MIREMS: Diaspora and the Representation of Home Conflicts in Canada’s Ethnic Media

2024/05/10 Leave a comment

Detailed analysis of the major diaspora issues and how they play out in ethnic media in contrast with mainstream and home country media. Some groups have greater diversity of opinions and coverage than others. Overview below:

This discussion paper delves into the reactions of ethnic media in Canada to four distinct conflicts: the alleged Chinese interference in Canadian elections, the assassination of a Sikh leader in Canada, the Russia-Ukraine war, and the Israel-Palestine conflict. By comparing and contrasting the coverage of these events in Chinese, South Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern Canadian media outlets, the paper aims to shed light on the critical role that ethnic media plays in shaping the mindset of Canadian citizens.


The paper argues that ignoring grassroots community media can have significant consequences on the mindset of Canadian citizens, as evidenced by the reactions to these conflicts in ethnic media outlets. This assertion is grounded in several well-established theories in the field of media and social communications analysis, including agenda-setting theory, framing theory, uses and gratifications theory, and cultivation theory.


The case studies presented in the paper provide compelling evidence for the application of these theories in the context of ethnic media in Canada. The chapter on Chinese media’s reaction to alleged election interference reveals how these outlets frame the issue in ways that prioritize the concerns and perspectives of the Chinese Canadian community, potentially influencing their political engagement and attitudes towards the Canadian government.


Similarly, the chapter on South Asian media’s response to the assassination of a Sikh leader highlights the role of these outlets in shaping the community’s understanding of the event and its implications for Canada-India relations. The analysis of Eastern European media’s coverage of the Russia-Ukraine war demonstrates how these outlets serve the specific informational and cultural needs of their audiences, providing perspectives and narratives that may differ from those found in mainstream Canadian media.
Finally, the chapter on Middle Eastern media’s reaction to the Israel-Palestine conflict underscores the power of these outlets in cultivating distinct worldviews and shaping public discourse within their communities.


In conclusion, the paper serves as a call to action for greater attention to and engagement with ethnic media outlets in Canada. By recognizing the power of these grassroots community media in shaping the mindset of Canadian citizens, we can work towards a more nuanced and comprehensive understanding of how global conflicts and events are impacting our diverse nation. Future research should continue to explore the role of ethnic media in shaping public opinion, while policymakers must consider the perspectives and concerns expressed in these outlets when crafting inclusive and responsive policies.

Source: Diaspora and the Representation of Home Conflicts in Canada’s Ethnic Media

And Douglas Todd’s article on the report:

Canada’s ethnic media is “the canary in the coal mine,” offering warnings about everything from foreign interference to psychological stresses on newcomers, whether from Iran, China, Russia, India, South Korea, the Middle East or beyond, says Andrés Machalski, president of Multilingual International Media Research (MIREMS).

But governments aren’t taking advantage of the fertile resource. Their lack of understanding of the powerful role played by ethnic media has “enabled Chinese and Indian agents to (impact) public opinion … and provided an open door to homeland subversion of Canadian democracy,” says Machalski.

MIREMS’ 54-page report maintains the media outlets are invaluable for understanding what is going on in scores of diaspora communities.

The report goes so far as to suggest many newcomers suffer from anxiety and depression associated with “complex PTSD” as they try to navigate news and views from their homelands with their new lives in Canada.

Although many of the views expressed in ethnic media are predictable, there is some range of opinion, says the report by MIREMS, which tracks more than 800 media outlets in 30 languages in Canada and worldwide….

Source: Douglas Todd: Canada’s ethnic media reveal tough realities

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Poilievre wades into Middle East conflict during speech to Montreal-area synagogue

2024/04/03 Leave a comment

More fulsome account of CPC leader Poilievre’s views on Israel, Palestine, Gaza/Hamas that let to the CP analysis of political fall-out with Canadian Muslims (‘We won’t forget’: How Muslims view Pierre Poilievre’s stance on Israel-Hamas war):

It can be one of the thorniest issues for Canadian politicians — highly divisive and filled with decades of fighting, with potential for political blowback from one side or the other.

While conflict has raged in the Middle East in recent months, federal Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has tended to focus on bread-and-butter domestic issues, such as inflation and the Liberal government’s carbon tax.

In the House of Commons, Poilievre has referred to Israel or Gaza only a handful of times.

However, during a speech at a Montreal-area synagogue last week, Poilievre provided one of the most comprehensive glimpses since becoming Conservative leader of his relationship with Israel, his views on the conflict in the Middle East and the history of the Jewish people.

His speech at Beth Israel Beth Aaron Congregation — an Orthodox synagogue in Côte Saint-Luc, Que. — also potentially foreshadows the approach a Poilievre government would take on issues such as the Middle East, which he described as a difficult question, and antisemitism.

Officials from Poilievre’s office have not yet responded to requests from CBC News for comment.

The synagogue is located in Liberal MP Anthony Housefather’s riding of Mount Royal. Housefather, a longtime Liberal who is Jewish, is currently reflecting on his future in the party after most of his fellow caucus members voted on March 18 in favour of a controversial but non-binding NDP motion to work toward the recognition of the State of Palestine as part of a negotiated two-state solution.

Conservatives, three Liberals, including Housefather, and independent MP Kevin Vuong voted against the motion.

Speech gets standing ovation

At the March 26 event at the Quebec synagogue, Poilievre was introduced as the “next prime minister of Canada.” A video of the event that was shot by a member of the audience, who allowed CBC News to view it, shows Poilievre’s 33-minute speech peppered by applause and standing ovations. Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, the party’s deputy leader, later posted video of the speech to YouTube.

The event provided a showcase for Poilievre’s knowledge of Jewish religion and culture. He recounted the story of Purim, where the Jewish people refused to relinquish their religion, and sprinkled his speech with familiar expressions, referring to himself as “a simple goy from the Prairies.”

Poilievre recounted his hitchhiking trip to Israel in his youth and the impressions it left on him — such as participating in a Shabbat in Betar and hearing songs being sung in Hebrew.

“The Jewish people are the only people I know of who, in the same language, worship the same faith on the same land in the same country as they did 3,000 years ago. That is a true indigenous people,” Poilievre said to applause and cheers.

Israelis and Palestinians both maintain that they are indigenous to the area.

