Multiculturalism in Canada's Sri Lankan Tamil Diaspora

by Jennifer Hyndman

Tamil protest in Toronto on May 10, 2009

More than ever, multiculturalism is a contested concept and policy. After the recent attacks in Brussels, Paris, and Beirut—among other cities—immigration is increasingly and often erroneously linked to questions of national security, since the assailants are often born in Europe and are full EU citizens. In Europe, multiculturalism is said to have failed; in Canada, it lives on in both policy and practice. But for how long? And in what form? In particular, how is it understood and expressed by the racialized newcomers and their children who come from war zones to Canada as part of a diaspora? Addressing this question is the aim of a current research project, funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and housed at the Canada Program of the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs.

Multiculturalism has little purchase as a concept in the US, but in Canada it has been policy for forty-five years. Multiculturalism was initially coined by the Canadian state under Pierre Elliot Trudeau in 1971 as a policy to incorporate new cultures and people into its society. This came just after Canada introduced a less Eurocentric, points-based immigration process that allowed a far greater number of nationalities to enter Canada. Multiculturalism became law in 1988, and has been implemented across Canadian institutions ever since. Today, multiculturalism is embedded in schools, law, and other Canadian institutions. Yet few scholars have examined how immigrant newcomers—including refugees—have taken up this policy and concept and made it their own. 

Contrast the Canadian and European experience on multiculturalism: many European leaders have declared its failure, and scholars have traced global backlash against multicultural policies. England’s prime minister David Cameron, for example, argued on BBC News in 2011 that “state multiculturalism” has encouraged different cultures to live different lives, often “behaving in ways that run counter to our values” and at the expense of a unifying “vision of society to which they feel they want to belong.” German chancellor Angela Merkel similarly argued in 2010 that multiculturalism as a vision for society has “utterly failed.” 

In contrast, Canadian politicians like current Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, view multiculturalism as an object of pride and central to Canadian social fabric. Canadians are more likely to view it positively, as a badge of citizenship or belonging, according to the findings collected to date. Being multicultural has become closely intertwined with what it means to be Canadian, especially for immigrants and their children. Multiculturalism is not just a policy.

Working together with Dr. Amarnath Amarasingam, a postdoctoral fellow at Dalhousie University in Canada, and Gayathri Naganthan, a medical student at McMaster University, the project has conducted four focus groups and fifty-two in-depth interviews with both Sri Lankan Tamils who came as immigrants (first generation) and those who were born in Canada of such parents (second generation) to explore the meanings of multiculturalism in Canada. 

Focus groups also explored the importance of transnational identities in the face of acute human rights atrocities against—and death of—Tamils in Sri Lanka in 2009. A longstanding war since 1983 between the government of Sri Lanka and the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) ended in the worst violence of that twenty-six-year period. In the first five months of 2009, some 40,000 Sri Lankan Tamil civilians were killed in fighting between the two parties. May also marked the death of the LTTE leader, and the end of military conflict in Sri Lanka. Once the conflict ended, hundreds of thousands of Tamil Sri Lankan citizens were interned in camps in the northern Wanni region. These deaths and this massive scale of detention reverberated in Canada, which hosts the largest single Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora in the world with upwards of 250,000 members.

Among Sri Lankan Tamils who have come to Canada—as refugees, family members of those refugees, and immigrants more generally—we wanted to know how they perceived multiculturalism: was it simply a government policy or did it have other more everyday meanings? 

Multiculturalism, as a deeply contested theory, has engendered a variety of debates and discussion. Several scholars, for example, have argued that multiculturalism is an extension of the “white settler state” which allows just enough room to be different and accepted by Canadian society, but not enough to change institutional power or challenge patterns of privilege that stem from the settler state and its “whiteness.” Civic pride in Canada has been identified by scholars with reference to Canada’s role as a global peacekeeper, the legally enshrined right to universal health care—in terms of state enterprise nationalism around gas pipelines, as well as English-Canadian nationalism with respect to Quebec separatism. 

