Ms. MacDonald and Canadians at large, took in a stunning 50,000 refugees from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in 1979, with 10,000 more admitted by the end of 1980, when Mr. Clark's government was succeeded by Pierre Trudeau's Liberals.

Mr. Atkey was the "principal author of the policy change which dramatically widened Canada's doors," Mr. Clark told a memorial service for Mr. Atkey recently. "His hand actually turned the wheel that turned the world."

Mr. Atkey was also spurred by the entreaties of his predecessor in the immigration post, Bud Cullen. The day after Mr. Atkey was sworn in, Mr. Cullen informed him that a program allowing sponsorship of immigrants by private groups and citizens, enacted under the Liberals, had stalled. Mr. Cullen "quietly suggested that a new government might do better," Mr. Atkey recalled, according to Mr. Clark.

Mr. Atkey rekindled the program, which was called Operation Lifeline. Community groups, private citizens and houses of worship came alive, and about 39,000 of the Southeast Asian refugees arrived under private sponsorship. "That was a big surprise for us, that private sponsorship should be so high," he would recall. "It kind of grew like topsy … community-based groups, neighbours all came together and it became very fashionable to sponsor a family." The program became the crown jewel of Canada's immigration policy and a model for the world.

Combining government with private sponsorship "was unprecedented and remained unequalled before or since in the world," said the Vietnamese Canadian Federation in an appreciation of Mr. Atkey.

Rescuing the boat people was Mr. Atkey's "greatest professional legacy," his friend and former colleague, Craig Forcese – a professor of law at the University of Ottawa – wrote in an online tribute.

Mr. Atkey modestly attributed the success of the immigration to "a rare time in Canadian history," he told The Globe and Mail last fall. "What permitted this to go ahead was a genuine change of heart by the Canadian community."

The response of many Canadians was indeed generous, but the Atkey family also faced threats of violence. One promised that their newborn baby son would never make it home from the hospital and the clan received an RCMP security detail for a time.

Though the Tories' policy was greeted with much public sympathy and activism, "the courage and leadership of MacDonald and Atkey in fighting for an unprecedented commitment, and in inspiring officials and ordinary Canadians to deliver on it, cannot be overstated," declares the book Running on Empty: Canada and the Indochinese Refugees, 1975-1980, launched May 17 in Ottawa and written by four retired foreign-service officers. Mr. Atkey wrote the forward, at the authors' insistence.

Admitting the boat people "was Ron's initiative," recalled Mr. Clark in an interview with The Globe and Mail. Mr. Atkey and Ms. MacDonald, Canada's first female foreign minister, "were close and I believe they had personal discussions before it came to cabinet. The two of them advanced it very strongly. I was very supportive of it but my practice was to leave a lot of initiatives to my ministers and I did in that case."

Mr. Clark said his government, which lasted just nine months, "encountered an extraordinary Canadian reaction" to the boat people. "We were highly encouraged by it. Even at this early time, it was evident that there was going to be much more buy in to this, much more involvement by citizens and groups.

"Ron was a very principled actor in all of this."

Mr. Clark, at the memorial service for Mr. Atkey, referred to his old friend as a proud Red Tory (the kind one today sees "only in museums," half-joked Toronto Mayor John Tory, who managed one of Mr. Atkey's campaigns). But the former prime minister also called Mr. Atkey "an architect of the future."

By that he meant that 35 years after the influx from Southeast Asia, Mr. Atkey again witnessed a refugee crisis and the boat people clearly remained moored in his memory. As chair of Humanity Wins, a group of prominent Canadians, he became a loud voice in the campaign to admit Syrian refugees to Canada. "We still have the same goal now as we had then," he told The Huffington Post in December, 2015, "and that is to set an example of a humanitarian nation."

But sensing a harsher public tone when it came to the Syrians, he added: "There seems to be a xenophobia sweeping through and silly things are being said."

He felt that the Justin Trudeau Liberals' commitment to settle 25,000 Syrians initially was "bold and emphatic," but he called on Ottawa to double that number. "If Canada can do another 25,000, that would make a significant contribution in line with Canada's contribution with the Vietnamese boat people in 1979 to 1980," Mr. Atkey told the Toronto Star last winter. "It will demonstrate to the Americans that they have to do more. We'll shame them into it, similarly the Australians."

Between November, 2015, and February, 2017, this country took in just over 40,000 refugees of the Syrian civil war, with about 14,000 of them sponsored privately, according to Immigration and Citizenship Canada

Mr. Atkey died unexpectedly at his Toronto home on May 9 of undisclosed causes thought to be heart-related. He was 75.

Ronald George Atkey was born on Feb. 15, 1942, in Saint John, where his pregnant mother had travelled to see his father ship out to war in Europe. Back home in Petrolia, Ont., about three hours west of Toronto, Mr. Atkey's father, Osborne Atkey, practised law while his mother, the former Mary Hills, taught school.

A star student at the University of Western Ontario, he earned a law degree as a gold medalist in 1965, followed by a master's degree from Yale University and co-editorship of a highly regarded textbook on Canadian constitutional law.

He experienced an alternating series of victories and defeats in his four consecutive federal election bids against Liberal rival John Roberts in Toronto's St. Paul's riding: Mr. Atkey won in 1972, lost in 1974, won in 1979 and lost again in 1980. Mr. Atkey served as an MP for a total of 2 1/2 years – "not as long as he was needed," Mr. Clark eulogized.

As his death notice stated, he had one speed in life: busy. After politics, Mr. Atkey practised law in Toronto; was the first chair of the Security Intelligence Review Committee, which provided civilian oversight of Canada's spy agency; was a member of the commission of inquiry into the wrongly accused terror suspect Maher Arar; taught law; patronized the arts; and published a spy novel, The Chancellor's Foot, with coaching from Margaret Atwood, who advised him to stop writing like a lawyer.

Mr. Atkey also played a key role in quieting the turmoil that engulfed Pakistan in the early 1990s. Former prime minister Brian Mulroney recalled in his memoirs that Benazir Bhutto was ousted as prime minister of Pakistan in August, 1990, and threatened with arrest. The memoirs relate that Canada's ambassador to Pakistan at the time, Manfred von Nostitz, asked Ms. Bhutto whether appointing an impartial Canadian legal expert to examine the constitutional issues surrounding her status would help. She agreed, and that expert was Mr. Atkey, whose report supported Ms. Bhutto's legal and constitutional rights.

Mr. Atkey's report was "a godsend to the beleaguered Bhutto and her political party," Mr. Mulroney quoted Mr. von Nostitz. "It no doubt helped her at that time to stay out of jail and to eventually be re-elected for a second term in 1993."

Morton Beiser, a Toronto psychiatrist known for his research in the fields of immigration and resettlement, interviewed the "greying, impeccably dressed" Mr. Atkey in 1988 for a book on the boat people's first decade in Canada. It's not often, the former minister mused, that one is given the chance "to make a difference." He added: "I didn't want my children to have to remember me as somebody who said, 'None is too many.'"

Mr. Atkey's first marriage ended in divorce. He leaves his wife, Marie Rounding; children Matthew Atkey, Erin Tait, and Jennifer Price; and four grandchildren. He was predeceased by a son, Jonathan Atkey, and a sister, Jane Atkey.