This article is an opinion piece whose contents represent the standpoint of its author and not UPF Lund or The Perspective’s editorial board.
Canadians, it seems, are still in the “denial” stage of grief when it comes to contemporary global turmoil. Aaron Wherry, one of CBC’s senior politics writers, explores this apologetic stereotype. “There is… an odd tendency in our politics and punditry,” writes Wherry, “to assume — whenever Canada finds itself in a dispute with another country — that it’s Canada that is somehow in the wrong, or that Canadian officials need to apologize and make amends.” But Wherry’s rhetoric insists, above all, that Canada is innocent; as though it has never been the reason for turmoil, whether foreign or domestic. This victim mentality is precisely what invites others to “run roughshod.”
Wherry’s article, written in the immediate aftermath of Canada and India’s tit-for-tat expulsion of diplomats, is the latest take on the diplomatic row between the two countries. It follows the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)’s formal allegation of Indian government involvement in “serious criminal activity” on Canadian soil including, but not limited to, “homicides” and “interference into democratic processes.” Escalations on both sides have been immediate. However, the tension has been building since the June 2023 assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the president of the Guru Nanak Sikh Gurdwara in Surrey, a satellite city of Vancouver. Three months later, former prime minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused India of foul play in Nijjar’s death on the House of Commons floor.
According to The Globe and Mail, the late temple president was also a vocal supporter of the Khalistan movement, which advocated for the creation of an independent Sikh state within the present-day Punjab region of India, much to the ire of the Indian government. Just how much he was involved in violent resistance remains unclear. In 1995, fellow Sikh separatists orchestrated a bombing in Chandigarh which claimed the lives of 17, including Beant Singh, then Chief Minister of Punjab. Nijjar fled India soon after, arriving in Toronto in 1997 to apply for asylum with a forged identity.
He vehemently denied any participation in the insurgency, though he would later confide to friends otherwise. What’s clear is that after settling in British Columbia, Nijjar was far from a pacifist preacher. He organized weapons training and made trips to Pakistan to meet with the mastermind of the 1995 bombing, and was privy to the leadership of the Khalistan Tiger Force (KTF), a paramilitary group designated as a terrorist organization in India.
Ironically, Canadian immigration officials denied Nijjar’s 1997 refugee claim, citing a lack of credible fear. He then applied for permanent residency, sponsored by his wife. When he naturalized as a citizen is a mystery. A BBC article lists the year as 2007, while The New York Times reported it was 2015.
In Nijjar and his compatriots’ eyes, they were martyrs for a righteous cause. They were targeting the Indian state, which targeted Sikh civilians. A state that used colonial borders, institutionalized by the British Partition, to its advantage. Its 1984 raid on the holiest site in Sikhism (code-named Operation Blue Star) killed thousands.
But I’m not writing this as a study of the Indian military, Sikh separatism, or even Nijjar himself. My concern is not with the 1995 bombing, or the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the prime minister who ordered Operation Blue Star. My concern is not with muddled sympathies and alleged sides of history, for the same reason why my words in Chandigarh and New Delhi can only be ones of a tourist.
What I find troubling is the role Canada plays — or doesn’t play — in this matter. The bombing of Air India Flight 182, seen as direct retribution for Operation Blue Star a year earlier, is the deadliest terrorist attack in Canadian history and was the deadliest act of aviation terrorism until the 9/11 attacks. Everyone thought it couldn’t happen — until it did. And after it did, a cascading series of investigative errors by the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) spoiled evidence, leading to the acquittal of all but one of the perpetrators.
Inderjit Singh Reyat, convicted on a manslaughter charge, was released from a halfway house in 2017 and is now a free man as well.
What I find troubling is the Canadian state. Too spineless to prosecute terrorists both then and now, a state that hesitates to list Samidoun as a terrorist entity unless it’s “in concert” with the United States. A state that relies on foreign partners (most recently France and the U.S.) to even arrest them.
What I find troubling is how Nijjar’s gurdwara, bearing Guru Nanak’s name as a federally-registered charity, openly glorifies Talwinder Singh Parmar, a fellow conspirator of Reyat in the Air India bombing — a Canadian citizen that murdered 280 fellow citizens.
