My name is Letchumanapihai Pathmayohan. Thanks for the opportunity to come here to speak. I saw this today in the newspaper so I thought of coming after I read about it.
As for the reason I'm here, I have been here in Canada for more than a quarter-century. I came from a war-torn country. I should say now that there's genocide in that country against Tamil people. When Bill C-51 came to be implemented, before that, what was happening in our community is that we were unable to bring our political matters, political issues, to the mainstream media or to the Canadian policy-makers, because we became like [Inaudible—Editor] We didn't know how to express that to the Canadian government, the policy-makers, the decision-makers, or the embassy, and we always were seeing scary things and fear tactics. We couldn't speak and we couldn't tell the truth.
When we came here, we thought that Canada had such freedom of speech and freedom of assembly all over the country. I really appreciate the Charter of Rights of Canada, which we don't have back home in my old country. We don't have any human rights there, and there is no Amnesty International. We came from that kind of country. We came here and our sovereignty.... We are free to bring these matters to the politicians, the decision-makers.
All of it it is under threat from all the terrorists, so we are going to be afraid to come forward and speak out. The majority went into the closet, even the educators and economic intelligentsia; they all went quietly. Mostly, it's keep your mouth shut. They want to go to work and they don't want to talk about these things. That disappears. The scary part is to speak out. That's what I am here to tell the committee. We had to work politically, in a political manner, and how did we want to bring it if we had this kind of a fear thing? Also, it brings the freedom fighters. The terrorists came, and they never consulted with the community people or the members in a due process as to whether it was the right thing they were doing or wrong. The people were defenceless, because we came from a troubled country. That sense of [Inaudible—Editor] does not exist here, I believe.
In Toronto, they have a lot of communities, quite a few. There is a large number of Tamil communities, but in Vancouver, we are all scattered. We are quite a few, I guess. That's what my sense of it is. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to speak today.