Thirty-five years after the deadliest mass killing in Canadian history, many don’t know about the tragedy, despite its magnitude.
On June 23, 1985, 280 Canadians, including 86 children, lost their lives in the bombing of Air India Flight 182, which has never really sunk into the national consciousness.
As Chandrima Chakraborty, professor, Department of English and Cultural Studies, McMaster University, tells the Big Story Podcast, right away the federal government framed the bombing as a foreign tragedy, even though the majority of the victims were Canadian.
“It immediately thwarted any attempt to publicly mourn, collectively mourn, come together as a community,” she says of the event, which has been called Canada’s 9/11.
(Sidebar: there's political multiculturalism for you.)
However, it was later confirmed the bombing plot was hatched on Canadian soil.
Chakraborty adds the victims were also seen as immigrants rather than citizens at the time.
“It was the terrorist act that was incorporated into the public’s memory and not the grief of those who lost loved ones,” she says.
The flight was heading from Toronto to London when the bomb detonated and crashed near Ireland, killing all 329 people
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