Six-month sentence in human smuggling
VANCOUVER — A B.C. man who pleaded guilty to helping smuggle two people across the border into Canada has received a sixmonth conditional sentence.
In July 2016, Gurmeet Singh entered a guilty plea in B.C. provincial court in Surrey to the offence under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act.
The following month, Judge Kimberley Arthur-Leung sentenced Singh to a 12-month conditional sentence.
Singh appealed that sentence, arguing that the judge had made a number of errors and that a conditional discharge would be a more appropriate sentence.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Frits Verhoeven rejected Singh’s appeal arguments, but cut the conditional sentence to six months because that was the maximum allowable under the applicable law.
Court heard that Singh, described as a “well-regarded and successful businessman in the Indo-Canadian community,” paid $1,500 to people who smuggled Daler Singh and Nirmal Kaur — whom he considered his uncle and aunt — across the border from the United States into Canada.
Singh and his wife met the couple in Seattle and paid for them to stay the night there. The Indian couple paid $2,000 US to the driver of a vehicle to be taken to the Canada-U.S. border at Blaine. They walked across the unfenced border into Surrey, where they were reunited with Singh.
Singh, a father of two who was 36 at the time of the sentencing, came to Canada from India in 2004 and became a Canadian citizen in 2011.
On the appeal, Singh’s lawyer argued that the sentencing judge had made several errors, including making a finding that Singh had sought out a person to assist him in bringing in the couple illegally. But Verhoeven rejected those arguments, calling Singh “an active, knowing, and wilful participant in the scheme” and noting Singh admitted to paying the smugglers $1,500.