From: The Encyclopedia of Canada's Peoples/Turks/Virginia H. Aksan
In Canada, as in the United States, political participation by the Turkish community is limited. This is the result of many factors, including the small size of the community, its limited financial resources, fragmentation within it, and a lack of experience in the organizational culture of North America. This situation is gradually changing as umbrella bodies, such as the Federation of Canadian Turkish Associations in Canada and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations and the World Turkish Congress in the United States, attempt to coordinate the Turkish voice.
The parties of the left and right in Turkey asserted themselves in armed street fighting throughout the 1970s, and the fragmentation of political action in the immigrant communities generally replicates Turkish domestic politics. Unity of action can, however, be relied on concerning certain Turkish national issues such as Cyprus, the reaction to Armenian and Greek pressures, and humanitarian issues such as the response to natural disasters.
The Cyprus question of the 1960s and 1970s, especially Turkey’s military intervention in 1974, exacerbated tensions between Greeks and Turks in North America, and the extended campaign by Armenian organizations in the 1970s and 1980s to dramatize the death of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915 led to increasing wariness on the part of the Turkish community. Turks sometimes feel misunderstood, and occasionally besieged, in North America, as when Armenian terrorists killed Turkish officials abroad. This was of special concern to Turkish Canadians in the early 1980s, when such events culminated in an attack on the Turkish ambassador in Ottawa in March 1985. In response to the perceived misrepresentation of the Turkish side of the issue in the North American press, the Federation of Canadian Turkish Associations published two pamphlets called The Armenian Issue (1985, 1987). Even more divisive are questions relating to the larger Turkish and Muslim world: Azerbaijan, Bulgaria, Bosnia, central Asia, and so on. Generally, the Turkish-Canadian community is neither active nor well organized politically, and it has not yet begun to participate significantly in Canadian political life.
