Monday, October 21, 2024

Justin's Other Messes

Justin has many messes but these ones are centred around India:

India had at least 26 extradition requests pending with Canada, the South Asian nation’s foreign ministry said on Thursday, amid a diplomatic row between the two countries.

“These are over the last decade or more,” India’s foreign ministry spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal told reporters during a weekly media briefing.

Bilateral relations between the two nations have plunged to a new low this week after Ottawa linked India to the murder of a Sikh separatist leader in Canada.

In tit-for-tat moves, both countries expelled each others’ diplomats on Monday. Ottawa said it was expelling six Indian diplomats and consular officials “in relation to a targeted campaign against Canadian citizens by agents linked to the government of India.”

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In 1989, when reports surfaced that Ottawa had expelled Indian diplomats for spying, then foreign affairs minister Joe Clark did not hold a press conference to lecture the Indian government or express righteous indignation at its alleged Vienna Convention violations.

Instead, Mr. Clark rose in the House of Commons to respond to charges from the Liberal immigration critic Sergio Marchi that India’s government had engaged in “elaborate and covert operations … to discredit and destabilize the Canadian Sikh community” and manipulate Canadian officials. India had grown frustrated with Canada’s coddling of Sikh separatists and the RCMP’s botched investigation into the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight that originated in Canada.

“If friendly governments engage in any activities, including intelligence activities, which are inappropriate, we deal with them directly, we reprimand them directly and we require the removal from the country of any people who have been involved in those improper activities,” Mr. Clark replied, neither confirming nor denying the reports that Indian consular and embassy officials had been kicked out of Canada.

Compare the low-key handling of that diplomatic incident with the onslaught against India unleashed on Monday by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau after the RCMP announced that it had gathered evidence allegedly revealing “the breadth and depth of criminal activity orchestrated by agents of the government of India.”

Mr. Trudeau’s press conference, with Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc standing solemnly behind him, was unprecedented not just in almost 80 years of diplomatic relations between Canada and India, but in the annals of international diplomacy between “friendly” countries, period.

Could you imagine the leader of any other G7 country going to such lengths to stigmatize and alienate such a critical ally?

 

Strangely enough, yes.

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India is withdrawing its High Commissioner from Canada after Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau again accused India of masterminding the June 18, 2023, killing of Khalistani terrorist Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. To back his accusation that India’s intelligence service conducted the hit, Trudeau said that US intelligence affirmed his conclusion. This was false. While American intelligence supplied Canada with raw data after Nijjar’s murder, Trudeau mischaracterised it.

Sikh militants in both Canada and California are deeply involved in organised crime and gang violence. When US intelligence has information about pending assassinations, it warns not only friends but also adversaries in advance; more than two decades ago, the United States even warned arch-enemy Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, about a pending attempt on his life. What happened in Canada’s case was more mundane: After a gangland hit, the United States sought to give Canada access to the routine but indiscriminate chatter.

Trudeau, shocked by the diplomatic crisis his offhand accusation against India sparked, dug in his heels to suggest US endorsement to his false accusation.

After almost nine years in office, Canadians are frustrated at Trudeau’s vacuity and condescension. Under the Trudeau administration, progressive virtue signaling trumps competence. Canadians chafed under draconian Covid-19 restrictions. They grew frustrated with bleak job prospects, poor inflation, and corruption scandals. While Trudeau might stave off elections for another year, polls show him losing to his conservative opposition by upwards of ten percent.

Perhaps Trudeau believed the volume and frequency of the accusation could trump truth. He also may believe that doubling down on Sikh militants might win him votes in key districts. On both points, he is wrong.

First, to misapply “Five Eyes” intelligence for his own political fortunes has created a crisis in the group’s intelligence sharing. Both the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency resented Trudeau’s desire to place them in a position where journalists asked them to confirm or deny his statements as doing so could betray sources and methods or spark a diplomatic incident if forced to call Trudeau a liar publicly.

Second, Trudeau errs by confusing militancy with legitimate religion. More mature or substantive leaders might recognise they had a problem. This was the case in the United Kingdom, for example, which five years ago appointed an Independent Faith Engagement Adviser to study and document religious extremism on British soil. The resulting Bloom Review covered the panoply of religious belief but its findings with regard to Sikhism were especially insightful. It found Khalistan activists relied on government ignorance and targeted the authentic Sikh community to further their fringe cause. The Bloom Review concluded, “Subversive, aggressive and sectarian actions of some pro-Khalistan activists and the subsequent negative effect on wider Sikh communities should not be tolerated.”

Trudeau’s behaviour has backfired in another way: By again sparking an international crisis by releasing a slapdash review to justify his accusations after-the-fact, Trudeau has again focused attention on Canada’s permissiveness toward Sikh terrorism and terror finance. Both Trudeau’s father Pierre and now Justin himself not only tolerated Khalistan militancy, but they also transformed Canada into a safe-haven for terror and terror finance, all for a cause financed and directed by an intelligence service in a foreign capital more than 10,600 km from Ottawa.

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The Commons public safety committee by unanimous vote has agreed to investigate RCMP murder-for-hire allegations against the Government of India. “A criminal is a criminal and a Canadian is a Canadian,” said Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan (Calgary Forest Lawn): ‘This is something the Sikh community has been talking about for more than 40 years.’

 

Would that be around the time Air India 182 blew up? 

 

But Justin isn't alone in these messes:

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When do we expel such people?

 

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