Mr. Speaker, May 18 is not just a date on a calendar. For Tamil Canadians, it is a wound that has never fully healed. Seventeen years ago, the Sri Lankan civil war ended in a final offensive that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of Tamil civilians in a matter of weeks. Hundreds of thousands were displaced. The wounds, psychological, familial and cultural, persist to this day.
As someone with Tamil roots, I carry this history. Tamil Canadians across the country carry it, too, in the names of relatives they never got to say goodbye to and in the trauma passed silently between generations.
Tamil Canadians across the country are asking for the truth to be spoken here, in the House, where it matters. We remember on May 18, Tamil Genocide Remembrance Day, because memory is resistance and because silence encourages those who would repeat these horrors elsewhere in the world. I call on the the government and all members to stand with Tamil Canadians across the nation this month.