The Hindu Chronicle

For Trudeau, sovereignty is an excuse, not a genuine concern

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (Photo courtesy: Canada PM website)

Even as Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s deceitful and stupid remarks on the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar rock his country’s ties with India, he reiterated on Thursday the same “credible allegations.” Speaking to reporters in New York at the sidelines of the UN General Assembly, this time he said that there are “credible reasons” to believe that Indian agents may have been behind Nijjar’s murder on Canadian soil.

Days before this statement, he told Parliament, “Any involvement of a foreign government in the killing of a Canadian citizen on Canadian soil is an unacceptable violation of our sovereignty.” But is Trudeau really interested in his country’s sovereignty. BBC reported on May 23 about Canadian media releasing a steady drip of reports, many based on leaked intelligence, about detailed claims of Chinese meddling in Canada’s last two federal elections in 2019 and 2021.

In November last year, Global News, which is the news and current affairs division of the Canadian Global Television Network, reported that the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) uncovered a racket involving the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) funding to the candidates affiliated to the party. The CCP placed “agents into the offices of MPs in order to influence policy, seeking to co-opt and corrupt former Canadian officials to gain leverage in Ottawa, and mounting aggressive campaigns to punish Canadian politicians whom the People’s Republic of China (PRC) views as threats to its interests.”

On February 23 this year, the same platform reported, “Three weeks before Canada’s 2019 federal election, national security officials allegedly gave an urgent, classified briefing to senior aides from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s office, warning them that one of their candidates was part of a Chinese foreign interference network.”

The report further said, that “the candidate in question was Han Dong, then a former Ontario MPP whom Canadian Security Intelligence Service had started tracking in June of that year.”

In 2021, Chinese diplomats and proxies made undeclared cash donations to political campaigns and hired international Chinese students to volunteer for certain candidates full-time, BBC reported. Also, Conservative MP Michael Chong and his family were targeted by the Chinese government in 2021 after he sponsored a parliamentary motion accusing China of human rights abuses.

In India, we bemoan the decline of morals, propriety, and rectitude in politics—and rightly so. Yet, there are no such reports about foreign governments interfering so brazenly in our national affairs and the government of the day turning a blind eye to the interference. This is not to say that such attempts have not been made; for instance, everyone knew that communists’ allegiance, at least in the past, were to Moscow and Beijing. But then the commies were never big players in Indian politics.

And there is Trudeau’s Canada, a G-7 nation with over 20 times the per capita income of India’s—and yet, it has become a playground for China’s nefarious activities. That doesn’t bother Trudeau, but what angers him is the killing of an illegal immigrant who was fomenting a violent secessionist movement in the country of his birth.

His own ratings falling, Trudeau is clutching at straws, even if it results in making a covenant with malevolence, be it the CCP or Khalistan-supporting politicians and parties. If relations with the world’s biggest democracy become a casualty and the concerted actions against the containment of China get jeopardized, so be it.

Trudeau is just like his father Pierre whose pigheadedness resulted in the crash of an Air India plane killing hundreds of Canadians. Being an unscrupulous politician, Justin Trudeau doesn’t think about the next generation; he thinks just about the next election. It is not only power that corrupts men; even lust for power corrupts them. Trudeau is an example.