What defines a terrorist threat? Review ordered

Minister responds to Sikh criticism

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.

Some of the outcry came from within his own caucus, as a Liberal MP urged that the mention of potential Sikh violence be removed entirely from the Public Safety Canada terror-threat report.

Goodale stopped short of promising 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,” the minister 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.

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 refers to 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.

A 2015 report by the Senate’s national security and defence committee also cited the Sikh martyr portraits, and proposed a new law to prohibit “terrorist glorification.”

But Wesley Wark, a national security expert and visiting professor at the University of Ottawa, said he was “a little surprised” to see the Sikh extremist reference, noting the two groups the authors cited have not been active here for years.

The suggestion of continuity from a terrorist past to the present “does not strike me as accurate,” 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. OTTAWA • An Ontario judge has delivered a blow to Sen. Mike Duffy in his bid for financial restitution over his dramatic and protracted suspension without pay five years ago, removing the Senate as a target in his multimillion-dollar lawsuit.

Justice Sally Gomery said in a ruling Friday that the Senate’s decision to suspend Duffy is protected by parliamentary privilege — a centuries-old right designed to protect legislators from having to answer to judges for doing their jobs — meaning Duffy can’t take the Senate to court over its actions. Gomery is striking the Senate from the lawsuit, which sought more than $7.8 million from the upper chamber, RCMP and federal government.

Duffy is seeking damages in the wake of the highprofile investigation of his expense claims, which culminated in his acquittal on 31 criminal charges in 2016.

He filed his claim in August 2017, claiming “an unprecedented abuse of power” when a majority of senators voted to suspend him without pay in November 2013, before any criminal charges had been filed.

Duffy’s lawyers argued that Stephen Harper’s staff aimed to quash a rising political scandal over Duffy’s housing claims and the upper chamber gave up its privilege when Conservative senators allowed the Prime Minister’s Office to dictate decisions about the case.

Gomery, in her ruling, said allowing a court to review the Senate’s decisions on Duffy would damage the upper chamber’s ability to function as an independent legislative body. She said she had to “respect constitutional imperatives” and suggested Duffy should do the same.

Duffy’s lawyer did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Friday morning the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 majority decision written by newest puisne justice Sheilah Martin, wiped out the mandatory “victim surcharge” in the Criminal Code on the grounds that it is unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. It’s a tough liberal ruling that erases part of the Conservative law-and-order legacy in the Code. Victim surcharges go back to the 1980s, but it was the Harper government that took away all judicial discretion relating to them. Since 2013 a judge finding someone guilty under the Code or the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act has been required to impose a $100 penalty for every count in the less serious “summary conviction” category and $200 for every “indictable offence” count.

We laymen naturally think of the rule against “cruel and unusual punishment” (preserved in section 12 of our Charter of Rights) in its historical context: it was devised to prevent law enforcement, in whatever guise, from running amok and creating new forms of exemplary torture or public humiliation. The word “unusual” was important. No one objected to serious crimes being punished in ways that were cruel but traditional; even traitors were thought to have a natural right to foreseeable and limited punishment, rather than artisanal innovation by a vengeful authority.

It is natural to look at the punishment being condemned here and wonder if making someone pay a hundred bucks can really be considered “cruel and unusual” in the way that torture would be. The Court was definitely guided by liberal concern for the differing effects of the law on various downtrodden groups. The criminals whose appeals were combined for the purposes of Supreme Court analysis included poor and afflicted people convicted of assault, robbery, and uttering threats. (At least one was hit with the surcharge only because he was found guilty of violating probation.)

The libertarian part of me does not like any form of mandatory sentencing very much, and likes it still less when a punishment is dressed up as some sort of creepy consolation or reward for crime victims, even though the impugned surcharges just went to the Receiver-General like any other fine. In a way, this business is odious liberal maternalism in the Conservative mirror. Retribution has a place in the justice system, and if we want to make things hard for criminals, we shouldn’t disguise it as therapy or holiness. (The federal government’s lawyers, in fact, did try to argue that the surcharge was not “punishment” at all. That didn’t go well.)

I was more impressed than I expected to be by Justice Martin’s ruling. Section12-based attacks on the mandatory charge may convince you that it had the same sneaky, expansionary character that we all dislike in any hidden business fee. The surcharge was a fixed amount per count of the conviction. Murder one person, the charge is $200: commit five counts of mischief, it is $500. These are amounts that some people — the mentally ill, the profoundly disabled, the homeless — have no realistic prospect of paying through their own efforts, or working off.

Remember, the judge was not allowed to waive the surcharge, even if he accepted that it could never be paid. What would happen in practice is that an impecunious convict who had not settled up would be required to appear in court periodically, fill out forms, and get an extension to his deadline. People who can’t raise a few hundred bucks are not likely to be good at handling a bureaucratic burden like this, but they were not eligible for state-funded assistance from counsel, for all the good it might have done.

These were guilty people who had in all other respects discharged what we call “their debt to society.” But the surcharge had them living under permanent threat of arrest and detention, with a dollop of occasional humiliation thrown in. If you have been even slightly poor, I believe the adjective “cruel” will appear spontaneously in your mind, as if whispered in your ear, while you study Justice Martin’s description of the effects of the discarded law.

WORDS MATTER AND BEING PRECISE MATTERS.