Dosanjh: Canada has put up with Khalistani terrorists for long enough

2025/06/23 Leave a comment

Of note from former British Columbia premier and Liberal minister:

….After decades of frustration over the West’s indifference to the Khalistani menace, India finally sees signs of progress, as the Trump administration appears to be acting on the threat in the United States. Following U.S. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard’s meetings with Indian officials in New Delhi in March, the FBI arrested a Khalistani terrorist with suspected links to the ISI.

While inviting Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 Summit in Alberta was a welcome move to mend Canada-India relations, the Carney government can ill-afford to continue ignoring the Khalistani threat.

As the past four decades have shown, permitting extremist groups with criminal tendencies to operate unbridled in Canada has severely undermined the country’s national security and public safety interests.

The Khalistan movement is not a legitimate political cause. It is an extremist, hate-fest-cum-transnational-criminal-entity that was responsible for Canada’s deadliest terror attack and has made our streets less safe. There is nothing Canadian about a movement that radicalizes children to hate, and threatens and glorifies the assassination of foreign leaders.

As former prime minister Stephen Harper rightly counselled, it’s time for Canada’s political class to “sever” ties with Khalistani separatists and treat them with the contempt that murderous terrorists and criminals deserve.

Source: Opinion: Canada has put up with Khalistani terrorists for long enough

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Violent extremists are using antisemitism to recruit in Canada: CSIS report

2025/02/21 Leave a comment

Not surprising, and presumably many are also using anti-Muslim commentary for the same purpose:

Ideologically motivated violent extremist groups are using antisemitism in a bid to recruit followers and inspire violence, according to a report from Canada’s spy agency.

The report dated May 2024, released under the access to information law by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), said the extremist groups are also tapping into current events, such as the Israel-Hamas conflict, to build support.

“Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists routinely weave antisemitic commentary into their narratives in order to inspire violence and recruit individuals,” says the report. “These new adherents, in turn, use antisemitic commentary, often tailored to current events, in order to disseminate violent messaging.”

“Thus, antisemitic beliefs, with violent undertones, are disseminated jointly to an ever-expanding circle of recipients.”

The report, obtained by the University of Ottawa’s Samuelson-Glushko Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic and shared with CBC News, says much of that antisemitic content is circulated via social media.

“Social media is the main pathway for the consumption of antisemitic and violent extremist content, be it via popular rhetoric available from mainstream providers, or via influencers who actively convey antisemitic content or conspiracy theories,” says the report. “The narratives encourage hate crimes, violence and terrorism.”

The report says the continual increase in incidents targeting the Jewish community will normalize antisemitism in mainstream Canadian society and will likely be exacerbated by the conflict in the Middle East.

It also says pro-Palestinian protests and university encampments “are unlikely to lead to or be staging grounds for violent extremist acts.”

The agency places a number of different groups into the category of Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremist (IMVE) including far-right extremists, anti-authority groups, anarchists, xenophobic violence and violence related to gender such as incels and anti-2SLGBTQ+ groups. Religiously Motivated Violent Extremist (RMVE) groups such as those that support Al-Qaida or Daesh, also known as the Islamic State, fall into a separate category.

While the report says it is difficult to measure the precise level of antisemitism in Canada, it says the number of hate-motivated incidents directed at the Jewish and Arab/Muslim communities reported to police since Oct 7, 2023, have risen….

Source: Violent extremists are using antisemitism to recruit in Canada: CSIS report

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Rioux | La solitude des profs

2024/10/19 Leave a comment

A noter:

…En France, les islamistes s’évertuent à « maintenir un niveau de connaissances faible afin de tuer l’esprit critique et le rationalisme, l’imaginaire et la fiction, ou encore ignorer l’Histoire, qui n’aurait aucun intérêt pour la connaissance de Dieu », dit l’historien Pierre Vermeren. Sans parler de l’éducation sexuelle…

On ne s’étonnera pas que, laissés à eux-mêmes, 56 % des professeurs français s’autocensurent sur la Shoah, le conflit israélo-palestinien, et n’osent plus montrer à leurs élèves la Vénus de Botticelli. Avant l’assassinat de Samuel Paty, ils n’étaient que 38 %. Pourtant, combien sont-ils à se cacher la tête dans le sable sans même oser prononcer le mot « islamisme » ? Face à la démission de ceux qui ne veulent pas faire de vagues, ne vous demandez pas pourquoi les professeurs se sentent abandonnés.

