Colour us Crazy About Canada

We continue to hear from various people in the Tamil community in Canada and most of these folks are CANADIAN. Let's be clear about that. We are not talking about people who are NOT CANADIAN, but in Canada, like it or not, we now have been hyphenated, not just by sociologists and political scientists and political parties, but by the government itself.

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The Census requires that we fully answer questions about heritage and background and whether we like it or not, the burden of being hyphenated is something we all have to carry. And so whatever I say here about Tamils in Toronto or anywhere else, I’m referring to Tamil Canadians. Many Tamil Canadians are requesting that our government be more vigorous in its condemnation of what the Sri Lankan regime is doing by attacking the Tamil population in Sri Lanka. Many Tamil Canadians are requesting that our government take seriously the idea of economic sanctions against Sri Lanka and encourage other countries to do the same. When chatting with Lorrie Goldstein yesterday of the Toronto Sun, I felt the need to tell Lorrie that while many Canadians are listening to the Tamil Canadians’ requests, other Canadians feel like these requests are demands. And when Canadians feel that something is being demanded of them and demanded of their government, they respond and sometimes they respond harshly, and when the demands are made on the lawns of a provincial legislature, the reaction is not very sharp, not very harsh. It gets sharper if the demonstration of demands moves onto the streets and interrupts regular life, and then when the demonstration of demands becomes several thousand Tamils taking over a piece of a highway, one of the busiest highways on a Sunday night in the heart of Canada's most heavily populated city, and when all of the lanes on both sides of the highway are blocked for six hours and when many of the people doing the blocking are putting women and children to the front of the blockade and when several of the blockaders are flying foreign flags, not Canadian flags, foreign flags and when those foreign flags are not just foreign to Canada but foreign to civilization itself, flags that represent a terrorist organization, which in Sri Lanka uses women and children as human shields, which kidnaps children and turns them into so-called child soldiers, who strap suicide vests to young boys, when Canadians watch this happening, they react more than a little sharply. They react angrily. My friend Lorrie Goldstein wrote and repeated on our air, "Let's not pretend that much of the condemnation of Tamils in Canada for protesting the plight of Tamil civilians in Sri Lanka isn't racist.” I will continue to quote him. He wrote:

"All hell has broken loose on talk radio and media websites seeking public reaction -- much of it utterly racist. Every experienced media commentator knows what's going on. To simply keep mindlessly repeating that the only topics worth discussing are that shutting down the Gardiner was irresponsible, the Tamil Tigers are terrorists and if Canadian Tamils don't like it here, they should go back where they come from, is racism. Of course closing down the Gardiner was irresponsible. Of course the Tigers are terrorists. But falsely implying most Tamil Canadians are crazed radicals, ignoring the fact most have protested peacefully for months, and implying they have no right to influence Canada's foreign policy is unjust. Further, blaming only the Tigers for atrocities, when credible human rights agencies also condemn the government and military of Sri Lanka for decades of persecution of that country's Tamil minority, is immoral. Canada should be as tough on the Sri Lankan government as on the Tigers. That's the moral position.”

