Personal "goodwill mission" is perplexing to Canada's first Tamil MP

 Rathika Sitsabaiesan elected new MP. Scarborough-Rouge River NDP candidate Rathika Sitsabaiesan celebrates her victory with her campaign manager Andrea Moffat and supporters May 2, 2011. file photo/DAN PEARCE Marlene Gallyot says she's determined to help Scarborough's large Tamil population by meeting with Sri Lanka's president next month. "I'm going to see how I can build a bridge of friendship for the Tamil community," said Gallyot, who ran as a Conservative in the May 2 federal election in the Scarborough-Rouge River riding but lost to rookie NDP candidate Rathika Sitsabaiesan -- Canada's first Tamil MP. Gallyot said she will ask Sri Lankan president Mahinda Rajapaksa, who has agreed to see her, to allow Tamils more freedom of movement in Sri Lanka and to let Canada to establish a High Commission in the northern city of Jaffna. "

The only way I could do this is go straight to the source," Gallyot said.

As a director of the Canadian Cricket Federation, she said she will also propose exchanges of cricketers between Canada, Sri Lanka, and the Indian State of Tamil Nadu where Gallyot was born and has high-placed political friends.

Gallyot's personal "goodwill mission" is perplexing to Sitsabaiesan.

Travel to Sri Lanka as a tourist is a sensitive issue among Scarborough's Tamils, many of whom consider Rajapaksa, who crushed Tamil Tiger separatists in 2009, to be guilty of war crimes against Tamil civilians.

The Scarborough-based Canadian Tamil Congress continues to call for a boycott of Sri Lankan goods and services.

Sitsabaiesan said Gallyot may be going against the community's real wishes. "I don't think she's aware of the real issues," the MP said, but speculated Gallyot's trip is evidence a Conservative campaign to court "ethnic" votes continues.

Gallyot, an Anglo-Indian who speaks Tamil, is a Thornhill resident who since the election has resumed her work as executive assistant to a regional councillor in Markham.

Knocking on doors in the Scarborough-Rouge River riding, she said, she met Tamil voters who said the lack of a Canadian visa office in Jaffna was an inconvenience because relatives would have to travel south to Canada's embassy in the capital, Colombo.

Sitsabaiesan said she has been making the same suggestion for years.

But while Sitsabaiesan said she'll continue to push the Conservative government to support an independent investigation of the alleged war crimes - and plans to screen a UK documentary on the subject for MPs this fall - Gallyot said she's trying to help Tamils in small ways.

"There's two sides always to any story and any country," she added, accusing some Tamil critics of Sri Lanka's government of engaging in a "witch hunt."

Crimes against humanity should be punished, but "you cannot fight stuff with aggression," Gallyot said. "The more you shout and ask for something, you're not going to get anything."

She will also visit Tamil Nadu, whose latest premier, J. Jayalalithaa, Gallyot calls a personal friend.

Gallyot said she will travel as "a goodwill ambassador" and meet Federal Environment Minister Peter Kent, Foreign Affairs Minister John Baird and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney before she leaves at the end of this month.

"Kenney is a kind man. He will listen about the office (in Jaffna)," she said.

On Thursday, Candice Malcolm, Kenney's press secretary, said Gallyot is not travelling on behalf of the Canadian government, though as a private citizen she can go where she wants.

David Poopalapillai, national spokesperson for the Congress said he believes Gallyot is sincere, and her willingness to go to Sri Lanka and meet Rajapaksa should be appreciated, but with the president's track record he doubts Gallyot's mission will succeed.

Poopalapillai also supports opening a Canadian High Commission office in Jaffna, because, he said, Tamils from Sri Lanka's north in practice don't have freedom of movement to go to the capital. It's "still not safe for an average Tamil," he said.

Scarborough-Agincourt MP Jim Karygiannis, who has travelled to Sri Lanka, disagreed with Gallyot's plan for a Jaffna office. "I have not heard from any of my constituents that they have problems going to Columbo," the Liberal MP said.

When a Liberal government tried to do the same thing following the Indian Ocean tsunami, "the Conservatives were howling," Karygiannis said, "and at the time we had reason to do it."

It now would be better to spend the cost of a Jaffna High Commission on increasing staff in Columbo, so Canadian authorities there can make quicker decisions on which potential immigrants to admit, he said.