Posted by I have long said that Trudeau was a massive intellectual and political lightweight riding on the coat-tails of his father’s name. You can read about my views on Trudeau and his stupidity, here, here, here, here and most recently, here. He wasn’t, and probably never will be, qualified to be Prime Minister of Canada but the Liberals, in their desperation to win an election after floundering in the wilderness for so long, put lipstick on the Trudeau pig and sent him out for photo ops. Now we are stuck with him for another two years but the honeymoon is definitely over with both the previously fawning international press and the left-wing local press now getting tired of his embarrassing incompetence… everyone that is except the Canadian Brainwashing Corporation (that couldn’t possibly be related to the liberals restoring CBC funding could it?) While even more left-wing publications like the Toronto Star have jumped on the Trudeau bashing bandwagon, the CBC still waxes eloquently about him and tries to make excuses for his every misstep. The CBC’s final take on the trip was, What really happened on Trudeau’s India trip: Trade concerns overshadowed by wardrobe choices, extremism talk. The piece starts “Rarely has the journalistic echo chamber rung more hollow than on Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to India. It’s an interesting exercise to see how many of the analyses were written by people thousands of kilometres from India, and how many quote the same Carleton University academic, Vivek Dehejia.” In other words, every other journalist and publication on the planet (both left and right) is wrong and doesn’t do their legwork; only the high and mighty CBC knows and publishes the truth and has (the taxpayer funded money) to have people on the ground. Despite being a lie, this sort of argument falls into the conceit trap that somehow “parachuting” a correspondent on the ground somehow gives you more accuracy instead of merely being a journalistic boondoggle to have paid vacation.
This is what The Star’s headlines have said during the week (bearing in mind that it a left-wing liberal publication while the CBC is ostensibly supposed to be impartial and moderate… even though it’s not):
Trudeau’s very bad trip to India may carry a steep cost;
Trudeau with his Indian culture overkill came across as patronizing
Why was Trudeau snubbed on his visit to India?
The National Post went with, Some people are rolling their eyes at the Trudeau family’s ‘extra’ fashion choices in India. The Toronto Sun not surprisingly has this headline, BATRA: No love for Trudeau’s disastrous India adventure. Even the Globe and Mail, despite having an innocuous sounding headline, After an awkward India visit, will Trudeau learn his lesson? – goes on to say, “Photo ops have limitations, as Justin Trudeau is learning on his inaugural visit to India as Prime Minister of Canada.” The bashing is not limited to just Canada – even the international press got in the fray.
The Washington Post, Trudeau’s India trip is a total disaster — and he has only himself to blame. “Trudeau’s eight-day India expedition has been an absolute fiasco”. The Atlantic has a long story on, Why Justin Trudeau Is Being Snubbed in India. The Times of India notes, Why Trudeau’s disaster trip may trigger a reset in India-Canada ties. The CBC in it’s perpetual arrogant attitude and tones of moral and intellectual superiority would have us believe that they have a more in depth on the ground view of India than the Times of India? Please. Even Maclean’s, a crappy version of and already bad Time magazine in America notes that, Justin Trudeau may have lost the foreign press (and not just Fox News). So either the rest of the entire media world (including liberal publications) are wrong, or the CBC is nothing but a biased mouthpiece for the Liberal Trudeau government and should be defunded immediately (saving us over a billion dollars a year) because taxpayers should not have to pay for partisan political propaganda masquerading as unbiased and impartial news.
It was easier to write about Trudeau Jr. when the press was fawning over him like teenage girls at a Justin Bieber concert. As the Washington Post writer notes, “I confess, from afar, I used to be a Trudeau fan-girl. But after this trip, I’ve changed my mind. Trudeau has come across as flighty and facetious.” She goes on to quote an anonymous Indian government official who says, “[Trudeau] seems more much more convinced of his own rock-star status than we ever were”. I hate to break it to you but if it took you over two years to figure this out (because it was blatantly obvious to anyone with even a modicum of intelligence not blinded by their own political biases), I’m afraid that whatever little faith the public had in your powers of observation and analytical skills before, it should pretty much be reduced to zero now.