—

… In France, Islamists strive to “maintain a low level of knowledge in order to kill critical thinking and rationalism, imagination and fiction, or ignore History, which would have no interest in the knowledge of God,” says historian Pierre Vermeren. Not to mention sex education…

We will not be surprised that, left to themselves, 56% of French teachers self-censor the Shoah, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and no longer dare to show their students the Botticelli Venus. Before the assassination of Samuel Paty, they were only 38%. However, how many of them hide their heads in the sand without even daring to say the word “Islamism”? Faced with the resignation of those who do not want to make waves, do not ask yourself why teachers feel abandoned.

Source: Chronique | La solitude des profs

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Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

2024/09/09 Leave a comment

One of the first pieces in mainstream media that ventures into country of origin and values arguments against immigration in addition to housing, healthcare etc:

…Canada needs to slow immigration for a number of reasons: lack of housing (it’s unfair to bring immigrants here when they have nowhere to live), rising unemployment, increasing social unrest, and decreasing social cohesion. At the very least, Canada needs to slow immigration from countries whose residents are currently hostile to Canada and the United States. This isn’t rocket science, and the notion that even discussing immigration in any way makes you a racist needs to be put to bed once and for all. There are countries with governments and citizens who hate our way of life and want to destroy it, and they are quite vocal about it. Canada needs a government that is mature enough to recognize this reality in order to keep citizens safe. This does not make us less empathetic. It makes us smart.

Source: Terry Newman: Trudeau’s Canada safe for alleged terrorist targeting New York Jews

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Jesse Kline: The Canadian terrorist supporter who Iran loves

2024/08/23 Leave a comment

Indeed. And shameful:

There are some awards that should give recipients pause and make them reconsider their life choices. Like receiving a Razzie Award for worst actor, a Grand Cross of the German Eagle from the Nazis or a human rights award from the Islamic Republic of Iran. But for Canadian terror apologist Charlotte Kates, the Iranian regime’s recognition of her anti-Israel campaign is considered a badge of honour.

Kates is the international co-ordinator of the Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, a registered Canadian non-profit that was founded by members of, and is closely associated with, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which Canada recognizes as a terrorist entity.

Samidoun is also responsible for organizing and funding many of the vile anti-Israel protests that have taken place on Canadian streets since October 7.

Readers may remember Kates as the woman who stood in front of the Vancouver Art Gallery in April, shouting “Long live October 7!” and praising the massacre in which 1,200 Israelis, mostly civilians, were brutally raped and murdered, and over 250 were taken into captivity, where many remain to this day.

Kates was arrested as part of a hate-crime investigation and released on the condition that she not attend any rallies, pending a court date in the fall. But that did not stop her from boarding a plane to Tehran, where she — along with five other individuals, including slain Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh — received an Islamic Human Rights Award for her “anti-Zionist activities” earlier this month.

A couple days later, Kates appeared as a guest on Iranian TV, clad in a hijab and appropriately spaced from her male host, where she blamed “Zionist organizations and political officials” for her arrest and opined about the “lie of so-called western democracy and concern for human rights.”

Iran, of course, has one of the world’s most dismal human rights records. This is the country where, in 2022, 22-year-old Mahsa Amini was arrested and subsequently murdered for improperly wearing a headscarf in public. The government crackdown on the ensuing protests resulted in hundreds of deaths, tens of thousands of arrests and numerous executions….