Poilievre talked about staying in a kibbutz near Ein Gedi, a historic site and nature reserve located near Masada and the Dead Sea — then standing in the Golan Heights in the north, watching missiles being fired from Lebanon.

“We literally witnessed with our own eyes Hezbollah lobbing missiles into northern Israel and the courageous IDF forces flying back into south Lebanon to retaliate against the attack,” he said.

The Canadian government does not recognize permanent Israeli control over the Golan Heights.

Poilievre said when he returned to Canada, he helped launch “a full-scale campaign to criminalize Hezbollah.”

Palestinians ‘a chess piece in an evil chess game’

As he has done in recent months, Poilievre blamed the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel on Iran, saying it has been occupying Gaza through its intermediary, Hamas, and wanted to prevent peace accords.

About 1,200 people were killed in the Hamas-led attacks on southern Israel and about 250 people were taken hostage, according to Israeli tallies. More than 32,000 Palestinians in Gaza have been killed during Israel’s military response since then, health officials in the territory say.

“It was the fear that discord would come to an end and that hope would take root that most terrified the regime in Iran,” Poilievre told the audience. “And so, they orchestrated the attack. The Hamas leaders travelled to Tehran. They got funding and weapons from Tehran and ultimately co-ordination.”

Duration 1:17Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, asked about civilian deaths in Gaza, said Israel has the right to defend itself and Hamas is ‘in violation of international law by using human shields.’

“I’m sorry, but I refuse to believe that rag-tag terrorists in Gaza were able to accumulate all of those weapons and all of that intelligence and co-ordination on their own,” the Conservative leader said to applause. “This was an outside job.”

Poilievre repeated his past call for Canada to ban Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying it was responsible for the downing in 2020 of a Ukraine International Airlines plane that killed 55 Canadian citizens and 30 Canadian permanent residents.

“This group operates legally on Canadian territory,” he said. “It can recruit, co-ordinate, mobilize, fundraise legally on Canadian soil over three years after they murdered 55 of our citizens.”

Poilievre said his heart goes out to the families of dispossessed Palestinians, saying the “Palestinian people have been made by the Iranian regime and other dictators in the regime, in the region, into a chess piece in an evil chess game.”

“I understand why the political pressures are high, and I understand why our Muslim friends and neighbours are suffering and are legitimately speaking out for the suffering of their loved ones in Gaza and in the West Bank.”

Poilievre told the audience he says the same things in mosques as he does in synagogues: “I love meeting with the Muslim people. They are wonderful people. When the issue of Israel comes up, I say, ‘I’m going to be honest with you. I am a friend of the State of Israel, and I will be a friend of the State of Israel everywhere I go.'”

Poilievre wants UN relief agency to be defunded

Poilievre accused Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of delivering different messages to different groups for political gain.

“He sends one group into synagogues to say one thing, and then he sends another group of MPs into mosques to say precisely the opposite.”

Poilievre said he believes in a negotiated two-state solution, with Palestinians and Israel living in peace and harmony. He said a Conservative government would stand up for Israel’s right to defend itself and would reject any motions or resolutions at the United Nations that it believes unfairly target Israel.

The Canadian government should defund the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) and ensure that “Canadian aid actually goes to the suffering Palestinian people and not to those promoting terrorism in UNRWA,” he said.

“We, as a rule, around the world, common-sense Conservatives under my leadership will be cutting back foreign aid to terrorist dictators and multinational bureaucracies and using the money to rebuild the Canadian Armed Forces.”

Poilievre pledged to “remove the bureaucracy and streamline the funding” for the federal government program that funds security infrastructure for places of worship and to “defund antisemitism.”

“We will go line by line through all the groups that get dollars from the federal government, and we will defund every single one of those that promote antisemitism in our country.”

Poilievre recalled a trip he made to Auschwitz, a concentration and extermination camp primarily for Jews that was run by Nazi Germany in Poland during the Second World War, and said it left him in tears. In April 2009, when he was parliamentary secretary to then-prime minister Stephen Harper, Poilievre attended the Conference Against Racism, Discrimination and Persecution in Geneva, and also visited Auschwitz and Birkenau to commemorate the victims of the Holocaust.

He praised the resilience of the Jewish people.

“I don’t know what the world will bring tomorrow. I don’t know, much less 100 years from now. But I do know this, that a thousand years from now, whatever is going on, on Fridays, as the sun goes down, there will be a Shabbat in Israel,” Poilievre said to a standing ovation. “Those songs will be sung. The Jewish people will go on.”

Source: Poilievre wades into Middle East conflict during speech to Montreal-area synagogue

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Zachary Paikin: Canada’s leaders must take the dangers of diaspora politics seriously

2024/03/07 Leave a comment

From my time in the foreign service years ago, virtually all governments have struggle to define the national interest beyond the general, and have struggled with diaspora politics to varying degrees, whether in terms of response to humanitarian disasters and conflicts (e.g., measures for Ukrainians compared to other countries) or “imported conflicts” like the current Israel-Hamas one.

Valid to argue for focusing on what brings us together. But beyond general bromides, and process suggestions for a national dialogue on core national interests, it is unclear how such a process would have a meaningful impact given a fragmented media and social media landscape, not to the political incentives for community targeting. And as the Liberal government has found out with respect to Israel-Gaza, extremely difficult to have clear and consistent messaging and actions:

A massive spike in antisemitic incidents across the country following Hamas’ gruesome October 7th attacks has shocked many Canadians. But these events are only the latest example of how diaspora politics are increasingly putting our national cohesion and international engagement at risk.

The disorder we have witnessed in Canadian cities in recent months, which just this weekend succeeded in shutting down an event between two G7 leaders at the Art Gallery of Ontario, comes on the heels of a major break in Canada-India relations following the killing of Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar, as well as the fiasco surrounding the invitation of former Waffen SS member Yaroslav Hunka to Parliament.

The implication seems clear: An increasingly multipolar international order—one featuring assertive new powers and competing global interests—risks fracturing our diverse society and rendering our foreign policy impotent. To avoid this outcome, we need to do two things. 

First, our leaders need to repurpose our public discourse about multiculturalism toward highlighting the ties that bind Canadians together, rather than focusing on the ways in which we are diverse and different from one another. 

