Throughout the late 1970s, stories about the Boat People continued to dominate international media coverage of Southeast Asia. Refugees told of paying exorbitant amounts to flee, only to find they were paying unscrupulous smugglers with no intention of providing safe passage. And if they managed to escape, they faced attacks from pirates who raped, looted and murdered defenceless refugees. Thousands are believed to have perished because their rickety boats sank in tropical storms. And if they managed to survive all that, many Southeast Asian countries were unwilling or unable to give them succor.
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Eventually the arrival of the Boat People amounted to the largest single group of refugees ever accepted by Canada. Between 1975 and 1985 about 111,000 came to Canada, 14,000 of those to British Columbia. The peak year was 1980, when the province received almost 5,000 of the 35,000 that arrived in Canada. What was remarkable was that 30,000 were sponsored by individual Canadians, religious organizations and other non-profit groups. In fact the arrival of Vietnamese refugees marked the beginning of the country's private refugee sponsorship program.
