The summer of ’79 was just starting. The Pope was Polish, Sony had introduced the first Walkman and Gloria Gaynor was tearing up the disco scene with “I Will Survive.”

Howard Adelman, a York University philosophy professor, was ending weeks of isolation at his cottage o­n an island in Georgian Bay, where he had been working o­n a book about German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

He had also just written an article o­n research into the reception German Jewish refugees received in Canada, the United States and Britain in the late 1930s.

Returning to Toronto for a weekend, Adelman began wading through six weeks of newspapers and was stunned to see the Vietnamese “boat people” crisis had exploded across the news during his absence.

Countries neighbouring Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos were swamped as tens of thousands of refugees fled the chaos of Communism.

“One couldn’t help wanting to do something and say, ‘Never again!’ ” Adelman recalls.

True to his background as a 1960s activist and co-founder of Rochdale College, Toronto’s controversial experiment in alternative education, he called a meeting, inviting a local Catholic priest, two rabbis, an alderman and ministers from the Anglican and United Churches to his house to discuss the crisis.

Within days, Adelman inadvertently launched a national campaign that saw Canada resettle 60,000 Indochinese refugees in just 18 months.

Now, 35 years later, he, along with Mike Molloy, a retired diplomat who was the chief co-ordinator of Canada’s boat people rescue operation in 1979, and Naomi Alboim, chair of the Public Policy Forum at Queen’s University and head of federal refugee resettlement programs in o­ntario in 1979, are trying to recapture the mix of politics, policy and compassion that turned the Vietnamese refugee crisis into a Canadian success story.

For the past year, they have reviewed the lessons of the crisis to seek ways to revitalize and reform Canada’s existing refugee sponsorship system.

They began with a conference at York University last November at which former refugees, their Canadian sponsors, civil servants, academics, volunteers, churches and resettlement workers met to discuss what had happened in 1979.

“Syria was a major stimulus for our conversations,” says Adelman. “It is crazy that we have done so little. Here you have all these people being driven from their homes. Their lives are shattered and, for the minorities at least, there is no truly meaningful solution. It’s a real problem.

“There used to be 2 million Christians in Iraq. They have almost all been driven out. Resettlement has to be considered as part of the solution, and Canada used to play a significant and important role. But not now.”

Back in 1979, when Adelman assembled 15 people in his living room, the aim was to draft a petition urging the month-old Progressive Conservative government of Joe Clark to do something. Ron Atkey was the new immigration minister.

“We just wanted to write a letter to tell Ron, ‘Come o­n, get off your ass and do something,’ ” says Adelman. “He was our MP, so we thought we might have some influence over him.”

Just as the meeting was about to start, two civil servants, André Pilon and Bob Parkes from the o­ntario settlement office of the federal department of immigratione, arrived at the door and asked if they could sit in.

As the group discussed their letter, Pilon told them about a new provision in the 1976 immigration act that allowed an organization or a group of five Canadians to sponsor a refugee.

“Wouldn’t it be better if you actually did something?” is the way Adelman recalls it.

“We forgot about the letter and we decided we’d sponsor 50 people over the summer. We’d do our good deed and then go home.

“I planned to hang around Toronto an extra day to organize a street sponsorship group and then return north to continue my writing.”

He wouldn’t see his cottage again for two years, and his book o­n Hegel was never finished.

Unknown to Adelman, a graduate student who sat in o­n his Sunday meeting worked as a freelancer for the Globe and Mail, and when the meeting was over he told Dick Beddoes, a columnist for the paper, what had happened.

“Beddoes wrote a very imaginative column that described how a philosopher hero abandoned his book o­n ‘Haykel,’ rode south o­n his white steed from his island in the north and founded Operation Lifeline to rescue the Indochinese boat people,” Adelman says.

The column was “totally mythological” and the name Operation Lifeline was Beddoes’ invention, he adds. But the article, and its inclusion of Adelman’s phone number, changed everything.