Continual intimidation, harassment, and violence against Jewish businesses, neighbourhoods, and community institutions since October 7th has been unnerving and dangerous. I certainly never thought I would live to see the Avenue/Wilson intersection in Toronto—where I spent the first five years of my life—labelled a “Zionist-infested area,” nor to witness a crowd outside the Montreal Holocaust Museum earlier this week cheer as those inside the building were called “rats.”

The face of Canada has changed considerably since multiculturalism was first adopted more than a half-century ago. One day after introducing the policy in Parliament in October 1971, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s maiden speech to outline his vision of a multicultural Canada was made to the Ukrainian Canadian Congress.

Ten years later, in 1981, Jews still outnumbered Muslims nearly four-to-one in the Toronto Census Metropolitan Area (CMA). Yet as of the 2021 census, Muslims accounted for more than 10 percent of the Toronto CMA, now outnumbering Jews by roughly the same four-to-one margin.

Multiculturalism is a unique Canadian success story. And it remains one of the most important assets we have to grow the foundations of our national power and prosperity in an increasingly post-Western international order. But the dramatic change in the demographic composition of Canada over the past four decades means that our population has become subject to a wider range of pressures and ideas. If we fail to pair our growing diversity with a common narrative, then we risk seeing Canadians pitted against one another—as indeed is already occurring—and the whole multicultural edifice being brought down in the process.

Leaders from all parties need to get behind a unifying message, rooted in the founding wisdom of our constitutional order: Canada stands for peace, order, and good government. That means that acts of intimidation and harassment will not be tolerated. But it also means we cannot allow conflicts in distant lands to divide us and shape who we are as Canadians.

This domestic message will resonate even more strongly if accompanied by an adjustment in the way we conduct our foreign policy. Research I have conducted for the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy shows how our political class has difficulty articulating a common idea of Canada’s national interests, beyond platitudes such as outdated conceptions of our “role in the world” as a “middle power” or our desire to be “seen to be a good ally.”

Unable to focus resources and attention on clearly defined core interests, our leaders all too often gear their statements toward domestic audiences for political gain. The current Israel-Hamas war is a case in point: given that Canada’s ability to influence the conflict is negligible, foreign policy statements are used to satisfy demands from this or that constituency. Diversity management takes the place of diplomacy.

A new discourse focused on what does or does not constitute a core national interest would encourage ethnocultural communities to think about foreign policy not as Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, or Ukrainian Canadians, but rather simply as Canadians. Owing to Canada’s location on the map, challenges in the Arctic, Asia, and Europe must rank far ahead of the Middle East when it comes to allocating limited resources in the pursuit of our interests.

By the same token, we should oppose antisemitism not just as Jewish Canadians, but because it offends who we are as Canadians: a civilized country based on peace, order, and good government for all. With a multipolar world exerting growing pressure on our multicultural tapestry, our leaders should focus less on moral posturing toward a conflict over which they have little influence and more on what kind of society we want to build here at home.

Dr. Zachary Paikin (@zpaikin) is a senior fellow with the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, a Canadian foreign policy think tank.

Source: Zachary Paikin: Canada’s leaders must take the dangers of diaspora politics seriously

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J.L. Granatstein: Leaving the old country behind

2024/02/27 2 Comments

While the examples of diaspora politics and imported conflicts are valid and real, surveys such as the GSS indicate that by and large, multiculturalism is not a barrier to integration. But these conflicts do increase the challenges, as the Israel Hamas war and related increases in hate crimes demonstrate:

…What was going on? Clearly, the old country ties remained strong in immigrants to Canada. Ethnicity is a powerful force, naturally enough, but official multiculturalism encouraged ethnic communities to retain their identities. There were language schools funded by Ottawa, in addition to newspapers, community centres, and dance troupes. The money flowed because there were votes out there waiting to be harvested.

What was not going on was any effective effort by the state to turn immigrant communities into Canadians. Naomi Klein, (not someone I usually quote approvingly), wrote in 2005 after terrorist attacks in London “that the brand of multiculturalism practiced in Britain (and France, Germany, Canada …) has little to do with genuine equality,” she said. She continued:

It is instead a Faustian bargain, struck between vote-seeking politicians and self-appointed community leaders, one that keeps ethnic minorities tucked away in state-funded peripheral ghettoes while the centres of public life remain largely unaffected by seismic shifts in the national ethnic makeup.

Surely she was right, as we can readily observe when our parties scramble for ethnic votes in the suburban areas of the nation’s large cities.

Most Canadians believe immigration is important for Canada, the present difficulties notwithstanding. But polling also shows that most also believe that we must make Canadians of those who come here. It is not enough to leave them alone in the hope that they will quietly assimilate into accepting our values—peace, order and good government, civility, equality, tolerance, respect for rights—and that if they wish to join us they must understand and accept this. Canada is part of Western Civilization, not a community of communities, as Joe Clark put it, not a post-national state, as Justin Trudeau proclaimed. We are a well-established pluralist, democratic, secular nation.

To paraphrase the American writer David Rieff in the New York Times some years ago, the multicultural fantasy in Canada was that, in due course, assuming that the proper resources were committed and benevolence deployed, immigrants would eventually become liberals. As it was said, they would come to “accept” the values of their new countries. It was never clear how this vision was supposed to coexist with multiculturalism’s other main assumption, which was that group identity should be maintained. But by now that question is largely academic: the Canadian vision of multiculturalism, in all its simultaneous goodwill and self-congratulation, is no longer sustainable. And most Canadians know it. What they don’t know is what to do next.

Stephen Marche was right in saying that the old country must be left behind. It is long past time that Canadians figure out how to make this work.

Source: J.L. Granatstein: Leaving the old country behind

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Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada’s multicultural utopia now a balkanized grievance factory – National Post

2023/11/09 Leave a comment

More of a rant over the current excesses than balanced and diaspora politics and grievances also apply to many communities, including those of European origen.

But yes, more messaging on what we have in common would be helpful, rather than what divides us. Finding that elusive balance between recognizing the identities of specific groups and heritages, needed for integration, and the common values that bring us together, is part of the ongoing challenge of Canada:

Canada has become a nation of diasporas. Rather than wrapping ourselves in a common flag, we huddle in our enclaves: Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Jewish, Chinese, Black and the list goes on. Faith, color and country of origin divide the nation. Everyone is the “other,” and increasingly, the enemy. Violence and acts of hatred are multiplying in our streets.

