Professor Aparna Sundar, Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University, has most kindly provided us with the transcript from her presentation at last week's panel - "Tamil Canada in the Media Eye: Protests Under Multiculturalism."
Each panelist spoke for about 5 minutes, after which they took questions from the audience.
Prof. Sundar covered some important points about the responsibility of the media and the boundaries of "Canadian multiculturalism."
Note: For those who are interested, I've added links to the various articles Prof. Sundar cites. Please note that these may not be the place the piece was originally published, and that the link may not always be active / accessible. -- Koko
Presentation given by Prof. Aparna Sundar (Assistant Professor of Politics and Public Administration at Ryerson University), at "Tamil Canada in the Media Eye: Protests Under Multiculturalism" - a panel discussion held on 30 November 2009 at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.
My first point is about the media. Much of the media commentary about the Tamil-Canadian protests was not profoundly thoughtful or enlightening, and served mainly to reinforce commonly held beliefs and prejudices. The debate over the right of protestors to protest versus the right of others to go about their daily business efficiently is always something one hears in the context of protests, but in this case, the right was further questioned because of who the protestors were. Were they really Canadian, and should they be allowed the “privileges” of Canadian citizenship? Aside from the more egregious and really quite predictable pieces along these lines by the likes of Christie Blatchford writing in the Globe and Mail, and Mark Steyn in Maclean’s ,[i] even quite well-meaning pieces have used the language of “Canadians’ as distinct from “Tamils” For instance, the National Post’s Stuart Bell, who has done some good reporting on the conflict itself, when asked a question at the Tamil Studies conference here in May about his focus on the “terror” angle, responded that otherwise most “Canadian” readers have a limited interest in these stories from “elsewhere”. So clearly Tamils, or others like myself who might have an interest in international stories, are not “Canadians.”
So the first issue with the mainstream media is that they by and large identify with a particular kind of elite and rather narrow image of who is Canadian (in Steyn’s words, most of the time the veil is down, and they seem unaware of the scale of social transformation in the country). But to me these comments are also reflective of a deeper problem with the media – that they do not see a responsibility for themselves as opinion makers, as shapers of public culture, or even as providers of some kind of unbiased “truth”. Bell’s statement that he writes what he thinks Canadians are interested to read reflects a kind of market-driven view of the media. But more than that, there is a celebration of ignorance, a celebration that reflects the arrogance of those who don’t need to know, but is also frightening if we think in terms of what the role of the media should be in a democratic society: In this sense, I don’t think the media serve even “mainstream” Canadians all that well.
This celebration of ignorance is seen in all the guessing and debate about numbers – is 200,000 the right number, if not, what is, etc -
Blatchford – “We live in a country where we don’t even know how many of our fellows are Tamils from Sri Lanka, but are simultaneously asked to accept on faith that they are properly and legally here and to extend to them every privilege conferred by Canadian citizenship”
Wente: “I should be ashamed of my ignorance. But I suspect it’s shared by most Canadians. It’s safe to say that not one in 50 would be able to explain who these people are and what they want – even though, on Tuesday, more than 30,000 of them staged one of the biggest demonstrations that Parliament Hill has seen in years.” She should be ashamed of her ignorance, but she’s clearly not, because everyone shares it, and she as an opinion maker has no greater responsibility to be informed than anyone else.
The media’s disinterest in looking deeper is linked to my second point, which has to do with the nature of Canadian multiculturalism itself. This multiculturalism is premised on the idea, as Sunera Thobani in her book Exalted Subjects puts it, of Canadians as benevolent and generous people, and multiculturalism as a natural outgrowth of that benevolence. Thus once a group has come to Canada, its troubles are over and we don’t really need to know about them. There is a willingness to accept a certain colourful, superficial diversity – of food, attire, and customs – but little effort to go beyond.
One of the very few media pieces that attempted to reflect more deeply on the meaning of the protests was an interview with Will Kymlicka, one of the leading Canadian theorists of multiculturalism. Kymlicka was surprisingly sanguine about the state of multiculturalism in Canada today, saying that “the Tamil case was exceptional, and not an indicator of any general breakdown in the way the concerns of ethnic groups are entering the political process. Canadians generally understand and accept that immigrants have strong concerns about events in their homeland, and will mobilize in times of crisis, and normally politicians would find a way to create channels of communication. But in this case, politicians were terrified of being caught in a photo where someone was waving the Tamil Tiger flag and hence being labelled soft on terrorism..”
