Commentary
Political leaders occasionally have to make bombshell announcements to domestic or international audiences. When this occurs, the natural assumption is he or she has been provided with enough evidence to make this assessment with a high degree of confidence. The risk in doing the opposite would be far greater than the reward.
What if the information is later proven to be either mistaken or misleading? It would be a major embarrassment for the intelligence service involved, and an even greater disaster for the political leader who made this announcement in the first place.
That’s the fate currently facing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
On Sept. 18, he told the House of Commons that senior diplomats in Canada and India were going to be expelled. “Over the past number of weeks, Canadian security agencies have been actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link between agents of the government of India and the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar,” Trudeau
said, adding that Ottawa would take all necessary steps to “hold perpetrators of this murder to account.”
Nijjar was a Sikh leader and temple president based in Surrey, B.C. He was gunned down outside the temple, or gurdwara, in broad daylight on June 18. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s Integrated Homicide Investigation Team
said “two heavy-set suspects” shot him and fled in a getaway vehicle “driven by a third suspect.”
Nijjar was also a wanted man in India. A screen grab of the Nov. 14, 2014, warrant for his arrest through Interpol’s National Central Bureau in New Delhi was
included in a Global News report. He was described as a “mastermind/active member” of the Khalistan Tiger Force, a militant group that’s part of the larger Khalistan movement that wants to create a separate homeland for Sikhs in the Punjab region. He was also linked to the October 2007 bombing of Punjab’s Shingar Cinema, which killed six people and injured 37 others. That’s why he was on India’s Home Ministry
list of terrorists under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act.
Trudeau’s announcement certainly helped explain his odd behaviour at the recent G20 summit in New Delhi.
There had been a
slew of awkward meetings and photo-ops with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the summit. Pundits and observers wondered if he was being admonished or slighted at the G20 by world leaders. This was based on a widely circulated
photo of U.S. President Joe Biden pointing and looking at Trudeau rather sternly. Or, he may have been pushing back at the ripple effect caused by his controversial 2018 India trip and extensive
criticism of several costume changes that he and his family performed.
There are other components that haven’t been explained properly—or at all.
Trudeau and the RCMP are doing the right thing by investigating this matter. If India sent assassins to murder Nijjar on Canadian soil, that’s inexcusable and they need to be held to account. The problem is we don’t know what sources and materials led Ottawa to this decision.
CBC
reported on Sept. 21 that the government had “amassed both human and signals intelligence in a months-long investigation,” which included “communications involving Indian officials themselves [and] Indian diplomats present in Canada.” Fair enough. Accepting the fact that some materials could be too sensitive to release in the middle of an investigation, a few items should be declassified to corroborate his statement and increase public confidence.
It’s also difficult to comprehend why Trudeau moved relatively quickly with the India controversy, but has only lightly tackled long-standing allegations of Chinese interference in our election process. Both stories are obviously different, and the former involves the murder of an individual, but they’re equally troubling and worthy of in-depth investigations.
Did the PM want to control the narrative, which he was able to do with India but
not China? Did he want to get ahead of the story, based on the fact that the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Steven Chase were reportedly ready to run with their
own version before he spoke out? (Harjit Sajan basically admitted as much in an interview with CBC’s “As It Happens” host Nil Köksal. He
said Trudeau made this statement “because some information was going to ... come out within the media.”) Did criticism of his 2018 India trip lead him to target this country and exact some measure of revenge at the first opportunity? Did his history with China, and his late father’s long history, cloud his judgment?
We just don’t know. There will be lofty differences of opinion about the Canada-China controversy until this happens. If it never does, and the bombshell announcement ultimately turns out to be false, Trudeau’s political career could be over.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
