By any objective standard, the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam is clearly a terrorist organization. The LTTE (or "Tamil Tigers") has killed tens of thousands of Sri Lankans over the last two decades, often in suicide attacks. It has also assassinated a variety of democratically elected political leaders, including Sri Lankan president Ranasinghe Premadasa and Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi. And, to keep its operations going, it has forcibly recruited child soldiers (over 6,000 since 2001, according to Human Rights Watch).

Knowing all this, the United States, United Kingdom and other Western nations have rightly branded the LTTE a terrorist group. Among other things, this means fundraising for the Tigers is illegal in each of those countries. Canada has not followed suit. Why?

In January, the National Post editorial board put the question to Justice Minister Irwin Cotler. In reply, he hinted that politics played a role: "Toronto I think has the largest number of Tamils ... outside of Sri Lanka, so we've got to be very careful just in terms of our own relationships."

S.P. Thamilselvan, the LTTE's political leader, offered a disturbingly similar explanation when he recently told CanWest News from his base in northern Sri Lanka: "Because [Canada] has provided [300,000 Tamils] with dignity and status to stay there as citizens with equal rights, definitely Canada will have second thoughts in making decisions that would affect the sentiments of those people." So we don't want to risk the votes of Canadian Tamils?

But on Feb. 15, Foreign Affairs Minister Pierre Pettigrew offered up a different explanation. Appearing before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade he alleged that "the government of Sri Lanka themselves have not listed the Tamil Tigers as a terrorist organization ... Most of the people we've been consulting, including the United States State Department ... are demanding that we do not do it at this time."

Unfortunately, the State Department won't back him up. When contacted by my group, the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD), a department spokesperson was puzzled. "The U.S. government designated LTTE as a foreign terrorist organization in 1997," we were told. Applying a similar label, he said, "is a decision for the Canadian government to make alone." Officials at the U.S. embassy in Ottawa were likewise surprised by Mr. Pettigrew's claim.

Sri Lanka's Minister of Foreign Affairs, Lakshman Kadirgamar, was even bolder: "No. I can tell you for sure that this government has not asked any foreign government not to designate the LTTE as a terrorist organization ... It is not up to the Sri Lanka Government to prescribe policy for them."

Mr. Kadirgamar went on to note: "It [has been] reported that the LTTE raised approximately $200,000 a month from the Tamil community in Canada." Much of it, he told us, is reportedly extorted through violence and organized crime.

Even knowing all this, our government has been coddling the Tigers for a while now. Five years ago, for instance, then finance minister Paul Martin and international co-operation minister Maria Minna attended a fundraiser for a group identified by the U.S. State Department as a front for the Tamil Tigers. Apparently, Tiger supporters saw this as a gesture of approval for their group. And based on the comments from Messrs. Cotler and Pettigrew, it seems this see-no-evil attitude persists to this day.