A diplomatic doormat?

What world leaders reveal about Ottawa’s global stature

When Prime Minister Justin Trudeau accused India two months ago of involvement in the killing of a Sikh separatist leader on Canadian soil, his claim was ridiculed from Kashmir to Kolkata.

Only this past week did New Delhi reveal it had named a “high-level inquiry committee” to probe allegations of a state-sponsored murder plot.

All it took was a charge that agents of the Indian government had tried to do the same thing — in New York City.

Two nearly identical cases except that, as the Canadian government has alleged, the assassination plot succeeded in Canada and was intercepted and thwarted by law enforcement south of the border.

In the hunt for differences, there is the obvious one: Canada is not its powerful superpower neighbour. And with its nice-guy image and flair for modesty, Canada’s guiding mythology has been of a country that aspires to do right on the world stage rather than to weigh in with its might.

But the charge against India, and New Delhi’s differing reactions to the two sets of allegations, raises difficult questions about Canada’s heft and authority on the world stage when it comes time to stand up for Canadian interests.

When news emerged in the U.S. of criminal charges against an Indian citizen for trying to arrange the murder of a prominent Sikh activist — reportedly Gurpatwant Singh Pannun — considered by India to be a terrorist, Trudeau said it “underscores what we’ve been talking about from the very beginning.”

It was mid-September when he rose in the House of Commons and alleged that India had a hand in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, who was shot dead in June outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, B.C. Nijjar and Pannun were allies in the fight for a Sikh homeland, known as Khalistan.

“The Indian government needs to work with us to ensure that we’re getting to the bottom of this,” Trudeau said this past week. “This is not something that anyone can take lightly.”

And yet India’s reaction to Canada’s allegation suggests it has and continues to view Canada as a bothersome critic it can afford to brush off — something of a diplomatic featherweight.

It’s not only India that has looked on Canada more as a bothersome pawn than a player to be reckoned with.

China repeatedly brushed aside Canada’s claims that Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, who were jailed from 2018 to 2021 in Beijing on espionage charges, were subject to “arbitrary detention.” They were released only when the U.S. agreed not to extradite Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, a Chinese national under house arrest in Vancouver.

And though Canadian police and prosecutors have mounted numerous cases that document Chinese espionage efforts and attempts to spread influence in Canada — one of the most recent being this summer’s arrest of a former RCMP inspector — there are few signs Beijing has, or intends to, let its foot off the geopolitical gas pedal.

Nor will it even tolerate Canadian lecturing, as Chinese President Xi Jinping demonstrated at a November 2022 G20 conference, when he scolded Trudeau for leaking details of a conversation about Chinese interference to the press.

Some will blame the prime minister — in his eighth year in power — for Canada’s woes on the world stage. Such a lengthy period in the crucible of international affairs is bound to bring out personality conflicts with colleagues who may have soured on Trudeau’s style or substance.

Donald Trump famously called Trudeau “two-faced” after the Canadian leader was overheard gossiping about the former U.S. president with his French, British and Dutch counterparts at a NATO alliance meeting in 2019.

If in fact Trudeau has a roughened rapport with some world leaders, it’s not necessarily rubbing off on their citizenry. A recent poll by Abacus Data showed that, among Americans, 42 per cent of respondents said they had a favourable impression of Trudeau.

“Interestingly, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau seems to enjoy more popularity in the United States than in Canada,” pollster David Coletto noted in his analysis of the results.

The perhaps more revealing figure for the matter at hand is that only half of those Americans surveyed believed Canada to be “influential in the world.” Canada (52 per cent) polled last in the list of countries, which included Great Britain (73 per cent), Japan (71 per cent), Germany (64 per cent) and France (61 per cent).

That may explain why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had no qualms about dressing Trudeau down publicly for calling on Israel to exercise “maximum restraint” as it targets Hamas in the Gaza Strip — an effort that has killed an estimated 15,000 Palestinians in eight weeks, according to statistics provided by the Hamasrun Health Ministry.

“The world is witnessing this. The killing of women and children. Of babies,” Trudeau said on Nov. 14. “This has to stop.” The war began after the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas and other Palestinian militants, who killed about 1,200 people.

“We were offended,” Herzog said of the sharp response in a CBC interview. The offence came, at least in part, because Israel had heeded Canada’s request to grant Canadian citizens in Gaza special permissions to leave the war zone, he said.

But there were no such social media screeds when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on Nov. 10 — four days before Trudeau — that “far too many Palestinians have been killed.”

And there were no Indian officials last week angrily dismissing the American accusations of a statesponsored assassination plot as “absurd and motivated” by politicians courting the influential Sikh vote, as they did when Trudeau came out swinging.

“This is a matter of concern,” Arindam Bagchi, a government spokesperson, told reporters. “We have said, and let me reiterate, that this is also contrary to government policy.”

No tit-for-tat diplomatic expulsions, either, after the U.S. expelled a senior spy with India’s foreign intelligence service, the Research & Analysis Wing (RAW) from the San Francisco consulate and another blocked from taking up a post in Washington, as Indian online news outlet The Print reported.

Some may quarrel with Canada’s form in presenting its allegations — a step reportedly taken after learning that the Globe and Mail was preparing to publish an article on India’s alleged role in Nijjar’s death.

Canada had been working with the Americans on the Sikh assassination cases since August. And U.S. police had infiltrated the New York City plot as early as June, according to the criminal indictment.

But Trudeau could only level “credible allegations of a potential link” between agents of the Indian government and Nijjar’s killing — considerably less powerful than the 15-page court document that Americans filed in court.

“The U.S. handling of the Pannun issue is discreet, lawful, based on disclosed ‘evidence.’ It is tough yet substantively different from Canadian grandstanding on Nijjar,” Shekhar Gupta, a veteran Indian journalist and editor-in-chief of The Print wrote on X, the social media platform.

But there is also a geopolitical reality that is impossible for Ottawa to parry, according to Indian foreign policy analyst Angshuman Choudhury.

“India simply can’t afford to rebuff the U.S. à la Canada for the simple fact that the former is far more critical to New Delhi’s geopolitical interests than the latter,” he wrote in The Diplomat, a website focused on foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region.

The hard truth, in other words, is that when Canada gets heavy on the world stage, it just doesn’t carry as much weight.