In a country built by immigration, this is sadly not a new phenomenon. In 1878, Toronto banned the St. Patrick’s Day parade for 110 years after feuding Catholic and Protestant Irishmen turned the event into “one of the wildest nights in the city’s history.” In 1914, violent demonstrations prevented the docking in Vancouver of the Komagata Maru, a ship carrying South Asian migrants considered a threat by the local population. In 1970, Front de libération du Quebec terrorists murdered provincial cabinet minister Pierre Laporte in their fight against Anglophone dominance in Quebec.

In 2023, however, there is a new wrinkle: the importing of larger geopolitical conflicts to Canada. Pro-Palestinian protestors openly demand the boycott of Jewish businesses and call for the eradication of Israel. Ideologically-captured Canadian elites parrot propaganda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while it intimidates its diaspora on our soil. Sikh separatists in British Columbia hold referendums on Khalistani independence, and India stands accused of assassinating one of the organizers in the parking lot of his gurdwara.

Canada has become a balkanized grievance factory, and all of us are paying the price. You don’t have to be a Jew terrified to put a mezuzah on their door, a Chinese Canadian being intimidated at the ballot box or a Hindu child bullied by Sikh kids on the playground. Instead of uniting around human rights and standing against hate speech, Canadian society is allowing all manner of aggression in the name of fighting “privilege,” and is tearing itself apart in the process.

How did we get here? First, the state-sanctioned multiculturalism policies of Pierre Elliott Trudeau in the 1970s encouraged newcomers to keep their culture of origin, rather than build a common one. Politicians loved it: for decades they handily exploited the so-called “ethnic vote” to court communities who could swing a riding or two in their favour. At the same time, they turned a blind eye to the exploitation of these communities by foreign powers, notably China, as we have learned in the last year.

After 2000, another factor fueled further division: the global rise of identity politics. It was no longer sufficient to call yourself Canadian, or even a hyphenated Canadian; you were encouraged to categorize yourself by privileged/non-privileged, white/non-white, gendered/genderfluid, settler-colonizer/indigenous and a host of other personal characteristics dreamed up in the halls of academia. Experts armed with advanced degrees encouraged this practice in the name of equity in the workplace, school and political arena — and out of fear of cancellation, job loss and social ostracism, most citizens meekly complied.

Then came 2015, and the current federal government’s attempt at Indigenous reconciliation. Rather than focusing on building economic opportunities for the future, it dwells on shaming Canadians for the wrongs of the past, even though the bulk of today’s population have nothing to do with the colonization of Canada hundreds of years ago. Worse yet, newcomers are encouraged to “other” themselves along these lines: white immigrants are lumped in with colonizers, while immigrants of color are considered oppressed and thus allies of Canada’s Indigenous peoples, regardless of whether they may have, ironically, oppressed other groups in their own country of origin.

The result is a nation balkanized along a thousand fault lines. We have not only lost our national identity but are actively repudiating the very things that attracted people to our shores in the first place: respect for peace and good government, human rights, democracy, equal opportunity and personal freedom. We are also eroding our international stature: a country so unsure of itself commands no respect and is even more vulnerable to the whims of great powers.

In an increasingly hostile world, that’s a risk Canada cannot afford to take. United, we thrive; divided, we fall. And the landing threatens to be brutal.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Canada’s multicultural utopia now a balkanized grievance factory – National Post

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Yakabuski: Fin de la récréation pour Trudeau

2023/10/31 Leave a comment

Hard hitting but merited:

Depuis l’attaque des militants du Hamas contre Israël du 7 octobre dernier, le premier ministre Justin Trudeau se garde soigneusement de dévier de la position américaine sur le conflit, qui menace de se propager à d’autres pays du Proche-Orient.

Son refus d’appeler à un cessez-le-feu crée des remous au sein du caucus libéral. Pas moins de 23 députés libéraux ont signé une lettre lui demandant que le Canada « se joigne au nombre croissant de pays qui demandent un cessez-le-feu immédiat ». M. Trudeau leur a répondu cette semaine en se disant favorable « à l’idée de pauses humanitaires », qui permettraient l’acheminement d’aide aux civils piégés à Gaza tout en n’empêchant pas Israël de reprendre son assaut sur le territoire palestinien dans le but d’éliminer le Hamas.

Sa déclaration, mardi, est arrivée presque simultanément à celle du secrétaire d’État américain, Antony Blinken. Devant l’Organisation des Nations unies, à New York, il a, lui aussi, appelé à des pauses humanitaires.

Depuis son arrivée au pouvoir, en 2015, le gouvernement de M. Trudeau semble élaborer sa politique étrangère en fonction des désirs des clientèles ethniques de certaines circonscriptions clés, notamment de la banlieue de Toronto et de Vancouver. Dans beaucoup de cas, ses positions n’attirent pas l’attention du public en dehors de ces enclaves ethniques, où l’appui — ou pas — de la population sikhe, tamoule, chinoise ou autre peut tout changer entre une victoire ou une défaite des libéraux lors d’élections fédérales.

Puisque leurs mots et leurs actions ne pèsent pas beaucoup sur la scène internationale, les gouvernements canadiens, sauf de rares exceptions, ont tous traditionnellement eu le luxe de concevoir leur politique étrangère comme un bidule à faire gagner des votes. Toutefois, cette approche s’est retournée deux fois contre le gouvernement Trudeau dans la dernière année.

Il a longtemps cherché à minimiser les allégations d’ingérence chinoise dans les élections fédérales de 2019 afin de ne pas se mettre à dos les électeurs chinois des circonscriptions baromètres de Toronto et de Vancouver. Mais ce scandale a fini par lui éclater au visage, avec les révélations dans les médias des avertissements répétés sur l’ingérence chinoise que lui aurait lancés le Service canadien du renseignement de sécurité.

On est en droit de se demander si M. Trudeau aurait fait une sortie aussi dramatique pour annoncer que l’Inde serait impliquée dans l’assassinat d’un militant séparatiste sikh commis en banlieue de Vancouver en juin dernier s’il ne se préoccupait pas autant du sort des libéraux dans les circonscriptions où la population sikhe est majoritaire ou presque. La réaction du gouvernement indien à ses propos menace maintenant les relations du Canada avec le pays que tous nos alliés cherchent à courtiser pour contrer l’influence chinoise dans le monde.

