Canada’s response to the Ukrainian air crash tragedy is very different from the way Canadians reacted to the Air India disaster 35 years ago, experts say.
News of Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752’s destruction and the deaths of all 176 people on board — including 57 Canadians, a number revised downward from 63 on Friday — touched off a nationwide period of public mourning.
On Parliament Hill, provincial legislatures and municipal sites across the country, the Canadian flag was lowered to half-mast. Vigils and memorials are being planned in communities from coast to coast.
That collective outpouring of grief is quite unlike the public’s reaction to the Air India disaster 35 years ago, when Flight 182, carrying 329 people — most of them Canadian citizens or permanent residents — was brought down by a bomb attack on June 23, 1985.
Chandrima Chakraborty, a cultural studies professor at McMaster University, said the Air India crash was dismissed as a “foreign tragedy” and met with widespread indifference by the Canadian public. Despite the scale of the tragedy — 82 children were killed — the event did not resonate as deeply with Canadians as PS752’s crash in Iran seems to be now, she said.
“It was an Air India plane, (thought to be) primarily Indians, so it must be an Indian tragedy,” she said. “That hasn’t happened this time.”
Chakraborty said this week’s crash is being framed as a Canadian tragedy in the media and by the federal government, and Canadians themselves are mourning the victims as fellow citizens.
Brian Mulroney, prime minister at the time of the Air India crash, was criticized for offering condolences to the Indian government rather than to the Canadian families of victims after the disaster.
“Once the government has that kind of gut response, it pushed the bombing to the margins of Canadian public consciousness. It did not result in the outpouring of grief or public mourning that we’re seeing now,” Chakraborty said.
“Canada’s lack of acknowledgement of the Air India loss as Canadian, I think, exacerbated the family’s grief of losing family members.”
Public understanding ‘hazy’
Today, scholarly research on the Air India tragedy remains relatively scarce and public understanding of the event is “hazy” in the minds of most Canadians, she said.
The Air India disaster led to a public inquiry and lengthy criminal trials. In 2010, a quarter century after the disaster, then-prime minister Stephen Harper delivered a formal apology to the families of the victims for Canada’s failure to prevent the tragedy and for mistreating the families in the aftermath.
“Your pain is our pain. As you grieve, so we grieve. And, as the years have deepened your grief, so has the understanding of our country grown,” he said on June 23, 2010.
“Canadians who sadly did not at first accept that this outrage was made in Canada accept it now. Let me just speak directly to this perception, for it is wrong and it must be laid to rest. This was not an act of foreign violence. This atrocity was conceived in Canada, executed in Canada, by Canadian citizens, and its victims were themselves mostly citizens of Canada.”
Jack Major, a former Supreme Court justice who presided over the Air India public inquiry, said the circumstances of that disaster are vastly different from those of the PS752 crash. The recent event, he said, drew immediate global attention due to the increasing volatility of the security climate in the Middle East and what he called the “world fright” about what might happen next in the U.S-Iran conflict.
Former Supreme Court Justice Jack Major led the public inquiry into the 1985 Air India disaster. (CBC)
The news cycle and the media landscape also have changed in the decades since Air India, he said.
“It became an international story immediately because of the relationships in the Middle East, which had absolutely nothing to do with Air India,” he said. “I don’t know you can draw much of a parallel.”
Major said there’s “no doubt” the Air India victims were treated differently because they were considered Indian, or “late-come Canadians,” but he said Canada’s mishandling of the disaster had more to do with government authorities passing the buck.
‘India’s problem’
“Their first reaction was that it’s India’s problem, not ours,” he said.
Sociologist Sherene Razack, who provided expert testimony during the Air India inquiry on whether racism played a role in the government’s response to the bombing, said it was a “positive moment” to hear the federal government claim those who died in this week’s crash as Canada’s own.
“Few in the media even did the usual hyphenation and simply said Canadians died in the crash,” said Razack, now a professor at UCLA. “This was a remarkable difference from the response to Air India and I can only hope that it signals some progress on the racism front …
“Is it possible that the nation has begun to change? I can only hope so.”
Andrew Griffith, a former senior immigration official who now researches diversity and multiculturalism, said he regards Canada’s current response as an “encouraging reminder” of how Canadians have evolved in terms of how they see, accept and embrace fellow citizens who are immigrants or members of visible minorities.
“What really struck me, as these horrific stories came out, was the reference is ‘Canadian.’ It wasn’t even Iranian-Canadian. It was simply these are Canadians, this is a Canadian issue and tragedy,” he said.
“I don’t think any of that really happened in the early years following Air India.”
Griffith suggested one possible reason for the change is the fact that Canada is now far more diverse than it was at the time of Air India, when visible minorities represented a smaller, newer share of the population.
“Now it is part of the Canadian reality,” he said. “That’s a sea-change, in my view.”
A man looks for the name of a victim at a memorial for Air India Flight 182. All 329 passengers and crew members on board were killed in the 1985 bombing attack, most of them Canadian. (Ryan Remiorz/The Canadian Press)
After Air India, the Indo-Canadian community was bitterly resentful of the authorities they believed failed to take the investigation seriously.
