Permanent Adversary: Why India Should Have Zero Expectations From Justin Trudeau's Successor

Justin Trudeau’s recent resignation as Liberal Party leader, as well as his intention to step down as Canada’s prime minister once a replacement is selected, comes as no surprise.

The party fears that going into an election in October 2025 with Trudeau as the face would result in an unfavourable outcome because of his plummeting popularity on account of myriad issues.

For all one knows, the party may have taken a lesson out of the Joe Biden fiasco in the Democratic Party in the 2024 United States (US) general election to avert an electoral upset.

And after all, when the greater good is at stake, heads must roll.

In his second term, Trudeau’s battles ranged from the steep inflation starting in 2020 to the current housing crisis to the trucker protests in the peak winter of January-February 2022.

Yet, he was seen enjoying himself at a Taylor Swift concert on 23 November 2024, even amid the violent riots in Montreal.

Even though in October 2024 he announced a temporary reduction in immigration over the next two years to address economic concerns, the die seemed to have been cast for his tenure to be cut short when his close ally and long-serving deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland stepped down on 16 December 2024.

Freeland was at loggerheads with Trudeau on the fiscal policy, given the impending trade war with the US under president-elect Donald Trump.  

The frontrunner to replace Trudeau is Mélanie Joly of the Liberal Party. She is currently serving as the foreign minister.

Among other things, her ministry has been responsible for the expulsion of Indian diplomats in October of last year on charges of ‘foreign interference.’ Hence, one can safely assume that the successor to Trudeau is unlikely to be particularly sympathetic to India.

Trudeau himself, despite having twice assumed the office of Prime Minister, has had a chequered journey in Canadian politics.

From an early age, he was earmarked for high political office. Having said that, when one reads his self-hagiographical memoir, Common Ground, he comes across as a bit of a spoilt brat.

His father is recorded to have upbraided him, and rightly so, on several occasions when he misbehaved with or made the job of the security personnel posted to protect him more than difficult.

Even otherwise, his childhood seems to have been marred by the trauma of the divorce of his parents and the subsequent gossip columns devoted to his mother Margaret, who even ended up on the cover of a magazine. 

Be that as it may, barring the initial successful resumption of the trade deal with the US in 2018, controversies continued to dog him throughout his tenure as Prime Minister.

Comedian Hassan Minhaz reportedly cornered Trudeau on his hypocrisy over his environmental policy, and, of course, there was the fiasco over 'blackface.'

We shall not go into the issue of how he handled the infamous trucker protests since it is, despite the fact that Trudeau likes to interfere in other people's affairs, an issue to be dealt with by the people of Canada, who are supposed to have sovereignty over their internal affairs. (The last time we checked, though, Canada is still technically a British colony that is standing over the ruins of the First Nations.)

Trudeau's India policy was a disaster from the beginning. His much-publicised visit to India in 2018 was a diplomatic disaster. His entourage contained Jaspal Atwal, a criminal convicted of attempted murder of a visiting Punjab cabinet minister, Malkiat Singh Sidhu.

The then defence minister, Harjit Sajjan, was also exposed as someone with sympathy towards the cause of 'Khalistan,' which is essentially a transnational terrorist movement that has killed Canadian citizens by the dozen during the course of the bombing of the Kanishka flight. 

Because of these reasons, Trudeau was snubbed by Captain Amarinder Singh, the then chief minister of Punjab, in 2017. 

Apart from the individuals in his entourage and himself, Trudeau's rogues’ gallery included his long-time alliance partner, Jagmeet Singh of the New Democratic Party (NDP), who till date refuses to condemn the hijacking and bombing of Kanishka.

The last straw to break the camel's back seems to have been the Nijjar fiasco, when Trudeau accused the Indian government of engineering the assassination of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was then presented as some sort of a Canadian icon. Accusations and counter-accusations did fly, as they do in an affair of this nature. 

Having said that, it was pointed out by Canadian observers themselves that Nijjar's citizenship had been obtained on the basis of documents that were economical with the truth. Furthermore, it beggars belief that someone who was in the habit of posing with dangerous weapons was merely a plumber. 

The one plausible explanation here seems to be that Nijjar was working for the Canadian counterpart of the American CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) — the CSIS (Canadian Security Intelligence Service). There is no other reason why his documents would be processed with such great alacrity. 

It is also plausible that all of this was being done merely to divert attention from the scandal involving China, wherein it was alleged that there had been Chinese interference in the last couple of Canadian general elections.

It is equally plausible that Trudeau was trying to prove Samuel Johnson right by resorting to an appeal to the patriotism of the Canadian people so as to shore up his crashing popularity ratings.  

Nonetheless, even as the Liberal Party is about to be thrown out of power by the Canadian people if the polls are anything to go by, those of us in India, and especially in Punjab, need to also consider whether a change in government in Ottawa would lead to any change in policy. 

In the considered view of the authors, there is likely to be little or no change, although it is possible that the ridiculous sabre-rattling by a mostly uninhabitable frigid country with a population equal to that of the National Capital Region (NCR), which has mostly been a vassal state of the US after a pummelling at their hands in the war of 1814, would stop.

