Canada’s new leader should negate anti-India slander, tackle terror

Canadians find no shortage of reasons to despise Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He oozes superficiality and even after nearly a decade in power, he shows little grasp over many economic and foreign policy issues. He mismanaged Covid-19 lockdowns causing gratuitous harm to the Canadian economy and failed to tame inflation. Mortgage rates are climbing. He never escaped the whiffs of corruption after seeking to interfere in a criminal case against a Quebec construction company involved in a bribery scandal.

Foreign policy blunders have reinforced Trudeau’s reputation as a lightweight on the world stage. Canada once had influence disproportionate to its population on the world stage. Part of this was its moral clarity and human rights advocacy; unlike the United States, Canada neither has a history of wanton use of military force nor human rights hypocrisy, and part of this was its ability to leverage deep trust and partnership into influence upon the United States. For more than a century, American policymakers assumed Ottawa’s goodwill.

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Long before President-elect Donald Trump began mocking Trudeau as “governor” of Canada or joking about making it the 51st state, Trudeau had antagonised a broad swath of official Washington far beyond Trump’s support base. Canadians may blame Trump for his polemics, but they should understand the damage Trudeau wrought either predates Trump or had nothing to do with him.

Consider the Khalistan issue. In 2022, two gunmen pleaded guilty in the British Columbia Supreme Court for assassinating Sikh businessman Ripudaman Singh Malik, the likely mastermind of the 1985 bombing of Air India 182. A Canadian court subsequently acquitted Malik and a co-conspirator, although that likely had more to do with mistakes by the prosecution and technical errors in the investigation than a dismissal of Malik’s involvement. Over time, Malik moderated and appeared to show remorse. The British Columbia Service confirmed the men were “hired and paid” but did not reveal by whom. The likelihood is that Khalistan militants and their sponsors in Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency ordered the hit because Malik was willing to expose the inside information he had about the worst act of aviation terror prior to Al Qaeda’s September 11, 2001 attacks.

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The belief by US and Canadian intelligence that Malik’s murder was the result of factional divisions among Khalistan militants and terrorists should have led Trudeau to be cautious when he accused India of masterminding the 2023 murder of Khalistan terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, an unrepentant sponsor of Khalistan-inspired terror who had entered Canada on fraudulent documents and become heavily involved in Canada’s Sikh underworld.

Against the backdrop of the 2023 G7 Summit in New Delhi, Trudeau accused India of ordering the Nijjar’s assassination. This would be akin to ignoring the mafia motive and blaming Italy after three mafia assassins in 1985 gunned down Gambino crime boss Paul Castellano in New York City.

Trudeau, who apparently blamed India to deflect attention from his own domestic troubles, doubled down on his error. He said the intelligence he based his accusation upon came from the United States via the “Five Eyes” programme. Anyone who has used such top-secret intercepts or snippets of human intelligence knows, however, they are seldom cut-and-dry. When Washington does have clear indication of a forthcoming assassination or terror attack, it forewarns even its worst enemies. In the past, for example, the director of Central Intelligence has warned Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei about an impending attack on his life. The lack of prior U.S. warning indicates that the United States only had gathered random telephone or messaging chatter.

By focusing the limelight on US intelligence gathering and then publicly misconstruing it, Trudeau came closer than any previous leader at reducing the “Five Eyes” programme to four. Doing this once showed immaturity and an astounding lack of professionalism; repeating the same accusation a year later was unforgivable. Trudeau’s slander not only damaged Ottawa’s ties with New Delhi, but also its relationship with the United States. Leaking cherrypicked theories to the Washington Post was not the actions of an ally nor a responsible steward of intelligence.

Trudeau may have sought the high ground, but in reality he transformed Canada into a moral swamp. At issue was not only tolerating false asylum claims and allowing Khalistan militants to fund themselves via organised crime. Objective enforcement of Financial Action Task Force standards would see Canada on its grey list for allowing Khalistan to use Canada’s permissive and subjective financial and law enforcement approach to turn Canada into a base for terrorist finance and money laundering.

Nor is the problem just the Khalistan movement. Canada sheltered and may continue to protect the assassins of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, Bangladesh’s first president. It has become a haven for Tamil Tiger financial crime and activity. Hamas activists attacked Canadian police in the heart of Montreal. Trudeau cynically allowed rampant antisemitism and Hinduphobia in order to placate Islamist and militant Sikh supporters among the cornucopia of useful idiocy that defined his progressive coalition.

Certainly Trudeau deserves the cheers of Canadians, Americans, and Indians for his fall, but they are not enough. If Canada takes its relations with both the world’s largest democracy and its southern neighbour seriously, any caretaker Liberal government or its likely Conservative successor must immediately assemble two commissions: The first should study Trudeau’s use and misuse of intelligence. If Trudeau politicised intelligence for domestic political reasons, the commission should call him out for politicising intelligence and then the new prime minister should make an official and unambiguous apology to all Indians.

Second, the next Canadian government should establish a blue-ribbon panel to examine militancy and terror financial networks operating within Canadian territory. Just like the Bloom Commission identified problems with Khalistani militants hijacking gurdwaras and intimidating ordinary Sikhs with threats of violence, it is essential Ottawa determine the extent to which the same pattern exists on Canadian soil.

Ignoring cancer only enables metastasis. Trudeau was like a doctor that prescribed a Band-aid for Stage IV cancer and then blamed its spread on everyone but himself. Canada today harbours a cancer that can cause harm across the globe. It is time it recognises and rectifies the harm its slander and terror tolerance caused.

Michael Rubin is director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.