Douglas Todd: Trudeau’s defiance of India ‘killing two birds with one stone’

2023/09/22 Leave a comment

Some interesting insights regarding the different positions within the Sikh and South Asian communities:

The callers lined up like almost never before on Harjit Singh Gill’s radio talk show this week after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared there were “credible allegations” that Indian agents were involved in the June murder of a Sikh activist outside a Surrey gurdwara.

“Things are very hot in the community,” said Gill, who has a morning talk show on Sher E Punjab, 600 AM. Trudeau took a chance on going public about the bloody end of the Khalistan independence fighter, Gill said, and many of B.C.’s 300,000 Sikhs felt affirmed by it.

Sikhs, who make up B.C.’s second-largest religious group after Christianity, have complained to Ottawa for months that India’s government, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who many call a Hindu nationalist, must have had a hand in the slaying of Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

A plumber whom Indian authorities have accused of murdering a Hindu priest and killing six in a Punjabi cinema bombing, Nijjar was shot in his truck in the parking lot of the giant Guru Nanak gurdwara, of which he was president.

Since Gill believes no politician makes such a big move without considering its electoral implications, he said Trudeau “killed two birds with one stone” in his high-impact claim, which Indian government officials have angrily denounced as “absurd and motivated.” They are now asking Indian nationals to be cautious about visiting Canada because of its “growing anti-India activities and politically condoned hate-crimes.”

Trudeau’s thunderbolt declaration, Gill said, was satisfying to many Canadian Sikhs, particularly advocates of a separate Sikh homeland called Khalistan, in the way it protected Canadians’ sovereignty and right of free expression.

The prime minister, Gill said, also brilliantly distracted voters from issues that were killing him in the polls.

They include the housing affordability crisis, China’s subversion of Canadian elections and Trudeau’s poorly rated performance at this month’s G20 summit in India, where Modi accused Trudeau of protecting Sikh militants who employ violence in their battle for the ethno-religious vision of Khalistan.

Trudeau’s attack on possible interference by India’s government will resonate not only among Sikhs, but among immigrants from all sorts of countries, says Andres Machalski, president of Mirems, which monitors more than 800 foreign-language media outlets in Canada.

Since millions of immigrants have come to Canada to escape discrimination and persecution in their homelands, Machalski said, “Trudeau’s unassailable message to all immigrants is, ‘We will stand up for you.’”

That message can hit home for people who have left behind all sorts of conflict-ridden nations, whether China, Ukraine or Sri Lanka, said Machalski. It reverberates for Machalski himself, since he came to Canada as a refugee from Argentina in 1976, when elected leaders were replaced in a ruthless military coup.

Specifically, Machalski said Trudeau’s declaration on the opening day of parliament, which “gained maximum attention” and divert from issues working against his popularity, was mostly aimed at garnering support from the roughly 800,000 Sikhs in Canada.

Even though the number of Hindus in Canada is about the same, and many will be upset by Trudeau’s attack on the Hindu-majority country of India, Machalski said Punjabi Sikhs in Canada have a stronger group identity and are more politically organized and influential than Hindus, particularly in crucial federal and provincial ridings in Greater Toronto, Metro Vancouver and Calgary.

That’s the case, Machalski said, despite Punjabi Canadians disagreeing on just how much support there is for a separate Khalistan in this country.

“Many Sikhs kind of just tolerate the Khalistanis and their vociferous rallies,” he said.

Despite the wide distribution of vivid photos of Canadian Sikh protesters outraged at India, Gill agrees the Sikh population is “not monolithic.”

It’s hard to get numbers on how many Canadian Sikhs share the vision of Khalistan, said Gill, who looks forward to the results of the non-binding referendum that a secessionist group, Sikhs for Justice, has organized.

Last week vote organizers claimed 135,000 India-born Canadians in the Lower Mainland showed up to vote in the referendum that Nijjar, whom India accused of terrorism, had helped organize.