After all, it is unlikely that the ‘West’ would leave a comical Gastonesque (Beauty and the Beast, anyone?) figure to have any sort of real influence on policy making. Even otherwise, Canada’s pro-immigration, twentieth-century policy dates back to the 1936 policy to grow the population, settle the land, and provide labour and financial capital for the economy.

The 'West' refers to countries that are part of various alphabet soup alliances, including, but not limited to, NATO, headed by the US and underwritten by American military prowess, while the 'Rest' refers to pretty much everyone else who is not officially aligned to this bloc. 

The three biggest players that are not part of any security umbrella are Russia, China, and India. Of the three, the Russian Federation is the only country with a per capita income and other indicators that even remotely compare with the least developed countries of the 'Western bloc.'

However, Russia suffers from a stagnant population, and its geography is also such that it cannot support a larger population than it has. It has also been embroiled in endless European wars since at least the turn of the millennium before this one.

China, of course, is the fashionable rising power and one whose rise was midwifed by none other than Henry Kissinger. Significantly, it is also a power with which the so-called Western elite is not loath to share power.

At one point, the likes of Ferguson even wanted the US to divide the world into spheres of influence between itself and China in the manner of Hitler and Stalin dividing Poland between each other.

The advantage of being China is that its geographical location is so far to the East that, except for the Pacific and, to a lesser extent, the Indian Ocean, it does not really threaten American interests. 

Out of the three candidates, India is the only country that has a rising population, as well as close proximity to both American allies and enemies. And if one goes by the theory of geographical determinism, it does matter quite a bit.

Hence, it can be said with certitude that although there are some people in the US and Europe who want to encourage India to counter China in the Indian Ocean the way China was built up to counter the USSR (the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or the Soviet Union), the truth is that most are not happy with India's rise, which, in all fairness, despite the recent uptick, is actually quite slow.

India's ancient borders, which also make sense in geographical terms, extended up to the Khyber Pass. Then, as now, and as is a pattern with all settled societies, as Anthony Sattin wrote in his book Nomads, we have been threatened by horsedrawn invaders from the northwest. 

The geography of the subcontinent is also such that a vast swathe from Punjab in the West to Bengal in the East is a plain and hence difficult to defend. It is in this context that the Partition Plan of Punjab was approved and the Radcliffe Line was drawn arbitrarily in 1947.

If Punjab remains strong and attached culturally, economically, and even spiritually to the rest of the country, it becomes really difficult to make inroads from the northwest.

It is in this context that we should not only examine the continued Western support for Khalistan engineered through its Canadian Cats Paw but also how and why the likes of General Bajwa from Pakistan, who perpetrated terrorist attacks on the Indian side of Punjab, visit Washington, DC, when they want to seek an extension. 

It is also no coincidence that missionaries funded by the US, inter alia, are getting the requisite funding to operate with impunity in Punjab.

Simply put, support for Khalistan or for another rump buffer state on India's northwestern border is a strategic imperative for the 'West.'

Furthermore, within Canada itself there is an ecosystem that encourages Khalistani activities. The modus operandi is as follows: Agencies and NGOs (non-governmental organisations) on the Indian side of Punjab, as well as in Canada, get funding on the basis of the work that they actually do, which is to process asylum applications that can be successfully processed only if one is able to prove the factum of political persecution.

Hence, the creation of an atmosphere of violence and terror on the Indian side of Punjab not only serves geopolitical but also pro-immigration economic interests on the Canadian side. 

In this context, it is unlikely that there is going to be any significant change in Canadian policy.

Recently, in response to a question posed by an interviewer, a long-time proponent of Khalistan, Simranjeet Singh Mann, admitted that he co-signs asylum applications to Canada in return for money, which he then uses to fund his political activities.

The nexus gets even more pernicious when we get to the other undeniable truth, which is that under the Canadian First Past the Post System, Khalistan-supporting Gurudwaras are a formidable vote bank in the more populous urban areas, especially in marginal ridings.

It is also no coincidence that the Conservative Party caucus counts Tim Uppal — someone who does support separatism in Punjab — as one of its members. 

The biggest evidence, though, for bipartisan support and condonation of Khalistani terrorism in Canada is the trial of those accused in the Kanishka bombing case.

Investigative journalist Terry Milewski has pointed out how CSIS operatives were already in the know when the bombing was incipient.

Secondly, the trial did proceed at a glacial pace by Canadian standards, and thirdly, the accused persons were eventually acquitted despite copious circumstantial evidence. 

In this view of the matter, the following conclusions may be drawn:

1. Who the Canadians elect or who the Liberals elect as their leader is their own business, and yes, one has to do business with whosoever is the prime minister, and yes, Indians, a large chunk of whom are of Punjabi ethnicity, do have a stake in the Indian economy inasmuch as they are a source of remittance.

Nonetheless, when needed, the riot act needs to be read out to whoever is in power using the various tools of leverage that India has at its disposal.

Like most Western countries, Canada has a population that is stagnating, and Indians are a source of not only cheap labour but also funds, inasmuch as the number of Indian students studying in Canada has increased year on year, and Indians account for almost 40 per cent of study permits issued in Canada.

2. We must also know in the back of our minds that irrespective of who is in power, geopolitical imperatives of great powers are not altered. Hence, we should not have any expectations of Pierre Poilievre of the Conservative Party should he be elected Prime Minister in the near future.