On the outskirts of Castlegar, a little town in British Columbia, a statue of Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy stands tall in the garden of the Doukhobor Discovery Centre. Much before Khalistani terrorists brought a culture of guns and gangs to British Columbia, the province became synonymous with the nonviolent and pacifist ideals of the Doukhobors. A small ethno-religious group of Russian origin, the Doukhobors fled to Canada in the 1890s, fearing persecution from the Russian church and state. Tolstoy is said to have assisted in their mass migration, and his statue stands testimony to his efforts and Canada’s tradition of welcoming refugees.
Canada has come a long way since. Today, it has become the go-to place for migrants from across the world, including refugees from conflict regions. But among them, a number of terror operatives, ranging from the Islamic State (IS), Palestine’s Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah to Sri Lanka’s Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Pakistan’s Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, have also found a safe haven for clandestine activities.
“Canada is hesitant to admit it, but the threats from immigrants is very palpable as it has also attracted terrorists, criminals and extremists,” says Wyatt Claypool, senior Canadian journalist. He cites the example of the 2018 Danforth shooting. “The police identified the gunman as Faisal Hussain, son of a Pakistani immigrant,” he says. “While some reports claimed that Hussain may have visited Pakistan before the shooting and that the Islamic State claimed the attack, there seemed to be a lot of hesitation to delve into the Islamist links to the incident. It was blamed on mental health issues finally.”
Moreover, Canada has been carrying out multiple repatriation operations for its nationals who were IS fighters following the dismantlement of the IS’s caliphate, a key priority of the United States. Ottawa was even lauded by Washington for its gesture. “We saw the IS fighters returning with no problem whatsoever,” says Claypool.
But what troubles Canadians more than terrorism is money laundering by front groups of extremist organisations. Recently, there were calls within Canada’s House of Commons to proscribe the Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for its alleged links with global drug syndicates and money laundering activities of the Hezbollah, says Claypool. The Trudeau government was asked to take aggressive action, especially after the downing of Ukraine International Airlines flight 752, which took off from Tehran in 2020, killing all 176 passengers, including 55 Canadian citizens. “But the government has put the IRGC on some sort of immigration ban list, which does not mean anything because no IRGC member wants to move to Canada, except to use it as a base for clandestine activities,” says Claypool.
New Delhi’s charge that pro-Khalistani terrorists are using Canada as their base to carry out terror and criminal activities on Indian soil is no different. “There is this kind of assumption that you would be labelled racist or xenophobic or bigoted if you say anything about the Khalistan issue,” admits Claypool. He also agrees that Canada will not call them out and people are getting away because of its weak counter-terrorism policies.
India is not alone. For the last two decades, Dhaka has been asking Ottawa to extradite Nur Chowdhury, the self-confessed assassin of Bangladesh’s founding father Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. Its foreign minister A.K. Abdul Momen even said that Canada was ignoring their plea in the name of human rights.
Extraditions are not easy from Canada, especially when death penalty is possible or where a case can be made out that the individual is unlikely to receive fair trial. “There are potential complications in a few cases like the Hassan Diab case,” admits Ward Elcock, former chief of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. Diab, a Canadian citizen, was extradited to France in 2014 and tried in the 1980 bombing of a Paris synagogue. In April, a court in France sentenced him to life; the Trudeau government vowed to stand up for Canadians and their rights.
“Reluctance to act in national security matters can sour relationships with friendly countries looking for cooperation and collaborations in countering global threats like terrorism and financial crimes,” says Colombo-based international security expert Rohan Gunaratna, who wrote the foreword to Stewart Bell’s Cold Terror: How Canada Nurtures and Exports Terrorism Around the World.
Sri Lanka, too, has expressed concern over the clandestine activities of the banned LTTE in Canada to raise funds, procure weapons and even influence the vast diaspora of Sri Lankan Tamils.
Likewise, India has been trying to achieve a common ground with Canada on the Khalistan terror issue under successive prime ministers. Vaishali Basu Sharma, a strategic analyst at New Delhi-based Policy Perspective Foundation, said former prime minister Manmohan Singh during his 2010 trip to attend the G20 summit in Toronto had asked Canada “to stop people from using religious places to promote extremism”, a decade-long concern that has now led to the souring of diplomatic ties between the two countries.
Ottawa’s ties with Beijing are also strained, albeit for a different reason. Thanks to its liberal migrant policies, Chinese nationals, originally from Hong Kong, have found easy entry into and access to acquire assets or invest in Canada, says Jonathan Berkshire Miller, director of foreign affairs and national security at Ottawa’s Macdonald-Laurier Institute. China is probably the country most active in ‘foreign interference operations’in Canada. “There is absolutely a problem when Beijing-connected Chinese individuals come to Canada, not for the purpose of setting up legitimate businesses and operating them but basically for making Canada more reliant on the Chinese government,” says Claypool.
Srikanth Kondapalli, professor in Chinese studies at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, said Chinese interference in Canada was well-documented. There were fireworks between Beijing and Ottawa when Huawei heiress apparent Meng Wanzhou was detained in 2018 at Vancouver airport on a US warrant for alleged bank fraud and business dealings in Iran. She was allowed to leave the country later. In another instance, Kondapalli recalled how two Chinese scientists, researching the zoonotic virus from camels at the Winnipeg laboratory, travelled to Wuhan before the outbreak of Covid-19. “The case led to an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and demands for discussion in the House of Commons amid concerns of Chinese espionage. But the outcome of the probe isn’t known,”says Kondapalli.
Domestically, the migration problem is being compounded by thousands of asylum seekers entering Canada from the US every day from Roxham Road border crossing. “It has been a bit of a scam, bringing immigrants on the promise of jobs and happier lives as authorities turn a blind eye,” says Claypool. “The problem is we are overstocking our country and outpacing our level of home building. The dangerous outcome is that Canada is fast becoming a playground for Mexican drug cartels. The fentanyl crisis, especially in areas like Toronto and Vancouver, is out of control with number of deaths rising exponentially.”
In the same way, illegal firearms and gunrunning have given way to a new Canadian gun culture that was nonexistent at one point. Even as the Trudeau government is talking about a full ban on firearms, illegal firearms are making their way to pro-Khalistani groups.
It may do well for Trudeau to revisit Tolstoy’s wise words―“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.”