Dans le dossier du conflit entre Israël et le Hamas, M. Trudeau, contrairement à certains de ses députés, ne peut pas contredire nos alliés sans qu’ils s’en aperçoivent. Tout comme pour la guerre en Ukraine, les enjeux de ce conflit sont trop importants pour que le premier ministre ose aller à contre-courant.

Certes, des divisions existent aussi au sein même de l’alliance occidentale, comme en témoigne la difficulté qu’ont les pays de l’Union européenne à s’entendre sur une position commune. Seul le premier ministre espagnol, le socialiste Pedro Sánchez, qui lutte pour sa survie politique après avoir perdu les élections en juillet, a jusqu’ici exigé publiquement un cessez-le-feu. Mais, dans son cas, toute autre position ferait éclater la coalition de partis de gauche qu’il essaie de préserver afin de garder le pouvoir et d’éviter la tenue d’élections, qui pourraient mener à sa défaite définitive.

Le président américain, Joe Biden, n’est pas prêt à appeler à un cessez-le-feu, même s’il dit déplorer les conséquences des actions militaires d’Israël contre le Hamas pour la population de Gaza et qu’il milite pour une accélération dans la livraison d’aide humanitaire. D’abord, parce qu’il sait que le Hamas, un groupe terroriste qui se consacre à la destruction d’Israël, ne respecterait jamais ses conditions. Ensuite, parce que toute clémence envers cette organisation serait perçue comme une invitation, pour les ennemis des États-Unis, à commencer par l’Iran, à semer la terreur à travers la région et le monde.

Tout au plus M. Biden demande-t-il à Israël d’exercer une certaine prudence en menant sa campagne contre le Hamas. Il sait pertinemment que cette situation est un bourbier géopolitique qui risque de plomber sa présidence et de mener à de multiples conflagrations militaires ailleurs au Proche-Orient et dans le monde. La dernière chose dont il a besoin, c’est de voir un gouvernement canadien soucieux de plaire à l’opinion publique lui compliquer davantage la tâche, déjà si délicate. M. Trudeau semble l’avoir compris.

Source: Fin de la récréation pour Trudeau

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Tasha Kheiriddin: Re-election is more important to Trudeau than supporting Canadian Jews

2023/10/27 Leave a comment

A bit over the top but yes, diaspora communities influence all parties and governments. But I fully expect the PM will visit Café Landwer and his initial messaging was strong. But of course the changing demographics have an impact. That 23 Liberal MPs called for an immediate ceasefire, along with recent mixed messaging, reflects, in part, that there are 114 ridings where Muslims form more than 5 percent of the population, compared to 13 ridings where Jews form more than 5 percent:

The Israel-Hamas War has shocked the world on many levels: the brutality of the Oct. 7 attacks against Israeli civilians, the propagation of disinformation by supposedly reputable news outlets, and the overt antisemitism on display in academia, politics and public demonstrations. The concept of decolonization, so fashionable in left-wing circles, has been turned against a people who for over a millennium have been persecuted, stateless, and the victim of racial hatred. Yet today, Jews are being cast as villains, in a manner that would make even Shakespeare blush.

In Canada, the conflict has also done something else. It has definitively exposed the true motivations for Liberal government’s seemingly incoherent and milquetoast foreign policy. Instead of standing for principle and the interests of our nation and its allies, the Trudeau Doctrine is dictated by diaspora politics and his party’s re-election prospects. This is true not only of its positioning on the current conflict, but on every major foreign policy issue in the past year.

It began with the Liberals trying at all costs to avoid a public inquiry into Chinese electoral interference. In February 2023, the Globe and Mail broke the story of how China implemented a sophisticated strategy to engineer the return of a Liberal minority government and defeat opposition Conservative politicians in the 2021 election. Allegations about this had been swirling for months, including reports on Chinese interference in the previous 2019 election.

But instead of seeking answers, Trudeau sought cover. He appointed “special rapporteur” David Johnston to examine the issue, effectively kicking the can down the road. Months later, Johnston quit in disgrace when the House of Commons demanded he resign after he had conveniently concluded that interference claims were based on “limited and partial intelligence” and thus did not warrant an inquiry.

Yet months later, when Trudeau was given information by CSIS that the agency was “actively pursuing credible allegations of a potential link”  between India and the killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist gunned down in the parking lot of a temple in Surrey, the government leapt into action.

Trudeau first raised the issue privately with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi at a G20 meeting in New Delhi. When that didn’t achieve the desired result, Trudeau publicly accused India of involvement in the crime in September, setting off a diplomatic firestorm that continues to burn. Canada’s trade mission to India was cancelled, 41 of our diplomats in India have been recalled, and our Indo-Pacific Strategy lies in ashes less than a year after it was unveiled.

Why did Trudeau act in such an incoherent way on these issues? Well, it’s math. A glance at the Canadian electoral map shows the importance of the Sikh and Chinese diaspora vote in both British Columbia and Ontario. There’s also the matter of Trudeau’s supply and confidence agreement with the NDP, led by Jagmeet Singh, who was strongly supportive of Trudeau’s stance.

And now, as war rages once again in the Middle East, there’s the Muslim vote to worry about, in electoral districts in Scarborough and the 905 belt around Toronto, as well as in Montreal. With the Conservatives soaring in the polls, ridings like Mississauga-Lakeshore, which the Liberals kept in the past byelection, could be in jeopardy if Muslim voters switch allegiances or stay home.

So once again, Trudeau is letting domestic policy dictate foreign policy. And this time, he’s not only throwing the Jewish community under the bus, but the values Canadians cherish, including the protection of minorities from hatred. And this weekend provided yet another example of that.

On Oct. 21, Trudeau visited a mosque and tweeted, “As members of the Palestinian, Arab, and Black Muslim communities gathered for prayer yesterday, I wanted them to know this: We know you’re worried and hurting. We’re here for you. We will not stop advocating for civilians to be protected and for international law to be upheld.”

Yet on the same day, a Jewish-owned business in Toronto was targeted by protesters waving Palestinian flags and screaming to boycott the “Zionist café.” Social media was flooded with images of hundreds of people mobbing the windows of Cafe Landwer while frightened patrons sat helplessly inside.