There has been so much negative press written about Trudeau’s India trip that it seems a waste of time and effort to repeat it. From his family’s constant changing of Indian costumes for carefully staged photo-ops to his attempt at bhangra dancing. Former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Omar Abdullah was among the many social media users to criticise the Canadian Prime Minister’s “choreographed cuteness”. “Is it just me or is this choreographed cuteness all just a bit much now? Also FYI we Indians don’t dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood,” Regardless, that’s just social-media optics that backfired on Trudeau although it does show that contrary to liberal belief, diversity and inclusiveness cannot be achieved through a paper-thin appeasement of shallow surface culture such as traditional native clothing and food. Culture is a much deeper system encompassing deeply held values and beliefs, language and religion that cannot be paid lip service to by donning colourful garments. That is where Trudeau and his entourage went wrong; they were playing local politics overseas where the same rule set and values don’t apply. But that’s small potatoes next to the big reason why Trudeau’s India trip was in for trouble in the first place. To understand this, we have to understand some history and some modern politics and demographics.
India has four main religious groups: Hindu (79.8%), Muslim (14.2%), Christian (2.3%), and Sikh (1.7%). Buddhism (0.7%) and Jainism (0.4%) are smaller outliers. While Sikhs are a very small minority in India overall, in the Punjab they are a majority. Although updated numbers are hard to come by, there are probably just under half a million Sikhs in Canada accounting for over a third of the total population of Indo-Canadian descent. In other words, Sikhs are overrepresented in Canada as well considering what a small minority they are or India’s overall population. “The community is still relatively tiny—about 1.4 percent of Canada’s 36 million people—but Sikhs are a significant presence in British Columbia (about 5 percent of the population) as well as in Ontario and Alberta (about 1.5 percent of the population in each province.) Many Sikhs are influential in Canadian politics and public life, such as Defense Minister Harjit Singh Sajjan and Jagmeet Singh, the leader of the left-leaning New Democratic Party.” The Atlantic article forgot to mention that there are four Sikhs in Trudeau’s cabinet… a massive over-representation given their proportion to the population (there are only 30 cabinet ministers), even if you ignore their religion and only consider them to be South Asian. Former Liberal cabinet minister Ujjal Dosanjh, who is himself Sikh, “the absence of any Chinese-Canadians from the cabinet, despite three Liberal GTA [Greater Toronto Area] MPs, is a more glaring oversight”. More on this later.
In the 1980s, a Sikh separatist movement roiled the Indian state of Punjab, which, as India’s breadbasket, has always been among the wealthiest states. Sikhs are a minority in India. They make up about 2 percent of the country’s 1.2 billion people. But in Punjab, they are a majority, constituting about 60 percent of the state’s 27 million people. The militancy—and the government’s crackdown—was brutal. Bombs planted by militants went off in crowded markets, killing civilians. The Indian government’s response came through both its regular and paramilitary forces. Human-rights groups cited gross violations. Many prominent Indian officials, including Sikhs who make up a disproportionate amount of the military and police forces, were killed by the separatists. Top militant leaders were killed in the government’s response.
Four events stand out in the minds of those who lived through the era: In June 1984, Indira Gandhi, who was India’s prime minister at the time, ordered her troops to enter the Golden Temple, the holiest shrine in Sikhism, to flush out militants who had taken refuge inside. The military operation, which was called Operation Bluestar, was successful—in that the face of the Khalistan movement, as the separatist movement was called, was killed in the operation. But Sikh religious sentiments were incensed by the violation of the holy site, which was damaged in the assault. Less than five months later, Gandhi’s Sikh bodyguards shot her dead at her home. A massacre of Sikhs across India followed, and in parts of the capital, New Delhi, government officials oversaw the killings. (The issue remains sensitive in India because some of those people who oversaw the killings are still active in politics.) There was still more to come: In June 1985, an Air India flight from Toronto to Delhi blew up over the Atlantic, killing all 329 people on board. Investigators later found that the plot was hatched by Sikh militants in Canada as retaliation for the storming of the Golden Temple.
The Indian state ultimately crushed the Khalistan separatist movement—brutally. Those Sikhs who might have been sympathetic to the cause were integrated into the political mainstream. By the 2000s, the rebellion, Operation Blue Star, Gandhi’s assassination, and the bombing of the Air India plane were no longer as much of a driving force in Indian, or indeed Punjabi, politics. India even had a Sikh prime minister, Manmohan Singh, the respected economist, who was one of the architects of the country’s economic liberalization program. But if the Khalistan movement was no longer part of the political conversation in India, it remains a potent political issue in Canada.