But I’m not sure one can separate or demarcate these issues so easily, for the war on terror has itself exposed the fault-lines of our version of multiculturalism. Thus terrorism becomes seen as ingratitude for the benevolence of Canadians, and one solution to it is to become less open and benevolent. It is interesting that the language of illegality, of vast numbers of people skulking under the radar of the law, is so much a part of these discussions. The “war on terror” has allowed for a retreat from even the multiculturalism of the 1970s and 1980s, limited though it might have been. So, for instance, the response to the arrival of the Ocean Lady was framed, both by the Govt and the media, in terms of safeguarding against terrorism, rather than in terms of a humanitarian response to the war, and death and displacement in SL of only a few months ago.
But the final point about multiculturalism I want to make is the one this panel raises, and which was the title of Wente’s piece: “Can you belong to more than one nation?” where she goes on to ask: “How will Canada evolve when so many people have multiple allegiances, to homeland and to host land?”
Kymlicka, Charles Taylor, and others have talked in terms of multiculturalism needing to accommodate “deep diversity” because those expressing it are also expressing a desire for Canada to accommodate it, and this indicates a desire to belong to the Canadian whole. But the protests challenge this, not because the protesters did not repeatedly reaffirm their allegiance to “Canada and Canadian values”, which they did, but because they showed how strongly they continued to be attached to other nations, how, despite Canada’s generosity and tolerance, even second and third generation Tamils felt a sense of transnational solidarity. Some boundary around the demonstration of an acceptable amount of emotion and attachment to worlds outside of Canada had been breached.
But the breaching of this boundary of what constitutes acceptable public behaviour is not only a challenge for Canadian multiculturalism, it is also a challenge to what counts for active citizenship in Canada, and this is my third major point. I would suggest that some of those who took offence did so because they felt these protests went beyond the bounds of normal democratic behaviour – which is to vote every four years, and lobby politely with elected officials if necessary the rest of the time. The sustained activism of the Tamil diaspora – and here I refer not only to the large human chains and demonstrations, but the numerous meetings and information sessions and efforts at networking carried out by Tamil-Canadians of all ages, occupations, and political persuasions - has forced us to re-examine what citizenship itself means. In this context, I want to quote the words of French theorist Etienne Balibar, who wrote a piece entitled “What we owe to the Sans Papiers” in response to the militant mobilisations of people without status in France. He wrote: ”we owe them for having forced the barriers of communication, for having made themselves seen and heard for what they are, not spectres of delinquency and invasion, but workers, families, from both here and elsewhere,…– We owe them for having…recreated citizenship among us, in as much as it is not an institution or a statute but a collective practice…(They) have contributed responsibly to the life of the community by giving rise to new forms of activism and renewing older ones. Now if activism is not everything which makes up active citizenship, it is clearly one of its indispensable components. One cannot at the same time deplore democratic apathy and yet disregard the significance of the recent mobilisations (around the rights of foreigners residing in France).” But further, he writes, “By this, they have given political activity the transnational dimension which we so greatly require in order to open up perspectives of social transformation and of civility in the era of globalization.”
I think it’s time then that we in Canada – not only in the media but also and especially in academia – think seriously about what we owe to the Tamils, how their activism has helped redefine not just multiculturalism but what citizenship itself should mean in this era of globalization. This is an important discussion that we need to have more of, and I want to thank the organizers of today’s panel for initiating it here today.
[i] Like the revelation during the 2006 war with Israel that half the population of Lebanon hold Canadian passports, the Tamil protests were one of those rare moments when the veil lifts and Canadians glimpse the sheer scale of societal transformation. The obvious question prompted by the size of demonstrations in Ottawa and Toronto is: how did Canada acquire that many Tamils? News reports suggesting that Toronto is home to “200,000 Tamils” prompted a lot of pooh-poohing about inflated figures and unreliable statistics. And surely they are. I doubt there are verifiable numbers on the Tamil population of Ontario. But, even if they’re half that 200,000, it would seem to be more Tamils than anyone might reasonably need—or indeed, even if you did need them, more than you could reasonably expect to acquire.” Mark Steyn. “Tamil Questions that can’t be Asked,” Macleans, May 28, 2009.
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