Trudeau’s response? We’re still waiting.

Source: Tasha Kheiriddin: Re-election is more important to Trudeau than supporting Canadian Jews

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McKinnon: The India debacle should prompt Canada to rethink the naive way we engage with the world

2023/10/05 Leave a comment

From a former colleague of mine.

Always been a challenge with large diaspora communities and will likely remain so, to a greater or lessor cost depending on the issue and situation:

The implosion of the Canada-India relationship, only months after our Indo-Pacific Strategy described India as a “critical partner,” is stunning. Canada’s relationship with a democratic and pluralistic India was intended, at least in part, to be a counterweight to our troubled relationship with authoritarian China. But after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced last month that there were “credible allegations” that the Indian government was involved in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar in Surrey, B.C., the two countries engaged in a tit-for-tat expulsion of senior diplomats; now, Delhi is reportedly further demanding the removal of 41 of Canada’s 62 remaining envoys.

The immediate cause of the breakdown may rest with Delhi, but the dysfunction has deep roots. A serious rethink is needed to get the relationship back on track. This includes consciously balancing national interests – Canada’s security and prosperity – against special interests, including the diasporas, in our relationship with India.

If the allegations are true, there will be implications for India’s international standing. It would no longer be seen as a largely benign democratic counterweight to China and Russia. Instead, it would prove that it is what it has always been: a complex giant focused on taking its place in the world and advancing its interests, albeit now under a leader in Prime Minister Narendra Modi who has overtly sidelined Jawaharlal Nehru’s original vision of a secular and tolerant democratic India. Canada and its allies must grapple with the contradictions of developing closer relations with an important country with an increasingly illiberal leadership – a more difficult task if there is serious evidence India is behind extrajudicial killings abroad.

A real challenge for Canada is that our allies have enough at stake in their own relations with India that they are unlikely to countenance their own serious ruptures with Delhi, even if they accept our version of events and want to be supportive. Despite tough talk in Canada, holding Indian officials accountable will be hard, to say the least, particularly if no one is put on trial. Nonetheless, a message needs to be sent that this cannot happen again.

But while I am shocked by this turn of events, I am not surprised that the long-standing misalignment in the relationship led to a deep cleavage.

As Canada’s trade and investment relationship with a booming India grew in the 2000s, a visit to the country became a priority for politicians from all levels of government. In my experience from that time, it was clear that for the most part, their interests were at least as much in the prospect of photos from an India trip playing well with voters in Canada than in seriously engaging the country. Politicians from across the spectrum wanted to see the country and the relationship in terms they could understand easily and convey to audiences at home, especially from Indian-originating diasporas. And so official visitors routinely described the Canada-India relationship as based on shared values of democracy and human rights, as well as strong people-to-people links.

Indeed, those links were seen by most Canadians to be an undiluted positive. From the Indian perspective, though, it was much more complex – the Indian diaspora, like the country itself, is diverse. The Indian diaspora in Canada is very large, with perhaps half of it Sikh, even as Sikhs represent only 2 per cent of India’s population. I recall reminding politicians who were heading to photo-ops in the city of Amritsar that it was important to remember that Sikhs, an impressive and distinguished community, made up about the same percentage of India’s population as that of their home provinces, so they needed to appreciate how much of India they were not seeing.

Even then, though, little attention was given to the complex history of the relationship, or our more substantive and enduring interests (economic, geopolitical, etc.) in a growing country that is home to 20 per cent of humanity. Or that it is in Canada’s interest to develop a substantive relationship with India, whether or not our values are precisely aligned. Instead, we mistakenly assumed that, because the relationship was based on shared values and our large India-originating diaspora, our relationship was assured.

But whatever pleasantries the Indian hosts might have offered visiting Canadians, you can be sure that they were much more focused on the hard edge of their interests and advancing them. Our view of the relationship would inevitably conflict with those of a country located in a difficult region where national interests were seen as paramount, and where the focus of the otherwise limited relationship with Canada touched on India’s national security.

Indeed, while the Canada-India relationship has difficult elements to its history – including the discovery that a Canadian nuclear reactor provided to India for peaceful purposes in 1954 had been used to launch India’s nuclear weapons program in 1974 – the most significant continuing irritant is the support in Canada for the cause of Khalistan, the concept of a separate Sikh homeland. In the 1970s, Canada developed a reputation as a base for the Khalistani movement. While simply voicing support would clearly be protected speech under Canadian law, violence in Canada quickly became a problem, including the 1986 attempted murder of Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu, who was visiting Vancouver Island, and the 1985 bombing of an Air India flight travelling from Montreal to London in which 329 people were killed, overwhelmingly Canadian citizens. The failures of the Canadian security services to disrupt the plot and the ultimate inability of the Canadian justice system to hold the perpetrators to account are well-known in India; at the same time, memory of the bombing in Canada is shamefully weak.

Those failures are exacerbated by Canadian politicians frequently being photographed at events where violent Khalistani extremists are lauded as martyrs. By and large, this is excused as carelessness while in pursuit of votes in diaspora communities. In India, it is viewed altogether differently, and not just by the hardline Hindu nationalist supporters of Mr. Modi.

Diasporas are an important part of Canada’s diversity and dynamism, and they reinforce our links overseas. But they also complicate them. Members of diasporas from other countries often have their perspectives frozen at the time they left, without full appreciation of current realities. This is not to say the views of diasporas should not be heard; of course they should be. But politicians and policymakers need to have a broader and up-to-date understanding of a country into which they can contextualize the views of individuals or groups from whom they are hearing. That’s especially true if those groups are advocating for the breakup of their country of origin. We need to tread very carefully around separatism, particularly given our own experience.

While the Sikh population in Canada is the largest in the world outside of India, other countries that have significant Sikh populations and active groups of Khalistan supporters – notably the U.K., Australia and U.S., – still manage to have constructive strategic bilateral relationships with India. That is essentially because those countries have developed substantial political, economic and security links to New Delhi that underscore their importance to a broader set of India’s interests. They have not simply rested on the naive assumption that (supposedly) shared values and having a diaspora are a sufficient base for an enduring relationship.