I want you to know that Lorrie Goldstein rarely plays the race card. But in the last few days he heard things and saw things that to his Canadian ears, his Canadian sensibilities, felt like some people were going off the rails and the colour of some of the rhetoric became tinged with racism. To cut to the chase it looked and sounded to him like a bunch of white guys, telling a bunch of brown guys, we're more Canadian than you are. If you don't like it in my Canada, go back to that brown country you came from. I want you to know that I don't disagree with Lorrie Goldstein, there was some of that going on this week. In every one of these dog piles, some of those who pile on have impure intentions. It happens to fringe political parties all the time. When the Reform Party got going, the Liberals and their media allies were quick to seize on the obvious, that some members of the party were western separatists, that some were viciously anti-French and anti-Semitic, anti-gay and anti-visible minority immigrant. Media helped fuel that characterization of Reform. Most mainstream media never did the same in exposing anti-Western Canadian bigotry, anti-Christian bigotry, and anti-pro family bigotry in the bowels of the Liberal party. There is no shortage of bigotry in a big country that one can focus on and even obsess about if one chooses to. I have no doubt that Lorrie - and knowing how often he has been called racist by lazy headed critics of his - played that race card with great reluctance. The part of the conversation we had yesterday, the part I want to focus on, is that which changed the focus from racial feelings, which are morally illegitimate, to those feelings of fear, which I think are totally legitimate based on what Canadians, especially in the Greater Toronto area, do know about the Tamil Tigers and about the behavior that they witnessed on Mother’s Day, last Sunday on the Gardiner Expressway. When people saw a highway being occupied by thousands of people, and some of them clearly had radical intentions and align themselves with the Tamil Tigers, it created feelings of legitimate fear. What Canadians are responding to is not the colour of Tamil Canadian skin. They’re responding to the colour of Tamil Canadian behavior in Toronto. Canadians hear, even today, news that the Sri Lankan government wants a fight to the finish with the Tamil Tigers, and civilians are trying to flee the war zone and are being prevented from doing so by the Tamil Tigers and these rebels are using women and children as human shields. That is what many members of the public were watching on Sunday, not on the streets of Sri Lanka, but rather on a highway in Canada, and these folks, most of whom were desperately trying to do whatever they could to get attention for their cause, were terrifying people in Toronto and because of major media coverage in the rest of the country, the reaction from most Canadians on this, in my humble opinion, was not based on the colour of Tamil Skin. It was based on behavior. Most Canadians do not want our police, who are here to provide public safety, to be provoked into looking like they are agents of the Sri Lankan government. As I said to Lorrie Goldstein yesterday, victory for the radicals would have been a picture splashed around news sites around the world of a little brown face bloodied by a police baton, or some other form of police enforcement. Police bent over backwards to make sure that kind of payoff to radical elements, that kind of picture, was not created on Sunday night. Police certainly could not be accused of racism. Some could even say that reverse racism was taking place because if a white group, whether it was a Christian fundamentalist group protesting abortion or perhaps some Hells Angels wannabes creating a similar blockade, well that might have triggered a less cautious response. But as we head into a long weekend in this country, where most of us want to kick back and enjoy some time with our friends and families, we ought to ask ourselves the question, "Why is it that for the most part, we aren't worried about being able to do what we want this weekend, without fear of being interrupted, intimidated or terrorized by the kinds of events we see in far off lands." And I will suggest that the answer is: Canada is Special. Canada is exceptional, exceptionally free and dare I say it, exceptionally tolerant. The Tamil Canadian community numbers are in the hundreds of thousands. How could that be if it weren't for a very tolerant, very generous family reunification immigration policy, layered on top of a very generous refugee policy. Canada isn't just one of the nice guys on the planet. It may be one of the nicest. Sometimes nice guys get taken advantage of. Sometimes they can become chumps. And some Canadians paying attention to the news of last week felt that way. Has my country gone from nice guy to nice chump? We like being a sanctuary, a paradise from people who have tasted the hell of other societies. But we do not want to become a doormat. That's not racial. That's rational. You see, no matter which cause some Canadians wish the government and their fellow Canadians would believe in, no cause is bigger than Canada itself. Most of us aren't concerned about whether or not Dalton McGuinty, the premier of Ontario, loses four or five Liberal seats in ridings where a lot of Tamil Canadians vote. And so we don't gauge our response to Sunday night the way he does. Most of us aren't concerned about whether Michael Ignatieff loses a few seats to the NDP or a few thousand dollars in fundraising efforts if he is on the political wrong side of the Tamil issue. Most of us trust this cause called Canada to be what we have always known it to be, a country that is about a lot of things, but is mostly about peace, order, and good government. Peace meaning social peace, religious peace, labour peace and we want no piece of any other country. Order is what we want and so when people want to protest, we want them to do it in an orderly way. We know that disorder can cause confrontation, can cause bloodshed, it can cause the kinds of things that exist in countries that export their people to us. We want their people, but not their problems. And good government. Good government doesn't turn on its own people and good government doesn't turn one part of the country on the other. My cause and your cause is Canada, a paradise for freedom, a sanctuary for those who have been dispossessed of their freedom. What is the colour of freedom? It looks like a red maple leaf to me, on a white backdrop with two thick red borders. The colour of freedom is Canada. Why do we love her so? Because we'd be crazy not to. We're crazy about Canada and make no apologies for it. Colour me Crazy about Canada. I’m Charles Adler on the Corus Radio Network.