Five Eyes and Nazis

This has not been a good couple of weeks for the Justin Trudeau government....

Trudeau's visit to the G20 summit in New Delhi in mid-September seemed unusually tense. He spent very little time with his host, India PM Narendra Modi, skipped one of the formal functions and then got stranded in India for two days because his geriatric official aircraft needed emergency repairs. 

Soon after Trudeau's return to Canada, the reason for the coldness of his welcome in India became clear. Trudeau rose in the House of Commons to announce that Canada had intelligence connecting the government of India to the assassination in British Columbia of a prominent Sikh activist who favoured establishment of a separate Sikh state, "Khalistan". Unsurprisingly India did not react well, denying the allegation outright and launching a series of tit-for-tat measures that shows no signs of ending any time soon. 

Here's the thing: it now looks as though the intelligence on which Trudeau is relying was not provided by the Canadian security agency CSIS.  Rather, it came from an unidentified member of the "Five Eyes" intelligence sharing alliance. (In my long-ago diplomatic service days, Five Eyes was usually referred to in documents as "AUSCANZUKUS", which I expect the reader can figure out quickly enough).  Since it was the US ambassador to Canada that revealed this fact, the best guess is that the US actually originated the intelligence.

Whether or not that is the case, the near-silence of the other Five Eyes countries in supporting Trudeau here is remarkable, and highly chastening for a leader whose first public statement to the international community on being elected in 2015 was "Canada's back".  Back it may be; as important as India, it evidently is not. Nobody looks good here.  India is under a cloud of suspicion; CSIS has apparently been shown to be unable to monitor suspicious activities of foreign nationals within Canada's borders; Trudeau has gone out on a limb using intelligence that he probably cannot independently verify and has so far declined to make public; and the Five Eyes "allies" are letting Trudeau and Canada twist in the wind out of fear of offending Modi. 

While all this was unfolding, Canada received a visit from the peripatetic Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who followed up a speech at the UN General Assembly with meetings in Ottawa and Toronto.  In Ottawa, Zelensky addressed Parliament, and an array of prominent Ukrainian-Canadians were invited to attend.  One of these was a 98-year old WW2 veteran, Yaroslav Hunka, who received a personal ovation from the politicians and the rest of the assembled crowd as it was announced that he had fought against the Russians during the war. It does not seem to have occurred to anyone, but it came out soon enough, that those Ukrainians who fought the Russians back then were fighting alongside the Nazis -- and indeed, Hunka was not just a common-or-garden Nazi, but a full-fledged member of the Waffen SS. 

Cue outrage from all sides: the opposition parties in Parliament, of course, the Jewish community, and even the Kremlin, which surely took delight in this confirmation of its contention that the purpose of its "special military operation" in Ukraine was to de-Nazify the country. The search for a fall guy ramped up fast, with House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota appearing to take full responsibility for the gaffe. Hurta lives in the riding represented by Rota, so that may indeed has been the source of the initial invitation.  But Hurta was granted a face-to-face meeting with Zelensky and Trudeau; given the level of security that surrounds both men, it is hard to believe that nobody looked into Hurta's past before approving his presence -- unless this is yet more evidence of the incompetence of CSIS.

And meanwhile on the domestic front, housing crises, mounting concern over immigration levels and anger over rising food prices continue to poison public opinion.  Any impression that Trudeau is in control of events vanished long ago; even he may soon realize that the only way to reset the agenda here is to call an election -- and if he prayed to be defeated, you could hardly blame him.