Earlier referenda were held among the large Sikh populations in Britain and suburban Toronto, which has contributed to Modi’s accusation that offshore agitators are stirring up division in his nation.

Prominent Punjabi Canadian Barj Dhahan, who has spent the past 30 years conducting business and philanthropy between B.C. and India, doesn’t trust the Metro Vancouver referendum. He says it’s not clear, for instance, who is eligible to vote in it.

And since Dhahan frequently travels to northern India, he says he knows the idea of Khalistan is virtually dead there. Sikhs in India “are much more worried about getting jobs and having a future.”

Gill, the talk-show host, also acknowledges the Khalistan movement is weak in India, in part because of changing demographics. In Canada, Gill said, views on Khalistan can differ sharply between Sikh fundamentalists and Sikh moderates, who often end up fighting for control of the province’s many gurdwaras.

Machalski, who monitors the discourse in dozens of Punjabi print and broadcast outlets across Canada, said there is no more uniformity among Canadian Sikhs on Khalistan than there is among Canadian Catholics on the pope.

Despite their wide range of views, Machalski said Sikhs in Canada are a powerful political force in electoral politics, including as MPs and MLAs, in part because of their ability to get assistance from the leadership of gurdwaras, which fill the role of community centres even for non-religious Punjabis.

Shinder Purewal, a Kwantlen Polytechnic University political scientist, and Dhahan have described how the Sikh population “punches above its weight” in politics for many reasons, particularly because of its ability to impact partisan nomination battles, including that of lawyer and NDP leader Jagmeet Singh, who was an early critic of India and defender of Khalistan supporters.

Source: Douglas Todd: Trudeau’s defiance of India ‘killing two birds with one stone’

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Douglas Todd: Idea of federal apology splits Italian Canadians

2019/08/27 Leave a comment

For some context. One of the files I worked on under the Conservative government was the historical recognition program which provided funding to communities who had been affected by wartime internment or immigration restrictions (Chinese, Ukrainian, Italian, Indian and Jewish Canadians).

Italian Canadian stakeholders were difficult and in the end, then Minister Kenney, engaged Conservative Senator Di Nino to help steer the discussions regarding projects to be funded. (For more details, see Multiculturalism: The Case of Historical Recognition in my book, Policy Arrogance or Innocent Bias:Resetting Citizenship and Multiculturalism):

Since Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already offered his apologies to many different Canadian minority groups, some Italian Canadian media outlets have been aroused to express anger that their ethnic group has not yet received one from him.

The Italian-language media, which has 25 different outlets in Canada, has been simmering this summer about Trudeau, who has made it clear he will formally apologize only after the Oct. 21 election for the internment of a relatively small portion of Italian-Canadians during the Second World War.

“Almost 80 bitter years later, the federal government appears ready to apologize to Italian Canadians for the humiliation, suffering, arrest and internments of hundreds in 1940. … While some say better late than never, others wonder why he did not do it right after he came to power,” said Lo Specchio newspaper.

“The fact Justin Trudeau has ‘promised’ just before the fall election to apologize in Parliament for the internment of Italian Canadians … raises questions about the prime minister’s sincerity,” said Corriere Canadese newspaper.

“Anti-Italian prejudice must end,” declared one writer in Il Cittadino Canadese.

Trudeau’s promised apology has become a key political issue in ridings with large Italian and other ethnic groups.

And it’s sparked debate among Italian Canadians and others over whether such an apology is warranted, since the detention of 586 suspected Fascist Italian Canadians was different in many ways from the mass internment of 22,000 Japanese Canadians during the Second World War.

Andres Malchaski, co-founder of an organization that monitors electoral issues among Canada’s ethnic communities, said many Italian-language newspapers are pushing for Trudeau to say he’s sorry because, like other ethnic groups, they’re “using apology and redress issues to establish their political and cultural identity in Canada.”

