Canada: the Dolt of Nations

Diplomats used to be able to handle certain situations.

Not in this country. Not anymore:

Global Affairs Canada needs to hire more diplomats, cut senior management in half and make sure executives have “in-depth knowledge of and experience in international affairs” to stay relevant in the 21^st century, according to a new report. 

In a comprehensive report published on Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee made 29 recommendations to ensure Canada’s diplomatic corps has the appropriate resources, priorities and people for modern times, something even Global Affairs Canada (GAC) has admitted it doesn’t always have.  

Let one remember that the person in charge of global affairs can't use a map.

So there's that.

**

The simple fact is that Modi humiliated Justin, not that Justin's instincts were correct (they never are);

For 40 years, the Indian government has consistently complained that Canada provides a safe haven for Khalistani terrorists and that Canada’s Liberal Party is their playground. Thousands of people were killed in the Khalistani agitation in India, where the movement is now long disgraced and dead. The 1984 Air India bombing, which took the lives of 329 people, was planned and executed in Canada by individuals Ottawa had refused to extradite to India, and the highlight of Trudeau’s 2018 fashion-show ramble across India was the Indian news media’s discovery of a convicted would-be assassin in Trudeau’s entourage. Jaspal Singh Atwal had been a leading member of a Khalistani terrorist group.

So there was already bad blood between Modi and Trudeau, who was rudely cold-shouldered during his attendance at the G20 summit in Delhi only the week before his astonishing September 18 address to the House of Commons when he made his claim of “credible evidence” implicating the Modi government in Nijjar’s murder. It was those same intercepted communications between CC-1 and Gupta, relayed by American authorities to the RCMP and CSIS, that formed the basis of Trudeau’s House of Commons allegations. Trudeau conceded as much last week: “The news coming out of the US further underscores what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning.”

But last week’s unsealed indictment does not implicate the Modi government in either the foiled Pannun plot or Nijjar’s murder. And nobody at any level in the U.S. administration has even dropped a hint along the lines of Trudeau’s Sept. 19 insinuation, which cited “credible allegations” that agents of the Modi government had contrived to murder a Canadian in the parking lot of a Surrey gurudwara.

You won’t find anything of the sort in the 14-page United States of America Vs. Nikhil Gupta indictment, and the agencies involved in the murder-for-hire investigation have suggested no such thing — not the U.S. District Attorney in New York, the Justice Department’s National Security Division, the Drug Enforcement Administration or the New York field office of the FBI. The U.S. State Department hasn’t “vindicated” Trudeau, either. Senior diplomats from both the U.S. and India say the two countries are cooperating in their investigations. India has begun a high-level inquiry of its own, in a move welcomed by U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken.

In sharp contrast, the Trudeau government spun the worst possible inference from the details of the Gupta plot. Rushing to get ahead of a Globe and Mail report that was about to appear, the Trudeau government fingered Modi in Nijjar’s killing and expelled a senior Indian diplomat, the Indian High Commission’s intelligence chief, before the day was over. Modi flew into a rage and expelled a senior Canadian diplomat, setting off a cascade of events that included the expulsion of dozens more Canadian diplomats, the suspension of visa services and the deep-sixing of the Canada-India free trade talks. The Trudeau government’s signature Indo-Pacific Strategy, Ottawa’s long-promised shift from its disastrous embrace of Xi Jinping’s China, was mothballed. ...

But maybe Modi has gone rogue. Maybe 40 years of Canadian law-enforcement incompetence and national-security unseriousness has invited Modi’s bull-necked Bharatiya Janata Party government to take matters into its own rough hands. It’s plausible. It’s just that the Americans aren’t saying anything of the kind, and last week’s indictment contains no evidence of the sort, and so far the body of historical evidence overwhelmingly favours the proposition of malign Canadian interference in India’s affairs, rather than the other way round.