Thus most Canadians don’t know or understand quite a few things when it comes to India. First, many Canadians see a turban, kirpan, and a full moustache and beard and they think Indian when in fact it only represents a very small minority Sikh religious group. That this group is now massively over-represented in our government at the most senior levels is a clear red flag to the Indian government. Then comes perhaps the biggest mistake in the whole Trudeau India trip. According to the CBC’s own report, “Jaspal Atwal, a convicted former member of an illegal Sikh separatist group, was invited to dine with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau at a formal event hosted by the Canadian High Commissioner Thursday in Delhi. The invitation, which was extended by Canada’s High Commissioner to India, was rescinded after CBC News asked the Prime Minister’s Office about it Wednesday… Photos obtained by CBC News show Atwal posing for pictures with Trudeau’s wife, Sophie Gregoire Trudeau, and Liberal cabinet minister Amarjeet Sohi at an event with the Indian film industry in Mumbai on Tuesday… Atwal, who did not travel to India with the Trudeaus’ entourage, was convicted of the attempted murder of an Indian cabinet minister, Malkiat Singh Sidhu, on Vancouver Island in 1986. At the time, he was a member of the International Sikh Youth Federation, banned as a terrorist group in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and India. He’s also been convicted in an automobile fraud case and was charged, but not convicted, in a 1985 near-fatal attack on Ujjal Dosanjh, an opponent of the Sikh separatist movement who later became premier of British Columbia.”
Thus it is no exaggeration that when Global News reports after Trudeau’s visit that, Pro-separatist Sikh Canadians praise Trudeau, slam Indian government and PM Modi, this does not go unnoticed in New Delhi. Rightly or wrongly, Canada has a reputation in India of being a safe-haven for Sikh separatists and terrorists; a perception that is only fuelled by how vocal and prominent the Sikh minority is in our current politics and leadership.
That we continue to get into trouble because of vocal minorities under the guise of “inclusiveness” and “diversity” marks the clear political naivete of the Liberal agenda. Take this article in the Globe and Mail about How Brampton, a town in suburban Ontario, was dubbed a ghetto.
I live in a suburban Ontario town where the visible minorities are now the majority. Brampton – a.k.a. “Browntown,” “Bramladesh”or “Singhdale” – is just like the nicknames imply: mostly brown. Sometimes, I wonder if I live in India or Canada. But I am not complaining. For someone who has lived her entire life as a minority – and a very visible one, thanks to the hijab covering my hair – this environment is a welcome change. I am with my own kind.
The brown people who live here love Brampton. It’s like being in India, but with free health care, good schools and clean streets. Yet even as we revel in this urban enclave, we know in our hearts that the Brampton that is emerging is not a good thing. Google “Brampton” and “ghetto,” and you’ll find plenty to read. Brampton gets labelled as “a ghetto,” largely because of the city’s high concentration of visible minorities, especially South Asians.
Canadian cities may boast that they never fell victim to racism and avoided the kind of white flight that led to the destructive segregation in many large cities south of the border. But the Brampton story reveals that we have our own version of white flight, and before we figure out how to manage hyper-diverse and increasingly polarized cities like Greater Toronto, we need to reflect on our own attitudes about race and ethnic diversity.
Now take another look at a similar but completely different report by the National Post about Vancouver being transformed by new wave of brash, rich Asians looking for safe place to ‘park their cash’. In some suburban areas of Vancouver such as Richmond, Chinese are now a majority of the population, just as it is with South Asians in Brampton. Even the LA Times wrote an article recently about Hongcouver, A city transformed — for better and worse — by influx of Chinese wealth.
Still, any argument that Asian migration has damaged the Vancouver economy doesn’t hold up, even when the jump in housing prices is taken into account. Granted, the Immigrant Investor Program didn’t stimulate the job growth (particularly in manufacturing) that advocates had hoped. But in truth, there was no economic “golden era” for Vancouver before the Chinese influx either. Vancouver’s unemployment rate was 13.6% in 1984. In April 2015, the rate stood at 6%. Its economy evolved, as have those of many other cities of the West, in a postindustrial direction.
You will note a major difference in the articles. Whereas the one about Brampton is loaded with accusations of racism and urban ghettos, the ones about Richmond and Vancouver are more about complaints that Asians are pushing up property prices too much. In other words, when we talk about South Asian immigration, it becomes very politically and racially charged very quickly. When we talk about East Asian immigrants, it’s more about economics (high housing prices) or some jealousy that they have too much money and flaunt it with flashy cars, houses and clothes that your average white Canadian can’t afford. It is very much a different reaction to an almost identical phenomenon.
