VERITAS: FUMBLE - TAMILS' TACTICS TRUMPED THEIR MESSAGE

In May, hundreds of Tamil-Canadians staged a wildcat blockade of the Gardiner Expressway, shutting down the vital transportation link for an entire Sunday night and snarling traffic throughout downtown Toronto. In true TD&F style, we looked at it purely from a communications standpoint, apart from any other considerations of the impending crushing of the Tamil rebellion in Sri Lanka as the country’s long and bitter civil war came to an end. We often talk about the need to be bold, edgy and downright bold when it comes to finding ways to get your message on the front burner of this busy, noisy world of information overload in which we live. But there is always a balance to be struck, between getting the attention you seek and going too far. That day, the Tamils went too far, because they violated a fundamental rule of communications strategy: they let their tactics trump their message. The story was no longer about the human tragedy in Sri Lanka and their call for action from the federal government. Instead, it shifted to one of illegal occupation of a critical transportation link and the ethics of placing children and elderly on the front lines of a confrontation with police – let alone the wisdom of placing them on the asphalt surface of a busy highway. When the tactic overwhelms the message, the opportunity is lost. And the manner in which the Tamil protesters went about it, they ultimately squandered any goodwill which they may have built up through their previous, well-organized tactics like the human chains which encircled the downtown core yet still let the rest of us go about our business.