1. “Graduate Nurses from Asia,” Library and Archives Canada [LAC], Online MIKAN no. 4365900, Item 2640, Acc. 1972-047 NPC, Box 06274.1. Though undated, the photo was taken sometime between 1959 and 1961, as a search of the LAC collection has revealed that one of the nurses named, Miss Loan Hoa Tjoe, was in Canada with the Economic and Technical Assistance Branch (i.e., the Colombo Plan) during this time.
2. After the creation of the Canadian International Development Agency in 1968, the Colombo Plan became less important to the overall Canadian aid program. LAC files indicate that fellows continued to come to Canada specifically under the Colombo Plan program into the early 1970s, but at much lower numbers than in the previous two decades.
3. I do not have complete numbers on how many fellows came to Canada from South and Southeast Asia during this period through the WHO program as compared to the Colombo Plan. The data that I do have indicates that the Colombo Plan was significantly larger in terms of total numbers of fellows coming to Canada than the WHO fellowship program, both in total and specifically in terms of those coming from South and Southeast Asia (see Table 1). Fellows from South and Southeast Asia made up much smaller percentages of the total number of WHO fellows, in opposition to the Colombo Plan, where most students arrived from South and Southeast Asia. An uncertain percentage of this smaller total would have been spread over many countries, including Canada. Therefore, it stands to reason that the WHO fellowship program brought in many fewer students than the Colombo Plan.
4. The Colombo Plan for Co-operative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia, Seventeenth Annual Report of the Consultative Committee, Vancouver, British Columbia, October 1969 (Ottawa: Queen’s Printer for Canada, 1970), 423–24.
5. David Wright, Sasha Mullally, and Mary Colleen Cordukes, "'Worse than Being Married': The Exodus of British Doctors from the National Health Service to Canada, c. 1955-75," Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 65, no. 4 (2010): 546-75, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhmas/jrq013