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 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.
Subjectivity often trumps objectivity when US and Western governments designate terror sponsors. Washington may complain that North Korea runs a criminal economy, runs ransomware schemes, or hacks banks and that Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps is as much a money-laundering conglomerate as it is a military organisation. The basis of the State Department’s more controversial designation of Cuba is that the Cuban regime offers safe haven to those who committed or masterminded past terrorism on US soil.
Subjectivity also corrupts the Financial Action Task Force, hence Pakistan’s release from the grey list under Chinese pressure, or Turkey’s release with Russian intercession.
Many other governments, especially in the Global South, are correct to accuse the West of hypocrisy when they refuse to recognise their own complicity in the same behaviour for which they blame others.
Here, Canada checks all the boxes. After Khalistani terrorists blew up Air India Flight 182, ignorance can be no excuse for the movement’s lethality. Left unchecked, the Khalistani extremists Trudeau’s government shelters can be as lethal as al Qaeda. The movement would be impotent without funding, however. Here, Canadian banks are as complicit as the Arab and Somali hawala agent who ultimately helped move money around prior to al Qaeda’s 1998 East Africa embassy bombings and the September 11, 2001, terror attacks in New York and Washington.
Canada is not alone. Illicit funding transits many countries. Some like Cyprus, Armenia, and Jamaica close loopholes and crack down; they have become part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Turkey, Pakistan, Azerbaijan, and Iran do not care. Trudeau, unfortunately, now aligns Canada with the latter camp.
Subjectivity, be it in the United Nations, the Financial Action Task Force, or on various country’s terror lists, undermines institutions; objectivity strengthens them. As such, India can do Canada, the United States, and Western Europe a service by designating Canada as a terror sponsor for its safe haven, if not support, for Khalistani militants. Western finger-wagging does not defeat terror; financial crackdowns, arrests, and extraditions do. Ottawa and, for that matter, Washington (where President Joe Biden recently welcomed Sikh militants at the White House) may not like the limelight but as both capitals lecture others, the best way to avoid such unpleasant attention is to make substantive reform.
Michael Rubin is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and director of policy analysis at the Middle East Forum. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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