Controversial monument honouring genocide victims set for completion in Brampton

A new monument that once sparked some controversy is moving forward in Brampton.

This past weekend, Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown took the podium during the annual gala for the National Council of Canadian Tamils (NCCT) and said the city’s Tamil Genocide Memorial–with its overhauled design–will be completed by the end of 2024. 

According to official reports from the City of Brampton, conversations surrounding this project go back some years, with the initial location of the monument, Chinguacousy Park, being decided back in 2022. Additional data also indicates that as of 2023, the City of Brampton handed official ownership of the monument to the NCCT, alongside municipal funding. 

Approval for a renewed design of this monument was reached back in February of this year. 

In January 2021, council passed a motion to recognize the contribution of the Tamil community in Brampton through the construction of a monument to what Brown called the “Tamil Genocide.” The motion was not well-received by all residents, and Brown ended up sparring with one individual who opposed the monument–something Brampton’s integrity commissioner said was less than “exemplary” but didn’t violate codes of conduct.

The resident who objected spoke at council, saying it “recognized only one ethnic group” and instead called for a monument to “commemorate all the victims of the armed conflict in Sri Lanka.”

Brown questioned if the speaker was a Brampton resident and asked if the individual worked with or had spoken with the Sri Lankan government “due to a perceived similarity in the language used,” the integrity commissioner’s report said.

Brown is far from the only Ontario or Canadian politician to call the conflict in Sri Lanka a genocide, with Ontario’s Bill 104 declaring a seven-day period each year ending on May 18 as “Tamil Genocide Education Week.”

According to a 2021 United Nations resolution, it’s believed between 80,000 and 100,000 people died in the decades-long civil war in Sri Lanka. Both the Sri Lankan government and the Tamil Tiger rebel group have been accused of atrocities during the conflict.

According to the monument’s official website, the Tamil Genocide Memorial aims to be the leading international landmark for public education on the atrocities faced by the Tamil people in Shri Lanka at the hands of Sinhalese governments over decades. 

At the time of this report, there is no official indication of the exact date of the project’s completion. 

– With files from Ryan Rumboldt