Canada needs diplomats in India to help navigate the “extremely challenging” tensions between the two countries, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Tuesday in response to demands that Ottawa repatriate dozens of its envoys.
India reportedly wants 41 of 62 Canadian diplomats out of the country by early next week — a striking, if largely anticipated, deepening of the rift that erupted last month following Trudeau’s explosive allegations in the House of Commons.
The prime minister bluntly spoke of “credible” intelligence linking the Indian government to the shooting death in June of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a 45-year-old Sikh leader India has long assailed as a terrorist.
The demand, first reported by the Financial Times, comes less than two weeks after the Indian government first called on Canada to establish “parity in strength and rank equivalence in our diplomatic presence.”
Canada has a much larger diplomatic corps in India, owing in part to the fact it’s a country of 1.4 billion people, compared to 40 million in Canada — about 1.3 million of whom are of Indian origin.
Trudeau would not confirm the reports Tuesday, nor did he sound inclined to acquiesce to India’s request.
“Obviously, we’re going through an extremely challenging time with India right now,” Trudeau said on his way to a caucus meeting on Parliament Hill.
“That’s why it’s so important for us to have diplomats on the ground, working with the Indian government, there to support Canadians and Canadian families.”
Canada, he continued, is “taking this extremely seriously, but we’re going to continue to engage responsibly and constructively with the government of India.”
Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly said largely the same thing.
“In moments of tension, because indeed there are tensions between both our governments, more than ever it’s important that diplomats be on the ground,” Joly said.
“That’s why we believe in the importance of having a strong diplomatic footprint in India. That being said, we are in ongoing conversations with the Indian government.”
During Tuesday’s daily briefing at the State Department, deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel was at pains to avoid exacerbating tensions any further.
“We are — and continue to be — deeply concerned about the allegations referenced by Prime Minister Trudeau and we remain in regular contact with our Canadian partners,” Patel said, a message the U.S. has had on repeat for weeks.
“It’s critical that Canada’s investigation proceed and the perpetrators be brought to justice. We also have … publicly and privately urged the Indian government to co-operate in the Canadian investigation and co-operate in those efforts.”
Patel also demurred on the potential impact of an escalating tit-for-tat exchange of diplomatic staff on the U.S. Indo-Pacific strategy, a key element of U.S. efforts to mitigate China’s growing geopolitical influence.
“I certainly don’t want to get into hypotheticals,” he said. “As it relates to our Indo-Pacific strategy and the focus that we continue to place on the region, that effort and that line of work is going to continue.”
David Cohen, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, has already confirmed that the allegations were buttressed in part on intelligence gathered by a key ally from the Five Eyes security alliance, which includes the U.S., the U.K., Australia and New Zealand, along with Canada.
Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s external affairs minister, confirmed last week that the subject came up in his meetings in Washington, D.C., with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Jake Sullivan, the U.S. national security adviser.
Trudeau’s allegation “was not consistent with our policy,” Jaishankar told a panel discussion Friday hosted by the Hudson Institute.
“If his government had anything relevant and specific they would like us to look into, we were open to looking at it. That’s where that conversation is at this point of time.”
Jaishankar went on to note that the issue of Sikh separatists living in Canada had long been “an issue of great friction,” notably after the 1985 bombing of Air India flight 182, the worst terrorist attack in Canadian history.
“In the last few years, it has come back very much into play, because of what we consider to be a very permissive Canadian attitude towards terrorists, extremists, people who openly advocate violence,” Jaishankar said.
“They have been given operating space in Canada because of the compulsions of Canadian politics.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 3, 2023.
HALIFAX – Police have accused a Nova Scotia man of murdering a woman reported missing from the province’s Annapolis Valley after U.S. authorities detained a suspect at the Houston airport as he was preparing to board a flight to Mexico.
The RCMP say they charged 54-year-old Dale Allen Toole with first-degree murder after he was extradited by U.S. authorities and landed at Pearson International Airport in Toronto on Thursday.
RCMP Insp. Murray Marcichiw said investigators have yet to find the body of 55-year-old Esther Jones, but he said police believe there was sufficient evidence to lay the murder charge.
The search for Jones began on Labour Day after family members reported her missing.
RCMP Cpl. Jeff MacFarlane, lead investigator in the case, says Jones was last seen Aug. 31 at the Kingston Bible College in Greenwood, N.S.
MacFarlane says the accused, who is from Tremont, N.S., was not a suspect until police received key information from the Jones family and the community.
He said police executed a number of search warrants at locations in and around Annapolis County, including the communities of Kingston, Greenwood and South Tremont.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
MONTREAL – The Quebec government says Canada’s special representative on combating Islamophobia must resign, after she sent a letter to college and university heads recommending the hiring of more Muslim, Arab and Palestinian professors.
The existence of the letter, dated Aug. 30, was first reported by Le Journal de Québec, and a Canadian Heritage spokesperson says it was sent to institutions across the country.
In her letter, Amira Elghawaby says that since the start of the war between Israel and Hamas in October 2023, a dangerous climate has arisen on campuses.
She says to ease tensions educational institutions should be briefed on civil liberties and Islamophobia, and that they should hire more professors of Muslim, Arab and Palestinian origin.
It was this reference to hiring that drew the immediate indignation of Quebec’s higher education minister, who called on Elghawaby to resign, saying she should “mind her own business.”
Minister Pascale Déry says hiring professors based on religion goes against the principles of secularism the province adheres to.
Speaking to reporters in the Montreal area, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said that while each university will make its own hires, Elghawaby’s role is to make recommendations and encourage dialogue between different groups.
Later in Repentigny, Que., Premier François Legault criticized Trudeau for defending Elghawaby “in the name of diversity” and refusing to call for her resignation.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
VANCOUVER – A report into a triple stabbing at a festival in Vancouver’s Chinatown last year says the man accused of the crimes had been let out of a psychiatric care facility 99 times in the year prior without incident.
The report, authored by former Abbotsford Police chief Bob Rich, says the suspect in the stabbing, Blair Donnelly, was on his 100th unescorted leave from the BC Forensic Psychiatric Hospital on Sept. 10, 2023, when he allegedly stabbed three festivalgoers at the Light Up Chinatown Festival.
The external review, ordered by the provincial government after the stabbings, says Donnelly was found not criminally responsible for killing his daughter in 2006 while “suffering from a psychotic delusion that God wanted him to kill her.”
Rich’s report makes several recommendations to better handle “higher-risk patients,” including bolstering their care teams, improving policies around granting patient leaves, shoring up staff training in forensics and the use of “risk-management tools,” such as GPS tracking systems.
The B.C. Ministry of Health says it has accepted all of Rich’s recommendations and has already begun implementing them including “following new polices for granting leave privileges at the hospital.”
Court records show Donnelly is due back in Vancouver provincial court in March 2025.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Sept. 13, 2024.