Source: Jesse Kline: The Canadian terrorist supporter who Iran loves

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Gurski: Again, the Liberals show they don’t really understand national security

2024/07/02 Leave a comment

Interesting commentary on the IRGC listing and related security issues:

Last week saw a flurry of activity from the Canadian government on national security.  First, it announced on June 19 that the IRGC — Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps — had been formally “listed” as a terrorist entity. Then the Senate approved Bill C-70 calling for the establishment of a foreign agent registry.

I will defer comments on C-70 for later and focus on the significance – if any – of the decision to add the IRGC to a large number of “listed entities.” The government crowed that it took this move after “years” of hard work and claimed this demonstrated, yet again, how seriously it takes national security.

Except that the IRGC move was not all that urgent: the Conservatives asked that the Liberal government list this group back in 2018, which makes you wonder what took so long. It is not as if the government needed to study whether the IRGC merited this rank given its 40 years of support for other listed entities (among which are Hezbollah, Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad) and well-known penchant for mucking about in the Middle East and elsewhere. Calling it a terrorist group now does not exactly constitute rocket science.

The terrorist listing tool dates back to 2002 (full disclosure: I wrote the first al-Qaida listing that year while working as a senior terrorism analyst at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS) and is used to identify groups the government believes engage in terrorist activity. It is handy largely from a financing perspective: if you are daft enough to send a cheque or e-transfer to Hamas leadership, you are guilty of terrorist financing.

But aside from that, the listing process suffers from two problems. First, it is not essential for a group (or individual) to be listed to warrant attention and investigation from our protectors (Communications Security Establishment, CSIS, RCMP, etc.). We at CSIS had been looking at al-Qaida for decades prior to the creation of the list; in other words, we did not need some mandarin to say “gee, AQ is a terrorist group, maybe our spies should monitor it.” Furthermore, the non-appearance of a group (or individual) from the list does not preclude investigating it (or him/her). Our spies aren’t waiting for orders to carry out their work in accordance with their well-established practices and legislative mandates.

Second, the listings are often purely political in nature. The addition of the Proud Boys in January 2021 was clearly a knee-jerk reaction to the raid on the U.S. Capitol by a dog’s breakfast of wankers, including some members of the U.S. branch of this group. The chapter in Canada has never carried out a single act of violence in this country and frankly, to cite a friend of mine who investigated the far right in Canada in the 1990s, couldn’t make a cheese sandwich. Sources told me that CSIS was not in favour of listing the Proud Boys as the group did not merit that kind of attention/status.

Sometimes groups are “delisted” for purely political reasons too. The Harper government took the anti-Iranian People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI, better known as the MeK) off the list in the early 2010s, despite its use of violence here and abroad. Go figure.

The timing of the IRGC decision also raises eyebrows. Just before the House of Commons rose for the summer? Did the government think no one was paying attention?  Just before a byelection in Toronto? To show it takes national security “very seriously” (to quote Chrystia Freeland)? To deflect criticism of its handling of the ongoing People’s Republic of China interference gong show?

For what it is worth, I have no issue with naming the IRGC a terrorist entity. I worked as an Iranian analyst for 20 years at both CSE and CSIS, and I understand what this ideological bunch of thugs stands for.

At the same time, the choice of day/month for this action does nothing to shake my belief that this government neither comprehends nor cares about national security. The IRGC could have been listed 20 years ago, and in all honesty should have been part of the original process just after 9/11. Making a big deal of it now just looks, well, political.

Phil Gurski is President and CEO of Borealis Threat and Risk Consulting.
http://www.borealisthreatandrisk.com

Source: Gurski: Again, the Liberals show they don’t really understand national security

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Australia cannot strip citizenship from man over his terrorism convictions, top court says

2023/11/02 Leave a comment

Of note:

Australia’s highest court on Wednesday overturned a government decision to strip citizenship from a man convicted of terrorism.

The ruling is a second blow in the High Court to the law introduced almost a decade ago that allows a government minister to strip dual nationals of their Australian citizenship on extremism-related grounds.