At 6 a.m. the next day, Adelman was at his desk working when a woman telephoned from Marystown, Nfld.

“I want to help Operation Lifeline,” she told him.

“ ‘Why are you calling me?’ ” Adelman asked.

“So, she read me the column and I said, ‘OK, you are now chairwoman of the Marystown Chapter of Operation Lifeline.’

“It was the kind of technique for organizing that we did in the ’60s,” he says.

His phone rang non-stop for two weeks. “Within 10 days, we had 68 chapters of Operation Lifeline across the country.

“Volunteers showed up at the door and I assigned them tasks like manning the phone and keeping records of new chapters, and people who couldn’t reach us by phone arrived at the door. Some of them were carrying bundles of cash in their hands.”

The group in Adelman’s living room sponsored all 50 refugees in just two weeks.

“It was a kind of spontaneous outpouring of various skills,” Adelman says. “People were ready to do something, and we merely provided the vehicle.”

Around the time Adelman was rummaging through his newspapers, Ron Atkey was spending a weekend at the cottage reading in o­n his new job.

Among the government documents and reports he had with him was an unpublished article that would later become a book by Canadian historians Irving Abella and Harold Troper, None Is Too Many, which detailed Canada’s refusal to offer aid or sanctuary to German Jews fleeing the Third Reich in the 1930s.

The article dealt with the tragedy of the MS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jews that was refused permission to land in Canada, Cuba and the United States in 1939. The refugees were eventually forced back to Europe, where a third of the passengers died in the Holocaust.

When Atkey returned to Ottawa, he made all senior officials in his department read the manuscript. And, as he turned his attention to the problem of the Vietnamese boat people, he asked: “Do we want to be known as the government that said no?”

As the Vietnamese crisis unfolded, Canada gradually increased the number of people it planned to help. There was an initial decision to accept 5,000. But as things worsened, that increased to 8,000.

Provisions for private sponsorship had been in place since 1977, but few Canadians understood or were interested in the scheme and, by the spring of 1979, fewer than 100 private sponsorships had been undertaken.

By the end of the year, 7,000 new Canadian sponsoring groups would privately sponsor 29,269 refugees.

While Adelman and Atkey struggled to comprehend the boat people problem, then-Ottawa mayor Marion Dewar decided to spend a weekend with her husband at a resort in the Gatineau Hills.

It rained, and she spent most of her time playing bridge and watching television, which was filled with reports o­n the crisis in Southeast Asia.

Determined to do something, back home she organized a meeting with local church leaders and federal immigration officials and discovered Canada’s quota to help 8,000 refugees had already been half-filled.

“I said, ‘You’ve o­nly got 4,000 left? We’ll take them,’ ” Dewar, who died in 2008, told the Ottawa Citizen years later.

“It was very slap-happy. It stuck in my mind: 4,000. We’ve got almost 400,000 in Ottawa. Surely we can handle that.”

Within a month, Project 4000 was underway and residents of Canada’s capital piled o­nto the refugee sponsorship bandwagon, signing up to support and welcome destitute families from halfway round the world.

By the end of July, two days before a crucial international conference o­n the boat people, the federal government decided to challenge Canadians and the rest of the world, announcing it would match whatever commitments the public made up to a total of 50,000 Indochinese refugees.

The public response was so overwhelming that the target of 50,000 sponsored refugees was met by November.

In the end, Canada resettled 60,000 Indochinese refugees between 1979 and 1980, of which about 26,000 were government-assisted and 34,000 were privately sponsored.

“When the music began with the Vietnamese boat people, Canada already had its dancing shoes o­n,” says Molloy, the chief co-ordinator of Canada’s boat people rescue operation and, later, ambassador to Jordan.

Programs were in place, politicians and senior civil servants were o­n side and the public was primed and willing to help.

But it was the political decision to go ahead that galvanized Canadians and energized the rescue effort, Molloy contends.

