In August 1972, the Canadian government resolved to admit 6,000 Ugandan Asians. An ‘immigration team’ was sent to Uganda and a temporary immigration office was set up in Kampala.

According to Freda Hawkins, the Kampala office was “under the direction of the head of our Beirut office, a French Canadian with wide experience in overseas immigration operations”.

By the end of 1972, “thirty-one charter flights had brought 4,420 Uganda Asians to Canada and the total number in Canada at the end of the year was 5,021, the remainder having made their own travel arrangements. New arrivals were then coming in at a rate of twenty-five or thirty a week. Of the 4,420 Uganda Asians who came to Canada on the charter flights, 1,607 had Uganda citizenship, 1,284 were stateless, 904 had British citizenship and 249 Indian citizenship. The others were citizens of one or another of the following countries: Kenya, Tanzania, Pakistan, South Africa, France and Mauritius. The remaining 1,154 Uganda Asians who had been issued with Canadian visas had still not arrived. Many were believed to be visiting relatives in Britain first, or possibly spending their first winter outside Uganda there.”

Source: Freda Hawkins, ‘Uganda Asians in Canada’ in Ethnic and Migration Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, pp. 268