Tamils' double-loss: Losing the war in Sri Lanka, losing influence in Ottawa

Tamil-Canadians I’ve spoken with in recent weeks are enduring a double blow. On the other side of the world, their family members and old friends are suffering amidst the Sri Lankan army’s methodical fight to the finish against the Tamil Tigers. Here in Canada, meanwhile, they've been abandoned by once-friendly politicians — and Tamil activists seem to have no idea why.

It’s nothing personal, I tell them. Most Canadians don’t care about any of the ethno-religious conflicts taking place around the world. Darfur, Congo, Chechnya — I doubt one Canadian in 10 could find any of these places on a map. Even the Palestinians — darlings though they’ve become of the university and union left — don’t register with average voters. Both Michael Ignatieff and Stephen Harper were strong backers of Israel during the recent Gaza campaign, and they paid no political price for it — except among Arab-Canadian activists and student groups, blocs that both major parties have conceded to the NDP anyway.

But the Tamils always thought they were different — and I can understand why. For years, the Liberals bent over backward to court the quarter-million-strong Tamil Canadian community. Paul Martin played to the Tamil voting bloc during his own rise to power, and the large Tiger-friendly Tamil delegation was a key player at the 2006 Liberal convention.

But that was then. In April, when Tamil protestors flying Tiger flags appeared in force on Parliament Hill, they were treated like swine-flu sufferers. Both Harper and Ignatieff banned their caucuses from having any contact with the crowd — leading to the pathetic sight of Liberal backbenchers shouting luke-warn encouragement from the other side of the street. A delegation of hand-picked Tamil moderates was permitted a brief, private meeting with Ignatieff. But for public consumption, the protestors had to settle for the booby prize of Jack Layton.

When pro-Hamas Arab protestors get shunned by politicians, they expect it — since one of their grievances is that the country is controlled by a "Zionist lobby" (e.g., me). But Tamils have always gotten better treatment. It's something they've come to expect.

Many Canadian Tamils, I think, had convinced themselves that Liberals genuinely cared about their struggle for a separate nation in Sri Lanka. In past years, I’ve sat in at Tamil community gatherings in Toronto’s suburbs, and heard MPs such as Jim Karygiannis and Derek Lee wax eloquently about the Tamil cause. Tamil leaders naturally believed the Liberals were on their side as a matter of true principle. They mistook the party's cynical game of fair-weather ethnopolitics for durable ethno-partisanship.

A strong, principled leader such as Michael Ignatieff is an ethno-politician's worst enemy. Unlike Paul Martin or Stéphane Dion, he is genuinely educated about foreign affairs. He knows the Tigers are a terrorist group under Canadian law, and they they use human shields and child-soldiers as expendable fodder in their increasingly nihilistic struggle. Moreover, he doesn’t lie awake at night worrying about losing this or that riding in Mississauga or Scarborough. His eye on the bigger prize, which can’t be won if mainstream voters see the Liberals as an amoral patchwork of parochial constituencies.

The result: Tamils have lost their friends in Ottawa just as they are losing the war in Sri Lanka. All in all, a very bad year for the people carrying the Tamil Tiger flags.

(Jonathan Kay)(National Post)