Do you call yourself an American?

[Jaimoe]

i used to get annoyed, especially around here, irish-amer, ital-amer, germ-amer, then you have the puerto ricans and the new yoricans, etc--it's like come on...we were all born here! BUT then i realized i was just jealous because i'm a midwestern mutt.

Canada encourages immigrants to keep their heritage, so it's very common to hear Chinese-Canadian, Indian-Canadian, Native-Canadian etc...

Yesterday 15,000 Sri Lankan Tamils (mostly immigrants) held an all-day protest at the provincial government's parliment headquarters regarding the plight/slaughter of their people in their native country. It was a peaceful demonstration (the third in a week), but it did cause traffic snares in downtown Toronto. Many younger Tamils were born in Toronto, but the ones interviewed all said: "my homeland" or "back home." I'm not sure if the one's interviewed see themselves as Sri Lankan-Canadian, which is exactly what they are. Toronto is home to the largest Tamil population outside of Sri Lanka, over 200K.

Anyway, we are all immigrants and nationality debates can get emotionally-charged.

i have always felt bad for the Tamils but to me that's always been like the Gaza Strip, they'll never stop fighting and even after the declare a cease fire, in 2 years it's starts up again. i understand they want autonomy but they've been suicide bombing and killing innocent civilians for a long time (i guess both sides but from what i've read, more so the Tigers) sorry for the tangent. jaimoe-i had no idea they all settled in toronto area, i always figured they went to india but that really doesn't make sense.

They didn't all settle in Toronto. I believe there's big communities in Montreal and Vancouver too. Toronto has the largest gathering. Same with Italians and Chinese (outside of their native countries). Hell, there's nearly 500K Italians and Chinese in Toronto.

The Canadian federal government sees the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization, so are reluctant to even acknowledge the demonstrations. Naturally, the opposition party, the Liberals, acknowledge the demonstrations. The Ontario Government, (Liberal Party), support the Tamil's plight, but there's only so much we can do. It's not as if we can roll our tanks off of our "huge fleet" of ships and start up a war that cannot be won. Plus, we are in pretty think in Afghanistan.

http://www.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idUSTRE54D1GR20090518

Not sure if it's total victory, but looks like they got the leader:

I heard about that. The Tamil-Canadians in T.O. are devastated. I hope the UN can do something about that civil war.

[goodjam2bn]

Absolument et je conduis une liberté de Jeep !