There’s no excuse for Trudeau’s sloppiness
PM’s office has cavalier take on political vetting
Justin Trudeau’s disastrous passage to India brought to mind Mark Twain’s pilgrimage to Europe and the Holy Land in the Innocents Abroad.
“In Paris, they simply opened their eyes and stared at us when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language,” he wrote.
At least Twain was lampooning the cultural imperialism of North American tourists.
The Trudeaus looked to be in earnest. One can imagine the prime minister turning up at the Bollywood event in Mumbai in an elaborate sherwani, to be greeted by Bollywood stars in sober black suits, and saying: “Now I don’t want anyone to feel embarrassed …”
But the barrage of bad publicity was not just the result of flighty photo ops in costumes designed by a tailor apparently in the grip of the delirium tremens. More seriously, it was the result of systemic negligence in Trudeau’s office that brought embarrassment on Canada.
As the National Post reported Friday, Jaspal Atwal — the man convicted of attempted murder who was invited to a reception at the official residence of the Canadian High Commissioner this week — was taken off a blacklist by the Indian authorities.
The suggestion by senior security officials inside the Canadian government was that India’s intelligence service may have wanted Atwal to be close to Trudeau to embarrass him for being soft on Sikh separatism. But that does not explain how he came to be issued an invitation to the event by B.C. Liberal MP Randeep Sarai. More pertinently, it does not offer any clues why that in- vitation was not vetted and immediately killed by the Prime Minister’s Office.
“If they had Googled the name, this guy would have shown up in two seconds,” said Garry Keller, who was chief of staff to former foreign affairs minister John Baird.
He said under the Harper government, the PMO would start planning events for a major foreign visit, such as Trudeau’s trip to India, months in advance. The details would be conveyed to caucus and Cabinet, whose members would be asked to forward the names of constituents they would like invited. Those suggestions would be vetted at the political level in the PMO and then sent to the RCMP and Privy Council Office for more detailed security checks.
Keller suggested that, either no cross-checking was carried out, or the objections of the RCMP and PCO were ignored by the PMO because Atwal was well-known in Liberal political circles.
Either way, it reflects an extremely sloppy approach to the serious business of international diplomacy.
“They obviously decided they were going to do things differently and put their guy out there. But this has done irreparable damage to the relationship,” said Keller.
It is generally understood that Twitter retweets and links are not endorsements. But appearing in a posed photo with the prime minister does transmit an impression of legitimacy that is, far too often in the case of this government, undeserved.
Last March, Trudeau posed with Veluppillai Thangavelu, a former vicepresident of the World Tamil Movement, a group Canada has outlawed as a terror organization. The picture was taken at a large political event and the prime minister could be forgiven for having been ambushed by someone he didn’t know, who happened to be associated with the Canadian front organization for the Tamil Tigers guerrilla group.
But the same excuse does not stand up in relation to the meeting with Joshua Boyle, the former hostage now facing criminal charges relating to incidents that took place after he was rescued from Pakistan.
Trudeau met Boyle, his wife and three children in his office before Christmas, two weeks before the former hostage was arrested.
The Prime Minister said all his meetings were cleared by his national security advisers and intelligence agencies. That seems remarkable, says Keller.
“I worked on the Boyle case for a number of years and it was completely hinky,” he said.
Do we really have a national security apparatus as proficient as the buttonpusher on a Hawaiian ballistic missile drill?
Calls to the RCMP’s automated media line went unreturned but, presumably, not because the Horsemen were asleep at the switch.
More likely, there is a political culture inside the Prime Minister’s Office that is prepared to take political risks in order to get Justin Trudeau in as many pictures with as many people as possible — even if they are widely known to be attempted murderers.
In that kind of cavalier environment, warnings from the security services can be dismissed as alarmist; impediments to the great political project of getting Trudeau re-elected in 2019.
The Liberals have long been accused of moral relativism when it suits them. Atwal’s horrific acts of politically motivated violence should not be obscured because he is a prominent Liberal or because the cause was Khalistani, not Quebec, separatism.
Trudeau’s government has now been burned too often for them to play the innocents at home, or abroad.
EITHER WAY, IT REFLECTS AN EXTREMELY SLOPPY APPROACH