A race to win a riding in the Ontario Provincial Parliament election in Canada that was held on June 7 featured a showdown among three candidates with Sri Lankan origins.
Vijay Thanigasalam, a 29-year-old financial adviser, who came to Canada in 2003 to escape the civil war in Sri Lanka won Scarborough-Rouge Park riding with a majority 963. Thanigasalam competed on Progressive Conservative Party (PC) ticket and was elected to Ontario Provincial Parliament (OPP) after garnering 16,224 votes.
Sumi Shan, a successful business woman who migrated to Canada with her family in 1980s contested for the first time from the Liberal Party, which was in power for 15 years before being reduced to 7 seats in the 124-seat legislature this time. Shan obtained 8785 votes coming third with 20 per cent of the vote after Felicia Samuel, a teacher and a trade unionist, of the New Democratic Party (NDP) who received 15,261 votes.
Priyan Lakshantha De Silva who was born in Sri Lanka and moved to Toronto as a child contested on the Green Party ticket and could obtain only 1014 votes. Priyan worked as an Office Administrator with the Toronto School Board until recently, when he dedicated himself to working on environmental and social justice issues in Toronto.
He is a strong advocate for protecting the environment and has worked at the local level promoting Ontario’s Greenbelt, supporting the People’s Climate March, and taking part in last year’s global climate conference in Paris. Out of all the contestants, Priyan is the only resident in the electorate, according to a press report.
Scarborough-Rouge Park was created by the 2012 federal electoral boundaries redistribution. The riding was known as Scarborough Rouge River before the demarcation and Rathika Sitsabaiesan, the first Sri Lankan Canadian to be elected to the Canadian federal parliament represented the riding from 2011-2015.
Sathiyasangaree ‘Gary’ Anandasangaree, a lawyer who was born in Sri Lanka, is currently representing the Scarborough-Rouge Park riding in the Federal Parliament. About 30 per cent of the population in the electorate consists of people of South Asian heritage.
During the recent campaign Thanigasalam came under fire for his Facebook posts supporting the Tamil Tiger movement. Later he apologized saying: “In the past I shared material related to the Tamil Tigers. I apologize and I no longer hold those views,” Thanigasalam wrote on Twitter late Tuesday.
The apology came after Global News TV asked the PC Party to comment on his Facebook posts about the late Tamil Tigers rebel leader Velupillai Prabhakaran.
According to captured posts shared by a community member, in 2011 Thanigasalam posted photos of Prabhakaran wearing a camouflage uniform. “Happy 57th Birthday to our National Leader,” it read. Another post commemorated the Black Tigers, the Tamil Tigers suicide squad. “The Black Tigers are the protective armours of our ethnic community…They are the eliminator of obstacles of our war path. They are burning humans that destroy the armed power of the enemy through their inner will power,” another Face Book post quoted by Toronto Star daily, has said.
His apology was quickly condemned on his Facebook page, branding him as a “sellout.”
“You don’t seem to be for our people anymore,” a comment posted on his Face Book page by someone had said, according to press reports.
In another interesting development a Toronto police officer of nine years, Roshan Nallaratnam of Sri Lankan origin, who contested Scarborough-Guildwood riding on PC ticket came under fire for allegedly threatening a Tamil community member when asked why he was not taking part in election debates.
In an email written in Tamil, Nallaratnam allegedly used a swear word threatening him “not to do anything nasty campaigning against me” and adding also, “I will teach you something after the election.” The NDP said the alleged email was sent to 96 people, including many from the Tamil community.
According to Toronto Star daily a spokesperson for the PC Party released a statement on behalf of Nallaratnam denying he sent the email in question. “The email is a fabrication from an account that does not belong to me. I have not been contacted by Toronto Police Services regarding this matter,” a statement by Nallaratnam said. “I understand that every complaint made is reviewed, but again I have not been contacted,” he said in another statement in response to a report that Toronto police launched a professional standards investigation on Monday into the alleged emails.
In what could have been one of the biggest upsets in the election, Nallaratnam almost unseated the former Liberal high profile minister Mitzie Hunter, losing by only 81 votes. Nallaratnam first contested running as the federal Conservative candidate in the riding of Scarborough Southwest in 2016 but lost to Toronto’s former police chief, Bill Blair, now a federal minister in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government. Contesting on Conservative Party ticket, Nallaratnam came third with 10,347 (21.2 per cent) against Blair’s 25,586 votes (52.5 per cent).
PC leader Doug Ford said that “Roshan is a great candidate and we’re going to stick with him,” after the reports of his alleged emails surfaced. The NDP called on Ford to denounce the behaviour and for Nallaratnam to apologize. The Liberals went a step further, calling on Ford to drop Nallaratnam as a candidate.
In his Face Book page, Nallaratnam says he is from Vavuniya and studied at St. Joseph’s College, Trichy and Periyar Centenary Memorial Matriculation Higher Secondary School in India. (www.newstrails.com)