The ruling also prevents the government from deporting Algerian-born cleric Abdul Benbrika when he is released from prison, which is expected within weeks.

Source: Australia cannot strip citizenship from man over his terrorism convictions, top court says – The Associated Press

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Rioux: Terroriste, mais encore…

2023/10/14 Leave a comment

Of note:

Ce n’est pas un hasard si le mot razzia nous vient d’Algérie. Depuis le Moyen Âge, Arabes et Ottomans menèrent des razzias ininterrompues sur les côtes méditerranéennes, où ils capturaient des otages qui étaient ensuite vendus comme esclaves, jetés dans des harems ou réduits aux travaux forcés.

Ce n’est pas un acte de guerre, mais une razzia à la puissance mille qu’a perpétrée le Hamas le 7 octobre dernier en pénétrant dès l’aube en territoire israélien pour « tuer du Juif » et assassiner plus d’un millier de militaires, de civils, de femmes et d’enfants confondus. Sans oublier de rafler une centaine d’otages qui serviront de boucliers humains, de monnaie d’échange ou de chair humaine dans des exécutions diffusées sur les réseaux sociaux afin de terroriser les mécréants.

Ceux qui font profession d’aveugles n’y verront qu’un attentat de plus dans la longue histoire du conflit israélo-palestinien. Nous sommes pourtant devant le pire carnage commis depuis 1945 à l’égard de civils juifs, assassinés pour la seule raison qu’ils étaient juifs. Sur leur chemin, les djihadistes ont abattu 260 jeunes qui participaient à la rave party Supernova. Quand ils ne les ont pas égorgés ou violés. Des fous de Dieu surgis d’un autre âge face à l’insouciante jeunesse mondialisée de Tel-Aviv, le contraste ne pouvait être plus étourdissant. Pour nombre de juifs, dont le secrétaire d’État Antony Blinken, cela n’évoquait rien de moins qu’un pogrom.

Certes, cette offensive poursuivait aussi des objectifs politiques. Il s’agissait de torpiller les accords d’Abraham, qui étaient sur le point de réconcilier diplomatiquement Israël et l’Arabie saoudite. Une alliance particulièrement inquiétante pour l’Iran, principal soutien du Hamas. Notamment parce qu’elle montre que juifs et musulmans peuvent vivre en harmonie, comme l’illustrent les 150 000 Israéliens qui visitent chaque année les Émirats arabes. Autre vision intolérable pour le Hamas, car le moindre signe de réconciliation signerait son arrêt de mort.

Ce carnage n’a donc rien à voir avec la cause nationale palestinienne, et encore moins celle d’un État indépendant. Il s’inscrit au contraire dans la lignée des grands attentats islamistes du 11 septembre, de Charlie Hebdo et du Bataclan.

Le mot terrorisme, que la prude CBC et l’extrême gauche française se refusent à prononcer, est d’ailleurs largement insuffisant pour désigner cette organisation islamiste, antisémite et totalitaire qui tient Gaza sous sa férule. Ses crimes vont bien « au-delà du terrorisme », pour reprendre les mots du bédéiste Joann Sfar. Car le Hamas n’a rien d’un banal mouvement de libération qui aurait commis quelques attentats. Créé en 1988, il est la branche palestinienne des Frères musulmans, nés en Égypte dans les années 1920, qui ont notamment soutenu l’alliance entre Hitler et le grand mufti de Jérusalem. Ici, l’oumma remplace la nation, l’islamisme le nationalisme, et le califat l’État démocratique.

Radicalement opposé aux voix libérales palestiniennes — que les Frères musulmans ont d’ailleurs souvent éliminées physiquement —, le Hamas n’a jamais eu d’autres buts que d’islamiser la société palestinienne et d’empêcher que ne s’impose une direction laïque soucieuse des intérêts nationaux de son peuple. « La mort sur le chemin de Dieu est la plus éminente des espérances », proclame sa charte fondatrice qui stipule aussi que « la bannière d’Allah » doit flotter « sur chaque pouce de la Palestine ». L’État palestinien ne pouvant être, à la rigueur, qu’une étape avant l’expulsion complète des Juifs de la région.

