PM’s India trip report raises ire
Trudeau pushes back against opposition allegations of political meddling with new committee
OTTAWA—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says neither he nor his office ordered a report into his ill-fated India trip to be censored, pushing back against opposition suggestions his office removed politically-sensitive information in the unclassified version of the report.
Both the opposition Conservatives and
New Democrats criticized the heavily-censored report, prepared by an all-party committee of MPs and senators, suggesting the prime minister held back embarrassing information from the report’s public release.
Trudeau flatly denied those allegations in the House of Commons Tuesday, stating nobody in the Prime Minister’s Office requested any section of the report to be censored.
“Neither I nor my office requested or directed any redactions,” Trudeau said.
“A proposal was made by the security and intelligence community (for redactions), and we accepted. We did no extra redacting, we did no under-redacting. We accepted the advice of the professionals.”
The report, which examined multiple security aspects of Trudeau’s much-criticized February sojourn to India, was released by the new National Security and Intelligence Committee of Parliamentarians (NSICOP).
It’s a cross-partisan committee, with representatives from the three major parties. NSICOP provides a classified version of their reports to the prime minister and public safety minister, who can request information be censored if it could damage national security, national defence or international relations. The report is then released publicly.
Nathan Cullen, the New Democrats’ ethics critic, said the broad ability to hold back information is why his party voted against the committee’s creation in 2017.
“I think the way this has been handled threatens the structure (of the committee) itself,” Cullen told the Star in an interview.
“They’re looking to provide the answers, right? Close the book. And we’re left with even more questions. This is a government that accused a trading partner of sabotage, essentially.”
The report examined how Jaspal Atwal, a former associate of Sikh extremists convicted of attempted murder, received an official invite to two events on Trudeau’s India trip. The series of events leading up to Atwal posing for pictures with the prime minister’s wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, are well documented in the report.
Less well documented is any evidence to back up any claim of “foreign interference.” The report notes that after Trudeau’s former national security adviser, Daniel Jean, briefed journalists on the Atwal affair, the National Post published a story suggesting the “intelligence service” of India might be attempting to embarrass Trudeau.
Jean later denied he suggested the Indian government was involved, but the committee focused heavily on the question of possible foreign interference.