Good morning. Wendy Cox in Vancouver today.
The decision by Raj Chouhan, the Speaker of the B.C. Legislature, to attend the going-away party for India’s top diplomat in Western Canada would have been routine a year ago. Attending diplomatic functions is part of the job.
But nothing about relations with India is normal right now. Chouhan’s attendance at the function in honour of a man who for the past year has represented a government Canada has accused of carrying out a political assassination on Canadian soil is a sticky matter for the B.C. NDP.
A spokesman for Premier David Eby, said the Premier was unaware of Mr. Chouhan’s attendance at the event.
The Speaker’s job is independent of the party Chouhan was elected by voters to represent, so he wouldn’t normally clear his event schedule with the Premier’s Office.
Photos posted to the Indian consulate-general’s official social media accounts show Chouhan standing up from his seat across from the former consul-general to give a speech to the long table of roughly two dozen attendees. Chouhan is also shown posing with Manish, the former consul-general who goes by one name, who is moving on to a post in Cyprus.
Chouhan’s attendance has angered members of B.C.’s sizable – and politically powerful – Sikh community.
Moninder Singh, a spokesperson for the B.C. Gurdwaras Council, was a close friend of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was gunned down outside Surrey’s Guru Nanak Sikh temple last June. Nijjar was deeply involved in a campaign to have Sikhs participate in a non-binding referendum demanding the creation of an independent Sikh homeland called Khalistan, to be carved out of northern India.
Singh and other Sikh activists have been calling for charges against Indian officials in Canada in connection with Nijjar’s death.
He was dismayed that Chouhan would appear at the May 2 going-away party.
“Any Canadian politician that attends meetings with the Indian consul-general or high commissioner of India and has not condemned Hardeep Singh Nijjar’s assassination publicly and questioned these individuals is doing a disservice to holding public office in Canada,” he said.
The day after the event, three Indian nationals were arrested and charged with murder. A fourth person has also been charged. All appeared for a brief court hearing Tuesday.
Chouhan said in a statement late Tuesday that he, like all British Columbians, is concerned about the allegations that India was involved in Nijjar’s killing. He said in the statement that he welcomes the arrest of the four suspects in the case and looks forward to the court process.
Last September, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told the House of Commons that Canada had credible intelligence that “agents of the government of India” had carried out the killing, sending relations between the two countries into a deep freeze.
Since then, a criminal indictment in the United States has alleged that an Indian intelligence officer was behind efforts to hire someone to kill a U.S.-based Sikh activist, a close friend of Nijjar’s who also works on the referendum campaign.
India regards calls for the creation of Khalistan to be seditious and the work of terrorists. Prime Minister Narendra Modi, currently campaigning for re-election, has become increasingly aggressive on the issue of Sikh separatists and what he and his government have described as Canada’s failure to respond.
Modi said at a campaign rally in India that his government is done with asking foreign governments nicely to deal with people – mostly Sikhs – it considers terrorists living abroad.
But the B.C. government has been largely mute about the controversy.
After Trudeau made his explosive statement in the House of Commons, Eby called on Ottawa to share information about safety threats to Canadian citizens.
Last month, the Premier said he hoped the RCMP investigation into Nijjar’s killing is able to conclude “and make a determination as quickly as possible.”
“It affects our relationship with India. It affects people’s sense of safety in the community and Surrey and across British Columbia. And the sooner we get resolution of that investigation, whether resulting in criminal charges or clarification about who was involved, the better.”
This is the weekly Western Canada newsletter written by B.C. Editor Wendy Cox and Alberta Bureau Chief Mark Iype. If you’re reading this on the web, or it was forwarded to you from someone else, you can sign up for it and all Globe newsletters here.