L’idée qu’avec le temps, le Hamas deviendrait un interlocuteur sérieux apparaît aujourd’hui comme un leurre. Cette organisation a toujours agi afin de faire capoter toute perspective de paix et de création d’un État palestinien. C’est ce qui faisait dire au journaliste israélien Stéphane Amar, que nous avions interviewé à Tel-Aviv, en 2016, que « le rêve des deux États est mort depuis longtemps ». Il ne pourrait renaître que le jour où Israël, seule démocratie du Moyen-Orient, trouverait un interlocuteur qui ne souhaite pas son extermination.

Nous avions alors constaté sur place combien la seconde Intifada, avec ses attentats kamikazes contre les civils, avait achevé de tuer tout espoir de paix, anéantissant du coup la gauche israélienne depuis longtemps ouverte au compromis. Tant que l’islamisme dominera le mouvement palestinien, la théorie des deux États demeurera un mythe. Quel État dans le monde souhaiterait la création à ses frontières d’une théocratie doublée d’un État terroriste ?

Les véritables défenseurs du peuple palestinien aujourd’hui ne sont pas ceux qui, trop heureux de s’en laver les mains, renvoient dos à dos les potentats du Hamas et le gouvernement démocratiquement élu de Benjamin Nétanyahou. Ce sont ceux qui combattent l’islamisme dans l’espoir que renaisse un jour un leadership palestinien digne de ce nom.

Le temps de juger les graves erreurs de Nétanyahou viendra bien assez vite. On peut compter sur le peuple israélien pour cela. Comme pour exiger une riposte ciblée et proportionnée. Mais, pour l’instant, constatons que la guerre que mène le Hamas pour détruire Israël n’a rien d’une lutte nationale et tout d’une guerre de civilisation.

On pourrait rêver d’un autre combat. Mais on ne choisit pas ses ennemis. C’est eux qui nous choisissent.

Source: Terroriste, mais encore…

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John Ivison: Tolerating the glorification of terror and slaughter is societal suicide

2023/10/12 Leave a comment

Of note:

Sukhdool Singh, an alleged gangster, was gunned down in Winnipeg last month, in a tit-for-tat killing between rival gangs.

Singh was wanted in India for extortion and murder, and was alleged to have links to the Khalistan Tiger Force, which has been designated a terror organization by the Indian government. He is said to have escaped to Canada on a forged passport in 2017 and India has been trying, unsuccessfully, to extradite him ever since.

Singh’s case is instructive because it is at the heart of the dispute between Canada and India. The Indians say Canada has offered a safe haven for Khalistani terrorists in return for votes from the Sikh community.

Canada says that its hands are tied because freedom of speech is protected under the Charter of Rights.

By its actions, the Canadian government has also endorsed the recent findings of the House of Commons justice and human rights committee that concluded suspects could be abused and tortured if returned to India and a host of other countries. Only six people were extradited to India between 2002 and 2020 and none of them were suspected Khalistani terrorists.

Canada is seen as being soft on terror, with some justification.

Its record on clamping down on terror financing is abysmal, as noted by B.C.’s Cullen commission into money laundering, which found that the federal Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre (FINTRAC) is ill-equipped to share intelligence with law enforcement. Proof of FINTRAC’s impotence is the lack of any charges laid between 2009 and 2016, even though it uncovered 683 transactions linked to terror financing

The government is in the process of beefing up its efforts against money laundering and terror financing, with a number of proposed legislative changes aimed at giving FINTRAC and law enforcement more powers.

But Canada’s perennial balancing act with rights and freedoms leads to much hand-wringing. For example, the Canada Revenue Agency has been accused of unfairly targeting Muslim-led charities, leading to calls for the agency to suspend its terror-financing investigative unit. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his sympathy for what he called the systemic Islamophobia in the CRA.