And getting back to the fact that Trudeau’s “inclusive and diverse” cabinet is nothing close to it. According to the 2016 census, there are 2,763,870 Canadians of East Asian origins versus 1,963,330 of South Asian origin and yet there are zero Chinese cabinet ministers (despite having many MP’s to choose from) but four Sikh cabinet ministers (even though they are not the only South Asians). One of the biggest cultural characteristics about East Asians is we don’t like to make waves. The Japanese have a saying, “the nail that sticks up gets hammered”. The Chinese have long had the moniker of the “model minority”. We are taught from birth to be respectful of our elders, to hold our tongue, to not rock the boat, to value harmony, balance and peaceful coexistence over confrontation. Plus we generally don’t have major religious schisms in our societies which tend to be homogeneous overall in race and religion (Taoism, Buddhism and Confucianism are all pretty low on the aggressive expansion and controversy side of things).
But when our own domestic politics and policies meet the explosive political realities of the rest of the world with disastrous consequences as they did in the case of Trudeau’s dismal India trip, we have to pause and take note. We need better, more knowledgeable and less partisan people in our own Ministry of Foreign Affairs lest Trudeau continue to bumble his way around the world and destroy what little credibility and influence Canada still has left. A note to Junior – all minorities are not the same and stuffing four Sikhs into your cabinet to offer the illusion of diversity and inclusiveness doesn’t fool anyone except the stupid liberals in Toronto who just like to report that “half of his cabinet is female.” It certainly doesn’t help perceptions in India where there is already a perception that Canada is a safe haven for Sikh separatists. How do you think Canada would react if India sent an entourage here filled with token white Parti Québécois ministers (who may have publicly announced support for not just Quebec separation but admiration for the long defunct Front de libération du Québec terrorist organisation) and tried to tell us that they were representative of Canada. Here’s a novel thought, rather than obsessing with the number of people that you have in your cabinet that can tick off the appropriate SJW inclusiveness box, why don’t you pick the best people you can for that particular portfolio regardless of race, age, sex, religion or background. If that means you end up with a bunch of old angry white males, I’m OK with that as long as they really are the best qualified.
UPDATE 1 (28 February 2018): I take it back, even the angry white males with Trudeau are incompetent. Trudeau’s national security adviser, Daniel Jean, “suggested that Atwal’s presence was arranged by factions within the Indian government who want to prevent Prime Minister Narendra Modi from getting too cosy with a foreign government they believe is not committed to a united India.” In other words, Trudeau’s government invited a convicted would-be assassin who has terrorist sympathies and then blames his host country for setting him up. The smart thing to do would have been to say Daniel Jean is a conspiracy theory nutter, it was his own opinion and he got it wrong, and throw him under the bus. But Junior is not smart and, “Trudeau stood by the government source in the House of Commons on Tuesday, after getting pummelled with questions from the opposition benches.” “Our professional, non-partisan public service does high quality work and when one of our top diplomats and security officials says something to Canadians, it’s because they know it to be true.” It’s amazing that nobody has fallen on their sword for the diplomatic catastrophe that Trudeau and his incompetent government has managed to create.
“Randeep Sarai, the Liberal MP who invited a man convicted of attempted murder to dine with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau during his trip to India has apologized and resigned as chair of his party’s Pacific Caucus.” Look closely, he hasn’t resigned anything, just some useless figurehead role in a minor and meaningless sub-committee. That’s like saying you have resigned as the coordinator for the local girl-guides bake sale. There is clearly zero personal accountability in the current Liberal Trudeau administration.
And yet the damage from Trudeau’s India trip fiasco continues unabated. “India calls accusations it set up the Atwal affair ‘baseless and unacceptable’“. Raveesh Kumar, an official spokesperson for the Indian government, “Let me categorically state that the government of India, including the security agencies, had nothing to do with the presence of Jaspal Atwal at the event hosted by the Canadian high commissioner in Mumbai or the invitation issued to him for the Canadian high commissioner’s reception in New Delhi. Any suggestion to the contrary is baseless and unacceptable.” How big of a disaster was Trudeau’s India trip? “Trump Jr. outshines Trudeau – That’s how bad India-Canada ties are” reads the headlines from the South China Morning Post. You do the math yourself…