Canadians’ reaction to the Ukrainian airline crash represents a “180-degree shift,” Griffith said.
“It means that Iranian-Canadians will feel more accepted, more welcome, more integrated, more part of society, whereas with Indo-Canadians it dragged on and on,” he said.
For the family members of Air India victims, the pain remains fresh.
Eisha Marjara, who lost her mother and sister in the bombing, said she sees a difference in the response to the two disasters.
“The response for the Air India tragedy was disappointing and heartbreaking,” she said. “We were left in the dark for a long time.
“So seeing the way the prime minister and the media [have] swiftly and transparently handled the crash and prioritized the well being of the families of the victims is very encouraging.”
VANCOUVER – Contract negotiations resume today in Vancouver in a labour dispute that has paralyzed container cargo shipping at British Columbia’s ports since Monday.
The BC Maritime Employers Association and International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 514 are scheduled to meet for the next three days in mediated talks to try to break a deadlock in negotiations.
The union, which represents more than 700 longshore supervisors at ports, including Vancouver, Prince Rupert and Nanaimo, has been without a contract since March last year.
The latest talks come after employers locked out workers in response to what it said was “strike activity” by union members.
The start of the lockout was then followed by several days of no engagement between the two parties, prompting federal Labour Minister Steven MacKinnon to speak with leaders on both sides, asking them to restart talks.
MacKinnon had said that the talks were “progressing at an insufficient pace, indicating a concerning absence of urgency from the parties involved” — a sentiment echoed by several business groups across Canada.
In a joint letter, more than 100 organizations, including the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, Business Council of Canada and associations representing industries from automotive and fertilizer to retail and mining, urged the government to do whatever it takes to end the work stoppage.
“While we acknowledge efforts to continue with mediation, parties have not been able to come to a negotiated agreement,” the letter says. “So, the federal government must take decisive action, using every tool at its disposal to resolve this dispute and limit the damage caused by this disruption.
“We simply cannot afford to once again put Canadian businesses at risk, which in turn puts Canadian livelihoods at risk.”
In the meantime, the union says it has filed a complaint to the Canada Industrial Relations Board against the employers, alleging the association threatened to pull existing conditions out of the last contract in direct contact with its members.
“The BCMEA is trying to undermine the union by attempting to turn members against its democratically elected leadership and bargaining committee — despite the fact that the BCMEA knows full well we received a 96 per cent mandate to take job action if needed,” union president Frank Morena said in a statement.
The employers have responded by calling the complaint “another meritless claim,” adding the final offer to the union that includes a 19.2 per cent wage increase over a four-year term remains on the table.
“The final offer has been on the table for over a week and represents a fair and balanced proposal for employees, and if accepted would end this dispute,” the employers’ statement says. “The offer does not require any concessions from the union.”
The union says the offer does not address the key issue of staffing requirement at the terminals as the port introduces more automation to cargo loading and unloading, which could potentially require fewer workers to operate than older systems.
The Port of Vancouver is the largest in Canada and has seen a number of labour disruptions, including two instances involving the rail and grain storage sectors earlier this year.
A 13-day strike by another group of workers at the port last year resulted in the disruption of a significant amount of shipping and trade.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
The Royal Canadian Legion says a new partnership with e-commerce giant Amazon is helping boost its veterans’ fund, and will hopefully expand its donor base in the digital world.
Since the Oct. 25 launch of its Amazon.ca storefront, the legion says it has received nearly 10,000 orders for poppies.
Online shoppers can order lapel poppies on Amazon in exchange for donations or buy items such as “We Remember” lawn signs, Remembrance Day pins and other accessories, with all proceeds going to the legion’s Poppy Trust Fund for Canadian veterans and their families.
Nujma Bond, the legion’s national spokesperson, said the organization sees this move as keeping up with modern purchasing habits.
“As the world around us evolves we have been looking at different ways to distribute poppies and to make it easier for people to access them,” she said in an interview.
“This is definitely a way to reach a wider number of Canadians of all ages. And certainly younger Canadians are much more active on the web, on social media in general, so we’re also engaging in that way.”
Al Plume, a member of a legion branch in Trenton, Ont., said the online store can also help with outreach to veterans who are far from home.
“For veterans that are overseas and are away, (or) can’t get to a store they can order them online, it’s Amazon.” Plume said.
Plume spent 35 years in the military with the Royal Engineers, and retired eight years ago. He said making sure veterans are looked after is his passion.
“I’ve seen the struggles that our veterans have had with Veterans Affairs … and that’s why I got involved, with making sure that the people get to them and help the veterans with their paperwork.”
But the message about the Amazon storefront didn’t appear to reach all of the legion’s locations, with volunteers at Branch 179 on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive saying they hadn’t heard about the online push.
Holly Paddon, the branch’s poppy campaign co-ordinator and bartender, said the Amazon partnership never came up in meetings with other legion volunteers and officials.
“I work at the legion, I work with the Vancouver poppy office and I go to the meetings for the Vancouver poppy campaign — which includes all the legions in Vancouver — and not once has this been mentioned,” she said.
Paddon said the initiative is a great idea, but she would like to have known more about it.
The legion also sells a larger collection of items at poppystore.ca.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 9, 2024.
