Long before Donald Trump, Velupillai Prabhakaran was a threat to Canada. After the UK and China agreed in 1984 that Hong Kong would revert to Chinese sovereignty 13 years later, the ‘Mountain Master’, head of the dreaded, global Triad mafia, became a threat to Canada amid the mass migration of Hong Kong Chinese to Vancouver. And then there was an outspoken consul general of India in British Columbia, who had the intention to alter Canada’s national profile, but could not, since his tenure in the western province was not long enough for such a big enterprise. This would have required one or two decades of all-out efforts by Indians totally dedicated to such a task.
It is simplistic to view Mark Carney’s recent election as Canada’s prime minister, and the rise and fall of Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre as a fight within Canada’s established two-party domination, or as a routine democratic exercise. Canada has been in a silent churn for many decades before the 47th president of the US caused the cauldron, so to speak, to overflow with Trump’s threat to annex his neighbouring dominion.
Underpopulated Canada’s liberal policy of attracting all varieties of undesirable immigrants has caused the country to be overrun by ‘outsiders’ and an increasing ghettoisation of immigrant communities. The deceptive peace of the Thousand Islands, which was once emblematic of Canada, has given way to expose an ugly underbelly caused by injudicious immigration. Canada now faces severe all-round problems, which are beyond Carney or Poilievre—and his future successor—to solve. If and when they attempt to do so, it will have serious consequences for Indian immigration to Canada for many years to come, and for the hitherto-thriving educational exodus from India to Canada.
Carney recently said that the US “is a melting pot, Canada is a mosaic”. It has not been a pretty mosaic for a long time. During the nearly 15 years that I covered Canada as a foreign correspondent in North America, I have watched incognito extortion by cadres of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) from shopkeepers and small businessmen in the Greater Toronto area. Canada listed the LTTE under its Anti-Terrorism Act in 2006; it renewed the listing last year, presumably because the LTTE continues to be a terrorist threat long after its leader Prabhakaran was killed.
I once attended the proceedings of a House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, which was “deeply disturbed by testimony claiming that some supporters of the LTTE practice intimidation and extortion among the large Tamil community within Canada”. Most estimates suggest that there are about 300,000 Canadians of Sri Lankan origin, mainly Tamils.
At the famous ‘Mob Museum’ in Las Vegas, the Triad crime syndicate’s money laundering activities in Canada, its drug-peddling in British Columbia and its massive manipulation of Vancouver’s real estate market have been extensively documented. So much so, at this National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, as it is officially known, ‘Vancouver model’ is the name given to what the Hong Kong mob has perfected in the otherwise enchanting Canadian metropolis. This model is now being exported worldwide as the Triad spreads its wings further afield. Trump, even in his first presidential term, has been obsessed with the flow of the deadly opioid fentanyl from China to the Americas. Now that Carney and Trump have met, Hong Kong’s extensive mafia network in western Canada may be jointly taken on by the two new North American leaders.
Law enforcement officials in British Columbia have told me during reporting visits that the Triad has extensively recruited Canadian Punjabi gangs—not Khalistanis—for gun running and drug dealing. Provincial ministers in Ontario province have shown me documentation of how Canadian truck drivers of Punjabi descent have been ferrying narcotics into the US, imaginatively hidden in their cargo. At one time, hundreds of Indian-origin truckers were languishing in jails across the border in the US after having been caught with large hauls of deadly opioids. The situation in the Prairie provinces, especially Alberta, has not been any better.
It was into such a volatile environment, ripe for a disruptive agenda, that an Indian consul general went to Vancouver about 15 years ago. He made no bones about wanting to “transform Canada into a brown nation” from a white one. I am not naming him because he is no more and is, therefore, unable to defend himself against these revelations of highly undiplomatic behaviour. He certainly thought out-of-the-box and became hugely popular. Not only among Indo-Canadians, but also among Canadians of all South Asian descent. He briefly united western Canada’s Indian community, which had been waging fratricidal battles between Hindus and Sikhs. Within the Sikh community, Khalistanis were then getting into bloody and often fatal attacks against other Canadian Sikhs who were opposed to separatism in Punjab.
I once accompanied this consul general to a few Indo-Canadian gatherings, where he said the time had come for mass migration by any means from South Asia to Canada. He said Canada would eventually become like some Caribbean nations where people of sub-continental origin are the majority. These Caribbean countries, he noted, successively elected ethnic Indians as their prime ministers.
I wondered if his strategy—like Trump’s false hope that Canada would become the 51st US state—was merely to unite the fractious Indian community in his jurisdiction, which was hopelessly divided then as they are now. The results of Canada’s parliamentary elections last month are ominous for Canadians of other ethnicity. Punjabi will be the fourth-most spoken language in the new House of Commons. There were 21 ethnic Indians in the previous House; three more have been elected this time.
But India must not expect that Carney will wave a magic wand and India-Canada relations will return to what they were before Justin Trudeau destroyed the relationship, unwisely abetted by strategists in the Indian establishment who cannot see beyond their noses. Bilateral economic relations will continue to thrive, but political or diplomatic relations may not keep pace. Unless India moves to Ottawa from London some of its people who salvaged Indo-British relations, which were also blighted by Khalistanis not long ago.