Canada’s lack of broader links with India means that Delhi believes it can act in a heavy-handed way on this file. Little else is at stake for the Indian government; in fact, the domestic political benefits to taking action against Canada are potentially significant for Mr. Modi. Our long-term interests in the purely bilateral relationship are relatively greater than India’s, given its size and status as a rising global power, and so we need to find a way out. That said, the stakes for India rise considerably as this becomes a global reputational issue that has the potential to damage its broader interests, and so at the end of the day, it must realize it cannot act with impunity in Canada or other countries.

So how do Canada and India get out of this situation?

Diplomacy, supported by high-level political engagement, is crucial to limit the broader fallout as much as possible. Effective diplomacy requires a clear understanding and acknowledgment of the issue at hand, along with a thoughtful strategy to make progress. Integral to this will be a willingness to listen more, and not just to friends, but also those with whom we do not regularly see eye-to-eye.

Our team in India needs to be able to do its job. The same is true for Indian representatives here, who can help Delhi understand better the situation in Canada. Hopefully, Delhi will soon realize how counterproductive a forced, rapid and significant drawdown of our diplomatic staff in India would be.

Ottawa needs to work with friends to whom Delhi will pay attention. We also need to understand, at the highest level, what Canadian interests are at stake, and to lift these above transactional or very short-term considerations. Presumably, our allies and other potentially influential countries (beyond our Five Eyes intelligence-sharing partners) have been made aware of the evidence we have about alleged Indian complicity in the murder, and if not, they should be, because we will need support from more than just the usual “like-minded” countries. Ideally, there should be at least some cross-party understanding of the way forward too, as this will be a long game. It also goes without saying that the police investigation into the Nijjar murder and any subsequent legal process must continue unhindered here.

The credibility and reputations for both India and Canada are now at stake, but perhaps especially for us. We make a lot of assertions about our importance, but our lack of substantive commitments compared to our rhetorical flourishes on the global stage over the years has been noticed.

Our governments – both politicians and officials – need to engage with Canadians about our national interests and international priorities, not just deliver pre-scripted sound bites or limit engagement to special interest groups or particular diaspora communities. Such engagement can encourage Canadians to think about the challenges that our country faces and to be supportive of serious debate about Canada’s place in the world, including what we need to secure our future as a country. The Indo-Pacific Strategy provides a good basis for such a discussion about the region with Canadians, but there must be an openness to differing views.

Values are important, but they should guide how we pursue our interests, rather than define them. Too much focus on values rather than other common interests inevitably marginalizes Canada’s influence in the very relationships where we might want to encourage improvement in human rights or governance. We are taken less seriously because we are seen as primarily interested in broadcasting our judgments rather than engaging with other countries to find common ground.

The world has dramatically changed, and it will continue to do so. Without a serious rethink of how we engage internationally, it will be difficult to ensure Canada’s security and prosperity in an ever more uncertain world.

David McKinnon is a former Canadian diplomat who has been posted to New Delhi, Canberra, Bangkok and, most recently, Colombo, where he served as Canada’s high commissioner to Sri Lanka.

Source: The India debacle should prompt Canada to rethink the naive way we engage with the world

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Orwell would have something to say about Canada’s moment in the global spotlight

2023/10/03 Leave a comment

On diaspora politics and national interests:

An old joke has it that the most boring possible news story would read: “Worthwhile Canadian Initiative.” And yet in the past two weeks, Canada has managed the surprising feat of making global headlines not once but twice, though by now its leaders may well wish it hadn’t.

The first instance came when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused India of assassinating a Khalistan separatist on Canadian soil; the second, when it emerged that Parliament had hosted a Ukrainian veteran of the Nazi paramilitary Waffen-SS.

What is interesting about both cases – aside from the fact that they brought such attention to Canada – is that they each involve what George Orwell called “transferred nationalism,” in which people glorify a country to which they do not actually belong. This is an underappreciated phenomenon in world politics, being much more common than many realize. And it is one to which Canada may be especially prone given its own weakening national ties.

Canadians have long prided themselves on their “mosaic” model of a multicultural society, in contrast to the “melting pot” version on display to the south. Part of their self-understanding is that Canada’s multicultural democracy does not require assimilation as a precondition of peaceable coexistence. This easygoing cosmopolitanism goes hand in hand with a certain complacency, however, as Canada increasingly fails to supplement it with a positive account of its own national identity.

The Belgian writer Émile Cammaerts (in a remark widely attributed to G. K. Chesterton) said that a man who ceases to believe in God doesn’t believe in nothing but in anything. Something like this is increasingly borne out with respect to Canadian political life, as diaspora politics at home and foreign causes abroad rush into the vacuum that ordinary patriotism once filled.

For the former, Hardeep Singh Nijjar was a leader of a niche movement to establish Khalistan, a separate Sikh homeland in northern India. This is a cause that has found passionate (and at times violent) support almost entirely outside of India itself. This may seem surprising but is hardly unusual. Nationalisms often form in exile – famously (and ironically, given the present circumstances), Mahatma Gandhi developed his vision of Indian nationalism while in South Africa.

Of course, their right to peacefully organize is not in dispute. But it’s fair to say their geopolitical goals are separate from those of most Canadians and for that matter of Ottawa, and they have caused serious complications in Canada’s relationship with a major regional power.

Meanwhile, the case of Ukraine is on the surface quite different. The passion that Canadians have manifested for the Ukrainian cause is not limited to an ethnic minority, suggesting that it has fulfilled certain patriotic longings, even among our cosmopolitan elites. In Orwell’s words, such a person “still feels the need for a Fatherland, and it is natural to look for one somewhere abroad. Having found it, he can wallow unrestrainedly in exactly those emotions from which he believes that he has emancipated himself.”

Unsurprisingly, the feting of a Nazi fellow-traveller on Parliament Hill has brought condemnation and alarm from Jewish organizations. Speaking as a Jew myself, I don’t think this episode betrays some latent antisemitism among Canada’s governing class. But it does indicate the pitfalls that await those who attach themselves to foreign causes, the complex history of which they only dimly comprehend.

And it must be said that the embarrassments and complications of these recent weeks might have been avoided had Canada’s political elites better tended their obligations to address the real interests of the citizens they notionally represent. The point here is not that Canada needs to embark on a program of promoting its own homegrown nationalism (what would that even look like – ”freedom fries” but for maple syrup?). But it wouldn’t be amiss for its leaders to work on articulating their vision of the country’s national interests.

