From refugee to murder victim: how Canada failed Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam
The case of Bruce MacArthur is devastating: indignity after indignity, horror after horror unfold every time a new murder charge is laid. Police say they expect there will be even more victims. He’s now charged with eight murders. We know that these murders were possible, at least in part, because MacArthur preyed on men who were marginalized: queer, racialized and/or poor.
But the latest victim, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, faced indignities from the state that stretch far beyond the inadequate investigations of Toronto Police. Kanagaratnam was never reported missing. He was undocumented. He was fleeing for his life and somehow found death in the country that he thought would protect him.
Kanagaratnam came to Canada in 2010. He was aboard the MV Sun Sea, a cargo ship that brought 500 Tamils to Canada’s west coast. They fled civil war in Sri Lanka, where it was commonly identified that government forces used chemical weapons on the minority Tamil population. In Spring 2009 alone, it’s estimated that 6500 civilians were killed in the fight for control over Tamil Eelam, the Northern and Eastern part of the island where Tamils are the majority. The bank placed the number of casualties at a staggering 100,000. The Sri Lankan government declared the civil war over when the LTTE (Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam) leadership was killed in May 2009. Kanagaratnam lost his brother in the war, according to fellow MV Sun Sea passenger T. Pranavan, in an interview with CBC News.
When the MV Sun Sea was intercepted on August 12, 2010, Canadian security agents took the refugees to CFB Esquimault and into detention to await refugee hearings. One man died during the passage.
They were released slowly. The first person released on Sept 13, 2010 was pregnant. By March 24, 2011, there were still 44 men in detention awaiting their hearings.
At the heart of the delays were two issues: Canada’s broken refugee claimant system and the Harper government’s claim that there were “terrorists” on board, members of the LTTE.
The boat’s arrival coincided with a period of time where Canada was engaged in aggressive campaigns to stop refugees from trying to reach Canada in the first place. The year prior, the Harper government tried to stop Mexican and Czech citizens from seeking asylum in Canada by making it harder to access visitor visas.
Five years after the MV Sun Sea arrived, 100 people still hadn’t had their status sorted out. Almost two-thirds were accepted as “legitimate” refugees and two were sent back to Sri Lanka. One of these men was tortured and killed, CBC reported.
Where was Kanagaratnam in all of this?
The Canadian Press interviewed Dinsan Vanniyasingam, also a fellow MV Sun Sea passenger, who said that he ran into Kanagaratnam in 2014 in East Toronto. Kanagaratnam told Vanniyasingam that was struggling with his immigration status. Sometime between September and December 2015, police say Kanagaratnam was murdered. The article also reports that his family started looking for him on social media, probably too late.
Police were so desperate to identify him that they took the extraordinary step of releasing a photo of Kanagaratnam’s corpse. It was heavily edited and barely looked like the photos of Kanagaratnam that have since been published. A final indignity to a litany of injustice heaped on Kanagaratnam by the Canadian state.
From the start of the investigation, the connections between MacArthur and Toronto’s Church-Wellesley Village have put the attention on what kind of victim MacArthur sought out. Toronto Police spokesperson Hank Idsinga told media, “[Kanagaratnam] doesn’t quite fit the profile that we’ve seen before.” An odd admission, as MacArthur clearly preyed on men who were vulnerable: whether they were queer, whether they were marginalized, or whether they were homeless, like Dean Lisowick who also had never had a missing persons case filed about him.
Kanagaratnam has been gone for three years already. During the period of time police believe he was murdered, Justin Trudeau was elected Prime Minister. Part of his victory was thanks to his welcoming rhetoric for Syrian refugees.
Today, things remain dire for asylum seekers. Canada refuses to suspend the Safe Third Country Agreement, making it very nearly impossible for people to seek asylum from the United States. As Haitian migrants seek refugee status in Canada, we know that they also find themselves in danger, compounded further by anti-Black racism. CBC Montreal reported that one refugee, who was given a fake identity to be able to work in a meat processing plant, cut his hand so badly he needed a skin graft. The worker didn’t know it was illegal for him to work without papers, and the company says they didn’t know that his identity was fake. It was brokered by a temporary work agency.
Did Kanagaratnam find MacArthur through seeking employment? It’s been reported that some of MacArthur’s victims had worked for him. Hopefully, we’ll learn more about how they came into contact.
It’s rare that a single case embodies so much of what’s wrong with our system, but Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam’s story stands as a wake-up call for all Canadians of good conscience to demand wholesale change: to immigration and refugee policy, to policing and to economic policies that place vulnerable people in harm’s way. We don’t have any time to waste.
UPDATE: I went back and forth in how to characterize the slaughter in Sri Lanka. I was in the streets in 2009 in Toronto in solidarity with the Tamil community, who broadly consider that the war was actually genocide. If you read how the Sri Lankan government talks about this conflict, it certainly sounds like that’s probable. I’ve added a report from the Tamil Guardian with how many were estimated to be killed in the final years of this decades-long war.