There has been relatively less research, however, with first-generation immigrants and their second-generation children born in Canada about how they articulate their identities in Canada and “live” multiculturalism (or not) in their everyday lives. Many scholars have noted that while multiculturalism in Canada may be popular, it is also superficial: a multicultural ethos rarely moving beyond “saris, samosas, and steel bands” into something more substantial. 

One might expect to witness such cynicism among multicultural newcomers, but our research suggests something quite different. Multiculturalism is real and woven into the daily lives of both Sri Lankan Tamil immigrants and their second-generation children born in Canada. We go further to argue that Canadian multiculturalism functions as “banal nationalism” in Canada, as daily practices of tacit and peaceful nation building are repeated on a daily basis among Sri Lankan Tamil Canadians. 

Sri Lanka becomes an exclusionary state against which Tamils in Canada define themselves. Many expressed a sense of inclusion in Canada that is attributed to experiences of marginalization in Sri Lanka. A seventy-five-year-old Tamil man who arrived in Canada at the age of forty-five emphasized the idea of Canada as a “nation of immigrants,” a theme we revisit below. This respondent had migrated from Sri Lanka at the age of twenty-five in 1962, going to the UK to study, and remaining there for twenty years before arriving in Canada. He noted repeatedly that he had “no interest in Sri Lanka,” that it was a “run-down country,” and with the postwar militarization of the Tamil-dominated northern and eastern provinces, he has lost all interest in ever returning. When asked about his Canadian identity, he too pointed to multiculturalism, equal rights, and inclusion. 

“In Sri Lanka, you’re not respected as a Tamil,” he noted. “You feel that you are one below, you know? In Canada, you feel like you can give your life for this country because you are one hundred percent like anybody else. In Sri Lanka, you are not one hundred percent like the rest of the majority.” For this respondent, life in the UK also emerged as an important point of comparison to Canada, having spent considerable time there. “The UK is not an immigrant country,” he argued, “so you are never a part of the country. You’re always an immigrant. In Canada, everyone is an immigrant. So, Canada can be your home.” 

For younger participants, their experiences of Sri Lanka were, by definition, less direct and more influenced by their families, diaspora activism, and/or growing up in Canada than about experiences of marginalization in Sri Lanka. Several noted incidents of racism and discrimination in Canada. One twenty-two-year-old Tamil woman, who was born in Toronto, recalled visiting Sri Lanka with her parents in the late 1990s and feeling very alarmed about the situation there. As she explained, “I didn’t understand, but I remember walking down the street and my mom was like, ‘Don’t speak English. Don’t speak Tamil. Don’t speak any of the languages you know. Just keep your eyes down.’ And the streets were like lined with soldiers, and I don’t know. I didn’t really feel safe.” While she recounted experiences of xenophobia and racism related to her religious identity and her activism in Canada around developments in Sri Lanka, she nevertheless argued that Canada was home.

A thirty-two-year old male participant who was born in England and came to Canada at the age of eleven months, for example, described the weak national identity of Canada as something commendable. “There’s a reason why people think we have a weak national identity, Canadians and people outside alike. It’s because we’re not married to political positions and strategies as a country the way a lot of other countries are. So it makes us look weak, but at the same time it’s amazing.”

By not being “married to political positions,” the exclusionary construct of the “nation” is pried open and rendered banal in an additional sense. Multiculturalism in Canada becomes a banal, everyday frame of reference that offers belonging and “nationness” in a new state, having been made to feel excluded from the predominantly Sinhala nationalism Sri Lankan state. 

These meanings of multiculturalism, derived from newcomers and their children, are alive and well among our research participants. They also point to more optimistic prospect for multicultural policies than European readings of multiculturalism, and offer hints to governments—municipal, state/provincial, and federal—about how to create belonging for newcomers fleeing a country where they were unwelcome minorities. Multiculturalism is a banal nationalism that offers a big tent and a new start for many Tamil Sri Lankans in Canada.

Whether respondents experienced discrimination in Sri Lanka while growing up there or felt unsafe during family visits during the war, most respondents expressed an overall sense of inclusion and security while in Canada. 

Photo Caption

Tamil protest in Toronto on May 10, 2009. Photo credit: NMinTO, Flickr, https://flic.kr/p/6n31tZ.