The language of national interests is admittedly in low repute these days, smacking as it does of amoral power politics. But because national interests are necessarily tied to the material concerns of the whole of a country’s citizens, they can have a moderating effect on both ideological passions and factional agendas, shaping a sense of shared democratic political community. And in the absence of such an account, we are likely to see more instances of transferred nationalism in Canadian politics going forward.

Thus, restoring the habits of reflecting on and speaking in terms of national interests could well prove salutary for elected officials and citizens alike. At a minimum, it might help keep Canada out of international news stories for a cycle or two.

David Polansky is a Toronto-based writer.

Source: Orwell would have something to say about Canada’s moment in the global spotlight

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Douglas Todd: Hindu Canadians are distressed and politicians need to take heed

2023/09/30 Leave a comment

Of note. Also need to acknowledge the likely impact of PM Modi and his hindutva ideology as a likely contributing factor. But absolutely, a challenge for all parties to navigate these communities and the related diaspora politics.

And its Omer Aziz who recently raised the alarrm;

A man has been arrested for vandalizing two large Hindu temples in Surrey, say RCMP.

The suspect and his accomplices are accused of plastering the Hindu places of worship with yellow-red posters. The posters call for a separate Sikh homeland in India and declare that Indian diplomats in Canada are “wanted” for the June 18 “assassination” of Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

These acts of intimidation at the Laxmi Narayan and Bhameshwari temples are only the latest strikes at more than a dozen Hindu sanctuaries across Canada. Indian consulates in Toronto and Vancouver have also been targeted.

And in a recent video, the head of the powerful secessionist group Sikhs for Justice, angrily tells all Hindus to leave Canada.

It is tragic that tensions are intensifying between two of Canada’s largest diaspora groups, the 772,000 Sikh population and the faster-growing Hindu population, which now numbers 828,000.

The escalations are occurring despite neither religious group being at all monolithic. Indeed, over the decades there have been countless examples of harmonious Sikh-Hindu relations across Canada.

And it must be noted that many Sikhs do not support activists’ aggressive, sometimes violent, push for an independent homeland in the Punjab called Khalistan.

However, the summer murder of Nijjar, a gurdwara leader in Surrey, reverberates with the sectarian divisions that also surfaced in this country in 2021. That’s when Sikhs in Canada were instrumental in leading the mass protests against attempts by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, a Hindu nationalist, to reform farming markets.

Canadian politicians, ever-focused on how to woo large ethnic voting groups, are being forced to try to figure out how to navigate increasingly volatile and complex divisions between the country’s Sikh and Hindu populations, who are concentrated in key ridings in the suburbs of Toronto and Vancouver.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a high-stakes political gamble, internationally and domestically, on Sept. 18 when he announced there are “credible allegations” that agents of the government of India had a hand in the slaying of Nijjar, whom India has accused of being a terrorist, including conspiring to murder a Hindu priest.

India has vociferously denounced Trudeau’s statement.

Nijjar’s lawyer, Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who is frequently quoted in Canada’s mainstream media as the head of Khalistan referendums in Toronto and Vancouver, is among the most vociferous in spreading anti-India, anti-Hindu accusations.

It is Pannun who declared: “Indo Canadian Hindus, you have repudiated your allegiance to Canada. Your destination is India. Leave Canada. Go to India.”

Omer Haziz, who served as a foreign policy director in the government of Justin Trudeau, wrote on the weekend that most Canadian politicians, and Liberals in particular, will not take a position on any international issue, especially regarding Sikhs, until they have pored over every local electoral implication.

“What I saw in government was how Canada’s ethnic domestic battles were distorting our long-term foreign policy priorities, and politicians … were pandering in lowest-common-denominator ways in B.C. and Ontario suburbs, and playing up ethnic grievances to win votes,” Haziz wrote.

“Canadian Sikhs have kept the issue of Sikh justice on the agenda by continually advocating and pressuring politicians,” Haziz said. “The Sikh issue has an enlarged influence on our bilateral relations with India … Mr. Trudeau did not want to lose the Sikh vote to Jagmeet Singh.” Singh, a Sikh, leads the NDP.

As Haziz confirms, Sikhs are famous for their political activism. Their clout is especially manifested through their ability to employ gurdwaras to sway voters to their chosen candidates in a party’s local nomination battles. Despite representing 2.1 per cent of the population, Sikhs have a much greater proportion of MPs and provincial MLAs in elected office.

But members of India’s majority religion, Hindus, who now make up 2.3 per cent of Canadians, are increasingly becoming more bold in Canadian business, education, media and politics.

That’s one of the reasons Ontario Liberal MP Chandra Arya recently stressed the “real fear” that Hindus in Canada feel after the video emerged of the Sikhs for Justice leader warning them to leave the country.

“The risk of ethnic and sectarian bloodshed is real,” said Arya, who has been vilified by Khalistanis for speaking out. He has been joined, nevertheless, by Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman in denouncing rising “Hinduphobia.”

While the Liberal and Conservative parties also angle for Sikh votes, social media commenters point to Jagmeet Singh’s ability six years ago to draw up to 90 per cent of his political donations from the Punjabi-Sikh community, mostly in Brampton, Surrey and Mississauga.

The political tide appears to be shifting.

More Canadians of Hindu background are getting into politics. And given the high concentration of Hindus in urban Ontario (575,000 people), former immigration department director Andrew Griffith has data showing that, while many ridings in Brampton, Mississauga and elsewhere are made up of 20 to 50 per cent of voters who are Sikh, another 15 to 25 per cent are now Hindus.

Meanwhile, there are 81,000 Hindus in B.C. (and 78,000 in Alberta). Sikhs in B.C. number 290,000. While Sikhs comprise anywhere from 20 to 50 per cent of voters in several ridings in Surrey, North Delta and Abbotsford, the Hindu share of voters has steadily expanded into the eight per cent range in the same ridings.

With the number of Hindus in Canada now growing faster through immigration than the number of Sikhs, politicians will feel the need to become far more sophisticated about the complex realities of both religious groups, and others, if they want to appeal to their interests, fears and dreams.

Source: Douglas Todd: Hindu Canadians are distressed and politicians need to take heed

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