Tories drop the Tamil act

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said that if he does not see human rights progress in Sri Lanka, he will boycott the 2013 Commonwealth summit in Colombo.

He said, during a Sept. 9 roundtable with ethnic media—in response to a question from one of his own former Conservative candidates, no less—that he hoped other world leaders would take a similar position, and that this would pressure the Sri Lankan government to take action.

The statement was a bold one, but it was also a striking volte-face, at least in optics, from his government’s previous efforts to whip up public concern over Tamils, often tying “Tamil” and “terrorist” in the same sentence.

Barely three months after coming into power, Mr. Harper moved to label the Tamil Tigers a terrorist group, then labelled the World Tamil Movement the same two years later. When Tamil protesters blocked an expressway in Toronto in 2009, the government took efforts to note that some in the crowd were flying Tamil Tigers flags.

And as each ship carrying Tamil refugees arrived off the coast of Canada, the Conservatives warned Canadians that they could be carrying terrorists and criminals.

As the opposition parties picked up on this theme, the Tories didn’t back down, instead making it an election issue. They advertised pictures of the Tamil ship and promised to crack down on human smuggling if re-elected.

Now, after all that rhetoric, Mr. Harper is insinuating that the Sri Lankan government should be pressured to clean up its act, with no prominent mention of the Tamil Tigers.

To be sure, the government has often mentioned, when the issue of the Sri Lankan civil war arose, that the Sri Lankan military should commit to a ceasefire. But in the same breath, it always asked the rebels to do the same.

Why the change of heart? Was it the UN secretary general’s panel report that suggested the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tigers both violated international human rights and humanitarian law? Is it the fact that the Sri Lankan government still exists, while the Tigers’ insurgency has been virtually wiped out?

Both explanations are possible. But Mr. Harper is not known to kowtow to any UN consensus, nor to stand on nuanced ground.

Rather, he often makes a public scene out of rejecting them, saying that Canada is standing on “principled” positions. He knows who his friends are.

What is more likely is that Mr. Harper now has a majority, and does not have to worry about getting the public onside to push through his human smuggling bill.

The government faced fierce opposition on it. So they chose to turn the situation into a wedge issue, using the Tamil refugees as a tool in their quest to cast all refugees in a negative light, whetting the public’s appetite for change.

Now that they no longer need the tool, they can drop the act and instead cuddle up to the 100,000 or more potential Tamil votes in Toronto.