Italian Canadians are “particularly aggressive … because they have a history of political participation and leadership and a need to defend that space against other ethnic lobbies,” said Malchaski, whose website, diversityvotes.ca, monitors hundreds of ethnic-language media outlets in Canada.

About 1.6 million Canadians are of Italian ethnicity, including almost 100,000 in Metro Vancouver, 280,000 in Greater Montreal and 490,000 in the Toronto region. Malchaski says many are involved in nomination competitions in ridings which have a changing mix of ethnic voters.

In his four years in office Trudeau became the focus of academic studies for his frequent “apologism,” for the way he regularly, often tearfully, expresses regret for historical wrongs to certain groups, including Sikhs, Indigenous people in B.C., Jews, Inuit and LGBTQ people.

As a result many Italian Canadian media outlets are suspicious about why he’s holding off until after the election to apologize for what occurred in Canada during the Second World War, when Canadian soldiers joined the Allies battling against Nazi Germany, imperial Japan and Fascist Italy.

Part of the reason for Trudeau’s delay could have to do with the uncertainty and controversy that continues to burn among Italians and the wider public over whether to apologize to offspring of the those Italian Canadians detained as suspected collaborators with Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s Fascists.

Canada was “not wrong or malicious” to try to protect the country by detaining certain Italians in the country at a time of war, says Patrick Luciana, an Italian Canadian who is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto’s Global Cities Institute.

“To have done otherwise would have shown an extraordinary dereliction of duty to Canada and its people …. What government wouldn’t take precautions against potential enemy subversives?” Luciana recently wrote, noting such precautions were the norm among Allied countries.

“How can we as Italian Canadians ask for an apology when 5,000 Canadian men and boys are buried in cemeteries throughout Italy, who died to rid ‘our’ ancestral home of fascism and naziism?,” Luciana said.

“If we want anything, it’s to avoid having this episode in our history forgotten. But that’s in our hands, not the government’s.”

Another prominent Canadian historian, Jack Granatstein, told Postmedia he thoroughly endorsed the views of Luciana, who argued it’s insulting to ask for an apology today from the descendants of Canada’s leaders in the 1940s, who were predominantly Anglo-Saxon.

Historians often make many distinctions between the targeted Italian Canadian arrests in Eastern Canada and the way that, after the Japanese invasion of Hong Kong and Pearl Harbour, most Japanese Canadians were removed from the West Coast, had their property confiscated and were interned.

Former prime minister Pierre Trudeau, Justin’s father, opposed collective apologies in general. And at least two other Italian Canadian scholars – Franca Iocovetta and Roberto Perin, who edited the 2000 book, Enemies Within – have also expressed skepticism about the Italian redress campaign, according to Christopher Moore, a contributing editor to Canada’s History magazine.

“In the 1930s, there were pro-Fascist organizations in most Italian-Canadian communities, often sponsored by Italian consulates loyal to Mussolini’s Fascist regime. The roughly 600 Italian Canadians interned, out of some 112,000 Italians Canadians, were mostly associated with these pro-Fascist organizations,” Moore said.

On the eve of the Second World War, the Italian Canadian population was split by duelling pro- and anti-Fascist organizations, noted Moore, a prolific writer and former Vancouver resident whose father wrote a biography of Angelo Branca, a leading B.C. lawyer, judge and Italian community leader.

Moore says Branca’s standing among Italian Canadians was “eventually enhanced by his determined resistance in the 1930s to the encroachment of the pro-Fascist movements.”

Regardless of whether Canadians support or oppose an apology, Machaski, whose website translates the Italian-language media into English, said the fight of some Italian Canadians “for an apology is more of a fight for political space for the community than a campaign for redress that might kindle old animosities.”

In advance of this fall’s election, Malchaski is on to something when he maintains the campaign to make sure Trudeau says he’s sorry is mostly about trying to conserve a sense of Italian identity among younger generations and to hold onto some political influence.

Source: Douglas Todd: Idea of federal apology splits Italian Canadians

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