How A Con Plan To Smear Trudeau Backfired Disastrously

A few months ago, Hamish Marshall, the Rebel co-founder who is now the Con's campaign manager, addressed the annual gathering of uber right-wingers at the Manning Centre.

And told them that if the Harper Party was ever going to return to power, it needed to regain the support of ethnic communities it had lost during the last election campaign.

But his new boss and fellow Rebel groupie Andrew Scheer clearly wasn't listening.

For in his desperate attempt to dump on Justin Trudeau's trip to India, with the help of his Con media groupies.

He may have just shot himself in the foot, and further reduced his slim chances of winning the next election.



After alienating Canada's large Sikh community.

The Conservative Party decided early Thursday not to proceed with a House of Commons motion that a Canadian Sikh organization says labels its community as “terrorists.”

According to the Sikh association, that decision came after a night-long campaign. “Throughout the whole night, the Sikh Community has been working aggressively to refute the frivolous allegations of labelling our community as terrorists at the request of foreign and corrupt entities,” a Facebook post says.

By suggesting they are terrorists, and that unlike Justin Trudeau, only the Cons stand for a united India.

Which is of course is a big lie, and a big problem for the Cons.

Canada is estimated to have the world’s largest Sikh community outside of India. More than 450,000 people across the country self-identified as following the religion in the 2011 census. The community has long been important to Canadian electoral politics.

For not only are Sikh Canadians a formidable community, as I have tried to explain India is a complex country, and in their frenzied assault on Trudeau, the Con media has disgraced itself.



By demanding to talk about Trudeau's trip to India to the exclusion of everything else, even though they don't know anything about that country, and as Supriya Dwivedi points out, are guilty of oversimplifying Indo-Canadian relations. 

For starters, the whole issue of India thinking Canada is soft on Khalistani terrorists isn’t exactly new. In fact, it’s about as old as I am, dating back to the Air India bombing. And yet it was largely presented by our media as some novel diplomatic dust-up.

Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s tenure, the issue of Canada’s Khalistanis became such a sticking point during his talks with Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, that Singh refused to even hold a joint press conference with Harper. That was a considerable and quantifiable snub, and yet so many Canadian journalists left out that detail when going on about Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s alleged snub to Trudeau.

As well as guilty of blatant bias.

And worse, both the Cons and their media stooges have also failed to reveal the true nature of Narendra Modi. 



Modi is the leader of the BJP, a party that openly and explicitly embraces Hindutva, or a Hindu nationalist ideology that seeks to establish Hindu hegemony over India. Literal lynchings of Muslims for purportedly eating beef have risen sharply under Modi’s rule, and roving gangs of gau rakshaks, or cow vigilantes, feel emboldened under a prime minister who oversaw one of the worst acts of mob violence against Muslims back when he was the chief minister for the state of Gujarat.

Failed to point out that the issue of Khalistan is really about human rights.

This is about Sikhs in Canada, the U.K. and the U.S. speaking out against the Indian government’s treatment of religious minorities generally, and specifically the demand for some sort of justice over the anti-Sikh pogroms in 1984 following Operation Blue Star and the assassination of prime minister Indira Gandhi.

And that the same people who tried to embarrass Trudeau in India, are the same ones who are trying to portray peaceful Sikhs all over the world as terrorists.

And as a result, by acting as Modi's surrogates, the Cons and the Con media have acted more like Hindu extremists than Canadians.

Canadian politicians who either tacitly or actively court any extremist factions should rightfully be called out, but Canadians should be more concerned that a foreign government would tell us what is and isn’t acceptable for our own citizens to be doing when it comes to political mobilization and freedom of speech.

And should be condemned by all decent people,

And the good news?

Scheer and his gang have alienated and insulted a large and proud group of Canadians. 

And try as they might I don't think they will win many of them back...



While Justin Trudeau on the other hand I'm sure has made many new Sikh friends...



Who will almost certainly join with others to help him win the next election.

So who says his trip to India was a failure?

And of course now we know who the Con media would make Prime Minister.



We have seen the enemy that would destroy this country, and must do what we must to resist him...