However, the atrocities that the world has witnessed over the course of the past weekend in Israel may tilt that balance away from the indulgence that has prevailed.

The scenes that played out on Saturday night in Mississauga, with joyous crowds cheering and honking horns, as if their team had just won the World Cup, were abhorrent. This was the glorification of the mass murder of children, such as the 40 dead babies discovered at the Kfar Aza kibbutz in southern Israel. This was celebration of Hamas’ deliberate and systemic targeting of civilians to kill as many as possible.

To his credit, Trudeau renounced such scenes in his remarks at a Jewish community centre in Ottawa. “The glorification of death and violence and terror has no place anywhere, especially here in Canada. Hamas terrorists aren’t a resistance, they’re not freedom fighters, they are terrorists and no one in Canada should be supporting them, much less celebrating them.”

Canada has a law against displaying hate — Section 319 of the Criminal Code, which says that anyone who incites hatred against an identifiable group where incitement is likely to lead to a breach of the peace is guilty of an indictable offence.

But such is the power of section 2b of the Charter when it comes to freedom of expression, it has been used sparingly — just 20 times between 2001 and 2019.

That is a good thing. I am proud to live in a country where truth cannot be put down by persecution. As John Stuart Mill said about free speech, conflicting doctrines often share the truth between them.

But it is quite another thing to witness fellow citizens lionize rape and murder.

In 2015, the Senate committee on national security and defence released a report in the wake of the terror attack on Parliament Hill.

It made a number of recommendations that were never enacted, including establishing a “no visit” list of identified ideological radicals and working in Muslim communities to create an effective counter-narrative to Islamic fundamentalism.

But one conclusion that it drew has special resonance today — that our hate laws should be updated to ban the glorification of terrorists, terrorist acts and terrorist symbols. The committee said it recognized issues with the Charter of Rights but noted that France and U.K. have similar laws.

There are clearly issues with what constitutes “glorification” — a grey zone where there may not be specific calls for action. France’s law appears to go too far: one 25-year-old man was handed a suspended sentence for scribbling “Vive Daesh” (aka ISIL) on a toilet wall.

Yet, antisemitic chants calling for the destruction of Israel, or in the case of Canada’s Khalistanis, building a carnival float that celebrates the assassination of Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi (as happened in Toronto in 2023) create the conditions for violence. The British law includes a clause that specifically says the offence occurs when members of the public might reasonably be expected to infer that what is being glorified is being proposed as conduct that should be emulated.

The introduction of such legislation may go a long way to healing the rift with India — and that cannot be done quickly enough.

We are entering a period of what historian Niall Ferguson has predicted will be a “cascade of conflict,” where Russia, Iran and China will do their best to overturn the international order by testing a fiscally overstretched America in three theatres: Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the Far East. It will be no surprise to anyone if China makes an illegal move in the South China Sea in the coming weeks.

Canada needs to recognize that, in W.B. Yeats’ words, anarchy is loosed upon the world and innocence is drowned; that “the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.”

We need to stand with our allies, even if we don’t often like what they do. India’s Narendra Modi is a thin-skinned chauvinist; Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu may be corrupt and is certainly incompetent.

As the former Shin Bet chief, Ami Ayalon, told Le Figaro, the Netanyahu government is largely responsible for the divisions that created an opportunity for Hamas, with its controversial push for justice reforms and a policy that marginalized the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank.

But these flaws pale in comparison to the what the great autocracies would have in store for us.

I’m haunted by a quote in Avi Shavit’s superb history of Israel: My Promised Land, where he talks about the vitality of the nation. “And yet, there is always the fear that one day, daily life will freeze like Pompeii’s.”

For too many Israelis, life did indeed freeze this weekend. The existential threat there is palpable. Canada cannot allow pluralism and reasonable accommodation to plant the seeds of our self-destruction.