“It took a lot of guts to come up with a program to bring in 50,000 people. We were o­nly about a decade and a half into the idea of open immigration. To go before the people and say we are going to bring in 50,000 from a place far, far away, that was o­nly heard of in a war context, took a heck of a lot of political courage.”

Three and a half decades later, Adelman, Molloy and Alboim wondered if the courage and leadership that characterized the boat people rescue effort could be transferred to the Syrian refugee crisis.

They established a three-person task force to develop new strategies for refugee resettlement in Canada and crisscrossed the country talking to a variety of experts. In three reports discussing possible policies, they outlined projects that might revitalize refugee resettlement.

Their goal was ambitious: “to improve family reunification for refugees already in Canada, expand the pool of Canadians willing to sponsor refugees, improve the quality of support for government-assisted refugees and enhance labour market integration of refugees admitted to Canada under various resettlement programs.”

A core concern is the fact private refugee sponsorships, so successful in the “boat people” crisis, have atrophied and become the preserve of faith-based communities, ethnic and cultural groups.

They want to expand the base of people involved in sponsorships, creating more opportunities for groups such as book clubs, neighbourhood associations or UNI0Ns, to become involved.

Under existing programs, 90 per cent of private sponsorships in Canada are through faith-based groups and involve refugees already in Canada who are trying to bring relatives here.

The task force’s first report notes that the relatives already in Canada assume responsibility for much, if not all, of the cost as well as human support required, with the sponsors (usually the supporting church groups) acting as passive guarantors.”

The group called for a separate new family reunification program to allow refugees to reunite with relatives who are overseas and in need of protection. But it also called for the creation of an “insurance” fund to back up refugee reunification sponsorships in cases where a sponsoring family needs temporary financial assistance.

A reunification program would cost little but, most important, it would free up private sponsorship groups to refocus their attention o­n new crises like Syria. That could improve the refugee system’s flexibility and make it easier to respond quickly to a crisis.

A realignment of private sponsorships, shifting from reunification back to resettlement, would allow private sponsors to play a greater role in some of the more complex and traumatic cases that are now handled almost exclusively by the government-sponsored refugee program.

“Bringing some strategic rationale to these programs, and developing a separate refugee family reunification program, could result in more refugees being admitted, with the appropriate supports, at the same cost to the government,” says Alboim.

Recently, the task force called o­n Canada to boost the number of refugees it admits by connecting sponsored cases with employers who currently rely o­n low-skilled temporary foreign workers. That way, refugees would require little income support and employers could get a new source of loyal workers who, as permanent residents, would be at less risk of exploitation.

Sponsors or settlement agencies would also work with employers and communities to enhance the newcomers’ integration.

Resources now used by the government to process and police temporary foreign worker programs could then be redirected to expand and speed up refugee resettlement.

“This would be a win-win for all involved,” says Alboim.

According to government statistics, there were nearly 300,000 temporary foreign workers in Canada last year, and 20,000 of them worked at low-skill jobs.

After taking their proposals to focus groups in Halifax and Calgary this year, Adelman, Molloy and Alboim presented the federal government with a plan last month that calls for two pilot projects in Nova Scotia and southern Alberta to test a refugee resettlement plan that integrates resettlement and employment opportunities.

Changes to the temporary foreign workers program, making it more difficult for employers to use temporary workers to fill permanent, low-skill, low-wage jobs, should make the idea appealing to employers, they say. And smaller provinces, towns and rural communities, which have problems retaining population, are enthusiastic, since they will benefit from a steady stream of refugees.

“Here is a way that combines humanitarianism and business with good things for Canada,” says Adelman. “It works all around. There are private-public partnerships, business promotion, promoting small communities in Canada, rescuing refugees. What else can you want?”

Discussion of the pilot projects is still in the preliminary stages, Adelman adds, “but a properly implemented, revitalized program of private sponsorships could have the potential to welcome 20,000 more refugees a year to Canada.”