Organization urges Sikh MPs to step down
Uproar over terrorism terminology
Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale said Friday he would have his officials review use of words like Sikh, Sunni and Shia to describe terrorist threats, after a report suggesting Canada was again at risk from Sikh extremism sparked fierce criticism.
His promise seemed to do little to calm the anger, however, as the Sikh community’s main national organization called late Friday for all 20 MPs and one senator of the religion to resign over the issue.
Some of the outcry came from within Goodale’s own caucus, as a Liberal backbencher urged that the mention of potential Sikh violence be removed entirely from the Public Safety Canada terror-threat report.
The minister stopped short of agreeing to do that, though suggested some of the report’s language may need tweaking. Government officials did not mean to impugn Sikhs or any other religious or ethnic group, he said.
“But words matter and being precise matters,” Goodale said after a speech in Toronto. “So I have invited my officials and the others they work with right across Canada to examine the descriptors that are used in relation to terrorism and extremism and violence to make sure those descriptors are appropriate and proper.”
In a statement released later, he mentioned specifically the adjectives Sikh, Sunni and Shia — the latter two being the two main branches of Islam — used to denote classes of terrorist.
The Canadian Sikh Association was not impressed, calling for all Sikh parliamentarians to step down.
“The Canadian Sikh’s have endured enough pain by constantly being reminded that they do not belong,” the group said in a news release, and should not be labelled extremists.
Earlier Friday, Liberal MP Randeep Sarai demanded that the Sikh extremism reference be excised from the annual report, saying there is no evidence such a threat exists in Canada and that the mention of it unfairly tarnishes a peaceful, 600,000-strong community.
The member for B.C.’s Surrey Centre riding made his request in a letter to Goodale after two days of emotional reaction to the document from the politically important Sikh community.
The opposition Conservatives and NDP have also called into question the reference.
Sarai — who attracted controversy himself when he invited a convicted Sikh terrorist onto the prime minister’s February trip to India — says he could find no evidence in the document to justify the passage.
The citation merely references the Air India bombing of 1985 — Canada’s worst terrorist attack — and resurrects a dark period for the community, he wrote to Goodale.
“Since 1985, when I was 10 years old, I have seen how Sikhs in Canada have had to wear the stigma of ‘Sikh extremist,’ ” says Sara, who wears a turban. “Finally, after 30 years, these words stopped being headlines on our newspapers, and Sikh Canadians were seen simply as Canadians, regardless of what was on their heads.”
A section of Public Safety Canada’s annual report on the country’s terrorism threats lists “Sunni Islamist extremism” and “rightwing extremism” followed by “Sikh (Khalistani) extremism.” There had been no mention of Sikh extremism in previous years.
The report notes that while violent activities in support of an independent Sikh homeland (Khalistan) in India have fallen since the 1980s when terrorists blew up an Air India flight, killing 331 people, “support for the extreme ideologies of such groups remains. For example, in Canada, two key Sikh organizations, Babbar Khalsa International and the International Sikh Youth Federation, have been identified as being associated with terrorism and remain listed terrorist entities under the Criminal Code.”
Sarai added his voice to that of many Sikh leaders this week, who said lawful activism in support of the separatist cause is in no way a threat or akin to violence.
The MP earlier this year resigned as the Liberals’ Pacific caucus chair and apologized after inviting Jaspal Atwal — a ex-member of an outlawed Sikh separatist group convicted of attempting to murder an Indian cabinet minister and charged with assaulting B.C. politician Ujjal Dosanjh, — to join Prime Minister Trudeau’s bungled India trip this year.
Not all Canadian Sikhs share Sarai’s objections to the report.
Ontario journalist Balraj Deol, a prominent critic of the Khalistani movement, noted that “martyr” portraits of Sikh terrorists, including Air India suspects, continue to hang in Sikh temples and appear in parades. The Public Safety report did not malign the whole community, only extremists, he said.
“It does not offend me, it does not offend a lot of people who I am talking to,” he said.
New Democrat Leader Jagmeet Singh said in a tweet the report stokes fear about the Sikh community without any evidence, “which is dangerous and wrong.”
Conservative MP Garnett Genuis also urged the government to provide more information to justify the report, saying the lack of evidence or context is an irresponsible way to discuss a sensitive issue.