Canadian authorities unloaded a cramped cargo ship on Friday of nearly 500 asylum seekers from Sri Lanka whose arrival has sparked a national debate over the country's immigration and refugee laws, Reuters reported. The sun was just rising on Pacific Coast when MV Sun Sea sailed under escort into a Canadian Navy base near Victoria, British Columbia, and docked next to a makeshift camp set up to process the men, women and children on board. Officials are assessing the medical condition of the estimated 490 people, who may have spent as long as two months living in the cargo hold of the 59-metre-long (194-foot-long) vessel as it made a zig-zag crossing of the Pacific Ocean. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews warned that Canada will be taking a tough line with the ship, which he said was believed to be carrying terrorists and may be part of a larger, international human smuggling operation. "Canada has very generous refugee laws, and my concern is that individuals not take advantage of the existing laws in order to further criminal or terrorist activities," Toews told a news conference. The 490 people on the ship are believed to be Tamils who left Sri Lanka weeks ago, but Canada fears some are members of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, which fought a bloody independence war that was crushed last year. The Sun Sea is the second ship carrying Tamil migrants to arrive in Canada in less than a year, and officials fear more are on the way. A cargo ship carrying 76 Tamil refugee claimants docked on the West Coast last October, but arrivals of boat people are a relatively rare occurrence. At least four boats arrived on Canada's Pacific Coast in the late 1990s carrying Chinese migrants, who experts familiar with the incident believe were actually being smuggled though Canada to the United States. Canada received 34,000 refugee applications last year, with most made by people after arriving by air or by driving in from the United States. An estimated 250,000 people of Tamil decent live in Canada, primarily in the Toronto area. It is said to be the largest Tamil population outside Sri Lanka and India. The arguments in Canada over immigration have never reached the fevered pitch heard in the United States, but the Sun Sea incident has set off a front-page debate in the media over whether its rules are too lax.
