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Sitting in the car yesterday, locked in traffic that brought the core of Canada's largest city to a near-standstill, I had some time to contemplate the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamils.

The Tamils are an ethnic minority who have been fighting a civil war for sovereignty in Sri Lanka since the 1980s. Recently, the war has escalated, massive casualties have been reported on both sides, and refugee camps inside Sri Lanka have filled with close to a quarter of a million displaced people.

Here in Toronto, where I happened to be on that otherwise balmy mid-May afternoon, there is a sizeable Tamil community, numbering more than 250,000, and they have been making their presence felt in recent days.

Much to the chagrin of the city's commuters, Tamil protests involving human chains severing the city's main arteries, have become increasingly common, turning rush hour traffic into a nightmarish gridlock. A few days ago, a group of over 1000 Tamils, including children, rushed up an on-ramp and blockaded a major expressway, trapping hundreds of motorists in their vehicles.

The reactions to this have ranged from tempered sympathy to outright outrage. So the argument goes, in a peaceful, democratic nation, all citizens have the right to protest, so long as they don't endanger anyone else. Beyond the fact that the protesters were extremely lucky they didn't cause a serious, potentially-fatal pileup, illegally blocking an expressway is not within anyone's rights.

Protests in some form or another have taken place recently in a number of international cities with Tamil communities, and while they have pushed the cause of the Tamils onto the headlines, they have garnered little sympathy by their actions, much less an increased international response.

So how far is too far, when protesting is concerned? Especially when the issue being protested is not one that most people witnessing it would recognize, much less be affected by. Would you support a rush-hour blockade of a major freeway in your city to call attention to a humanitarian crisis?

On the one hand, if people are suffering and dying, it's hard to begrudge anyone trying to stop it, but what good does disrupting civil society do? It's a question Torontonians are struggling with this week, and one that we'd all be well served to consider.