Source: John Ivison: Tolerating the glorification of terror and slaughter is societal suicide

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Clark: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

2023/09/20 Leave a comment

One of many articles on the intelligence revelations that the Indian may have been behind the Canadian Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar:

It was a jolt for Canada when China retaliated for the arrest of a Huawei executive in Vancouver by locking up two Canadian bystanders, the two Michaels, five years ago. Now a second shock shows us foreign governments are continuing to reach into Canada to intimidate.

This time, agents of a supposedly friendly country, India, are alleged to be linked to the death of a Canadian, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh community leader who in June was shot in his truck in the parking lot of the Guru Nanak Gurdwara in Surrey, B.C.

There has never been anything like this before: an explosive public allegation that a foreign government’s agents targeted and killed a Canadian citizen, in Canada.

Certainly, there has never been a moment like the one on Monday afternoon when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood up in the House of Commons to tell the country that Canada’s security agencies are pursuing “credible allegations” of a potential link to the Indian government.

India is not supposed to be an enemy, or even an adversary. There are tensions, because the Indian government has for decades accused Canada of being soft on Khalistani terrorists, who seek to carve an independent Sikh state out of what is now northern India. But India has often conflated non-violent Sikh separatist advocates with terrorists and extremists. Mr. Nijjar was organizing an unofficial referendum on the creation of a Sikh state when he was killed.

The idea that New Delhi might send agents to kill a Canadian in Canada is stunning.

Mr. Trudeau said on Monday that he had spoken to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi about the allegation “in no uncertain terms” at last week’s G20 summit in New Delhi, but there was no word from the Canadian government on Mr. Modi’s response. There’s no sense Mr. Trudeau was given a satisfactory answer, or that he was promised Indian co-operation on an investigation.

Canada has already expelled an Indian diplomat who was the chief of the Indian foreign intelligence agency in Canada, but it’s not clear what, if anything, will happen next.

Again, Canada is jolted into recognizing a new world in which foreign governments reach out to influence, intimidate and coerce Canadians in Canada. Again, there is new reason to believe foreign interference might be a bigger, broader danger than this country is prepared to counter. This time, the allegation is assassination, which underlines the direct threat to the security of Canadians – especially those who belong to diaspora communities here.

Already, many in Canada’s Sikh community believed that the Indian government had been involved in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, and his death had sparked anger and protests. Indian diplomats had complained to Mr. Trudeau’s government that those protests were becoming threatening. The killing brought tension to Canadian streets.

It wasn’t quite the same thing in 2018, when China arrested Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on U.S. charges. But that was an attempt to intimidate Canada for exercising its own laws. It showed Canadians can’t expect sovereignty without foreign coercion.

And there have been more examples of China and other countries feeling they can reach inside Canada. The RCMP said earlier this summer that they had shut down illegal Chinese police activity in several Canadian locations. The Globe and Mail has reported on a series of attempts by Beijing to influence Canadian elections. Canadian relatives of victims of the 2020 downing of Ukrainian Airlines Flight 752 by Iranian armed forces reported that people close to the Iranian regime had approached them in Canada, in an attempt to intimidate them into silence.

Now, Mr. Trudeau has made an explosive, albeit unproven, allegation of an extreme example – an alleged assassination in Canada – and promised to work closely with allies “on this very serious matter.” In the Commons, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh called on allies to “condemn this violence … in the harshest terms possible.”

But it is far from certain that the U.S. and other Canadian allies will rush to hold India to account.

For one thing, credible allegations in the hands of intelligence agencies aren’t the same as evidence gathered by police for a trial. And in a world where Western allies have imposed extensive economic sanctions against Russia and are increasingly seeking to counter China’s influence, the U.S. and European nations won’t relish the prospect of conflict with another major power.

But if the allegation is true, it will be fuel for the coming public inquiry into foreign interference. Foreign governments apparently feel as though they can reach into Canada with impunity. Countering that is now a pressing national priority.

Source: Canada once more forced to reckon with era of foreign intimidation

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