Asoka Weerasinghe (Mr.) Kings Grove Crescent . Gloucester . Ontario , K1J 6G1

23 August 2024

The Honourable Melanie Joly, PC., MP
Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs
House of Commons
Ottawa, Ontario

Dear Madam Melanie Joly:

I just noted a news item in Sri Lanka’s Daily Mirror that Mayor Patrick Brown (Conservative) of Brampton, Ontario, had requested you to :…take a hardline position against Sri Lanka,” for their concern  of his construction

of a Tamil Genocide Memorial” in Brampton, for those who had died during their 30-year ethnic war with the Sri Lankan Government, for the want of their mono-ethnic, separate Tamil, racist State, Eelam,  carved out from the rich, real-estate in the North and East of the island.

 I agree that you should take a hardline on this issue that has created problems for our relationship with a sister Commonwealth country, Sri Lanka, who had been our friends for donkey’s years.

You have every right to uphold the dignity of Brampton’s  First Nation peoples. like the Wendat (Huron), Haudenosaunee and Anishinaabe including’ The Mississauga of the Credit.   This land is covered by the Ajetance Purchase(1818) of the Indigenous peoples.

Why is Mayor Patrick Brown insulting our indigenous people by not shedding a single tear let  alone erect a Memorial ‘Genocide’  Monument in Brampton for our own Indigenous children  who were killed in an act of Genocide” in the North-west of our vast nation by the Christian Missionary assisted Residential schools, I don’t understand quite well!

In Kamloops, B.C, just 3,984 km, from Brampton, the remains  of 215 children were found buried on the site of the Kamloops Indian Residential School on the Tk’emlups te Secawepen site, on May 27, 2021.  Mayor Patrick Brown hadn’t had a heart to leave a Memory Red rock from the Cheltenham Badlands, as a  Memorial ‘Genocide’ Monument for these 4000 killed children, but, hey, for the want of the Tamil votes at the next election, Mayor Patrick Brown was constructing a Memorial Genocide  Monument for theTamils who lived 13,720 km far away over the Pacific and Indian Oceans.

Madam Joly, make it quite clear to Mayor Patrick Brown that he is the one who gave birth to this Tamil Genocide Memorial Monument, and that it is his Baby and that you are  NOT interested in getting involved in changing its diapers when things go wrong for him.

As  John Q Public Judge and Jurist, I declare  that this act by Mayor Patrick Brown is one of insanity, unthinkable-sickness, one of humbuggery and should be stopped immediately. It is not good and insulting for the lovers of First Nation Peoples, and I am one, and very likely the last in the First Nation Peoples Lover’s Respect Totem Pole. and to restore the good relationship with my homeland, Sri Lanka.

Madam Joly, here is my  humble confession to you, that my love, respect and inspiration for the Canadian Inuit and First Nation Peoples were due to my encounter with your Quebecois, Charles Gagnon, painter, photographer, exhibit designer with whom I produced as Head of Thematic Research, for the Design and Display Division of the National Museum of Man Halls at the Victoria Memorial Museum, in Ottawa.  They were The Longhouse (Iroquois),  Buffalo Hunters (Plains Indians), and Inuit (Eskimo)  in the early 1970s.  I also produced The Children of the Raven Hall (West Coast cultures) with another designer.

Madam Joly, I wish, and I wish and I wish, that you take the hardline as I proposed to restore the dignity of the children of our Indigenous First Nation peoples who were killed in an act of Genocide, in my adopted homeland, Canada, that I will stand in guard for thee”. 

I resent Mayor Patrick Brown’s  insane humbuggery, for the want of Tamil votes to get reelected as the Mayor of Brampton at the next Provincial election. It is just not good enough for me, an honest Sri Lankan, Sinhalese-Canadian who has lived in Ottawa, Canada, since 16 October, 1970.

Very sincerely

Asoka Weerasinghe (Mr.)

Former, Head of Thematic Research Section

of the Design and Display Division, 

National Museums Corporation (1970-1977)

(My long Poem, The Trail of Mankind was adapted as the Storyline for the National Museum of Man’s Orientation Hall by Director Dr.William Taylor Jr., in 1972)