Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, walks past India's Prime Minister Narendra Modi as they take part in a wreath-laying ceremony at Raj Ghat, Mahatma Gandhi's cremation site, during the G20 Summit in New Delhi, on Sept. 10, 2023.Sean Kilpatrick/The Associated Press
Prabjot Singh, lawyer for the Sikh Coalition, lobbed what should have been two softball questions to Justin Trudeau during the Prime Minister’s testimony on Wednesday at the public inquiry into foreign interference.
The first: Will Canada target sanctions against India’s intelligence agency, as well as those officials found to be responsible for, as the RCMP alleges, homicides, extortions and other violent criminal activities in Canada? And, by the way, might the government suspend Canada’s intelligence-sharing agreement with India, given the possibility of India misusing such information?
“I would suggest accountability for those responsible is crucial to deterring this kind of violence,” Mr. Singh said, a lawyerly understatement to be sure.
Mr. Trudeau’s response should have been: I’ve already given those orders. Those specific actions, in addition to the expulsion of India’s high commissioner and five other diplomats, would have underscored to Prime Minister Narendra Modi that there will be costs to what the RCMP alleges is a campaign against pro-separatist Sikh Canadians, including a dozen “credible and imminent threats to life” and the killing of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June, 2023.
Instead, Mr. Trudeau prevaricated on the notion of sanctions. “I’m not going to hypothesize about what steps we are going to do to keep Canadians safe.”
He similarly demurred on the idea of cancelling the intelligence-sharing agreement with India. “We are not looking to provoke or create a fight with India,” Mr. Trudeau said, while adding that the Indian government made a “horrific mistake” with its aggressive actions and that other steps would be “determined in due course.”
It’s astonishing that the intelligence-sharing agreement remained in place for a nanosecond after the Prime Minister rose in the House of Commons in September, 2023, to say there were “credible allegations” that agents of the Indian government were involved in Mr. Nijjar’s slaying.
Then, at least, Canada still had some faint hope of co-operation with Indian officials. What’s the excuse now? Mr. Trudeau had a telling comment as part of his response to Mr. Singh. “We are not looking to provoke or create a fight with India.”
This just in: Canada is already in a fight with India, serious enough to merit the expulsion of the country’s top diplomat.
As the Prime Minister noted, there are deep people-to-people relations between India and Canada. But the actions of the Modi government are overtly hostile, not to mention a transgression of a basic rule of international diplomacy. Still, Mr. Trudeau seems curiously unwilling to acknowledge that India is, if not an enemy quite yet, certainly an adversary.
In fairness, it’s a whiplash change in the relations between the two countries. Back in 2018, Canada and India inked a wide-ranging agreement on strengthening ties between the two Commonwealth nations.
Economic and education initiatives were on the agenda. So were nuclear science and intellectual property. And so was the sharing of intelligence for combatting terrorism and violent extremism. That agreement is just six years old, but it now feels like it hails from a distant era.
Similarly quaint is Canada’s Indo-Pacific strategy document, less than two years old. Its description of India as a “critical partner” with a “shared tradition of democracy and pluralism” and a commitment to a rules-based international system comes off as painfully naive.
Mr. Trudeau got it half-right at the inquiry, when he observed that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s “coercive diplomacy” were eroding the international order. “We are seeing right now around the world a pulling back of the rule of law, [a] contesting of the rules-based order,” he said.
Where the Prime Minister fell short was in continuing to pine for that rapidly receding world in which nations were willing to operate within mutually accepted boundaries. Russia does not accept those boundaries. Neither do China, North Korea or Iran. India, under the increasingly autocratic Mr. Modi, is auditioning for that rogues’ gallery.
The Liberals’ love of multilateralism, even as the rules-based order withers away, is obscuring that reality. Canada is part of the Western alliance, an enviable position indeed, even as global chaos mounts. Embracing that fact – and living up to the responsibilities that come with it – is Canada’s future in an increasingly dangerous world.