What I find troubling is the motorists driving down 120 Street, past the billboard of Parmar, 90 per cent of whom have “little to no knowledge” of the bombing, and a similar percentage that can’t pass a true-false quiz on general Canadian history. Tasha Kheiriddin’s description of Canada as a “balkanized grievance factory” is more accurate than ever. If she’s correct, the only reason why Canada — a house divided — hasn’t fallen apart is that the oblivious parents haven’t found out anything.
Immigration is not the problem. Nor are Sikhs or Sikh separatism. The problem is when grievances, like those Reyat and Parmar hold, are imported and naturalized. Postnational citizenship can and should accommodate a lot of things, but it cannot be self-contradicting. “Canadian” has to prevail as opposed to “Sikh” or “Hindu”, whether it be through silly examples of banal nationalism like poutine or otherwise. And right now, the label is losing its grip through revenge killings, necessitated and condoned by a weak justice system. Killings like the 2022 murder of Ripudaman Singh Malik, who was also a suspect in the Flight 182 investigation, cannot be up for interpretation. The criminals wait it out, and if the Crown comes knocking, promise not to do it again. Afterlife is for their victims.
Perhaps Nijjar’s death was just a convenient segue for self-serving politicians like Trudeau, who can never hope to fill his father’s shoes. Trudeau, who is more eager as a white man than anyone to weaponize identity politics, brags that he has “more Sikhs in [his] Cabinet than Modi does.” Trudeau, who couldn’t care less about the Sikhs in his caucus like Ujjal Dosanjh, who was bashed (literally) for speaking out against extremism. Sikhism is a spectrum, like anything. It’s not Canada’s job to arbitrate, much less Trudeau’s.
The threat is still alive, far from being neutered. Lack of awareness does not correlate to a lack of danger. It’s easy for a packed Scotiabank Arena to laugh at the sheer ridiculousness of the situation, but after the laughing is done, maybe it’s a good idea to take the ongoing bomb threats against Air India flights seriously. Or the possibility that other foreign actors, such as Russia, may be taking advantage of the chaos by sneaking on bombs of their own.
Or maybe they laugh because the country’s immigration system has become a laughing stock. 13,660 asylum claims were filed by international students in the first nine months of 2024 alone. In 2023, the number hovered around 12,000. The 2024 figures represent a 655 per cent increase from the full year of 2018, though conditions in origin countries barely changed. Instead, an increasing number of unscrupulous consultants are instructing clients uncompetitive for permanent residency to file for asylum. Among the twenty-some thousand is Muhammad Shahzeb Khan, a Pakistani man who claimed to be gay as credible fear while conspiring a mass murder of Jews in New York (Khan was the suspect the RCMP arrested based on a lead from the FBI). These are not refugees. They don’t deserve to be.
Canadian tolerance is bleeding into apathy. At a 2015 Winnipeg town hall, Trudeau — then campaigning to be prime minister — proudly announced: “The Liberal Party believes that terrorists should get to keep their Canadian citizenship…because I do.” But behind the frontage road — the façade — of humanitarianism courses a busy highway — throughline — of double standards and general flakiness. It only took ten months for Trudeau to revoke as many citizenships as previous governments in a 27-year period. On the other hand, Nur Chowdhury, who plotted Bangladesh’s 1975 coup d’état and assassinated then-president and founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, lives free in Toronto. Chowdhury, who never naturalized as a citizen. Chowdhury, who even the Immigration and Refugee Board admits was given a fair trial in absentia. Chowdhury, who was ordered deported in 2006 before the federal government backpedalled its own decision, afraid he would face the death penalty. Canada is now a consistent defender of nothing, except abstract constructs of global citizenship over its own citizens.
It can be hard to remember what the country stood for. For me, I close my eyes and picture a scene Tim O’Brien described in his book The Things They Carried. An anguished young man from small-town Minnesota on a little fishing boat in the Rainy River, looking across at the expanses of northern Ontario, tearing himself apart over how bad Vietnam can be. I picture Jeremy Hinzman, the paratrooper who was a conscientious objector, who deserted his unit for Toronto when he learned he was being sent to Iraq, stuck in legal limbo since 2010. People who deserve all that Canada has to offer. As much as the United States is the cardinal skid mark of the Canadian mindscape, it needs only look south if the latter wants to get serious.
By Yuhuan Xie
April 1, 2025
