Anatomy of a fiasco
Oxford defines the noun “fiasco” as “a complete failure, especially a ludicrous or humiliating one” — for example: “his plans turned into a fiasco.” It’s an apt description for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s gaffe-filled visit to India last February.
The trip, which was heavy on photo opportunities but light on trade and diplomacy, ended up casting the prime minister, his office and many senior officials in a bad light. It was poorly planned and ineptly executed. Later attempts to gloss over the embarrassing fallout added to the atmosphere of bungling.
Now a report from the multiparty National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians, while heavily redacted before its public release, sheds light on the workings of that ill-fated tour.
Readers will recall, perhaps cringingly, how Trudeau and his family paraded around India in ostentatious local garb, met mostly second-tier officials and did little to bolster Canada-India relations.
The fashion statement can be blamed solely on Trudeau himself. That nobody at a senior level talked him out of wearing Bollywood attire suggests the PMO team also failed to understand the political optics back home. But there were other, more serious failures. In a clear breach of security, a man convicted of attempted murder and who had links to terror groups got invited to two events that Trudeau attended.
Jaspar Atwal was convicted of trying to kill an Indian cabinet minister in 1986. Somehow, he got himself invited to a reception hosted by Trudeau in Mumbai and had his picture taken with Sophie Grégoire Trudeau. Atwal was invited to a second event, in Delhi, until somebody realized who he was and cancelled the invitation. Atwal has been linked to violent Sikh nationalists who carried out lengthy campaigns of assassinations and terror attacks in India and also spread the violence to Canada. Yet Ottawa has never been as harsh as the Indians demanded in fighting domestic Sikh extremism. And Atwal’s presence with the PM is just one failure among several. The PMO is at fault for almost all of them, including a craven attempt to shift the blame to others.
The PMO first pointed at Randeep Sarai, a Liberal MP from Surrey, B.C., suggesting he invited Atwal to the Mumbai reception and a dutiful Sarai publicly took the blame. But the parliamentary report determined that the PMO invited 423 people to the two events, including Atwal.
Making matters worse, Trudeau’s national security adviser, Daniel Jean, suggested to reporters that Indian intelligence agencies might have had a role in getting Atwal into the Canadian events.
The report says the RCMP got wind of Atwal’s invitation a week in advance and tried to tip off the security services. Somehow, the message didn’t transmit. Other warnings were attempted, all of them unsuccessful, until it was too late.
No federal authority involved in the India trip, not Trudeau, not the PMO, the RCMP nor the security services covered themselves in glory. Let’s hope that lessons have been learned, by the prime minister himself and right on down the line.