Pierre Poilievre's silence on India keeps getting louder

Sometimes, it’s what you don’t say about something that tells the real story. That seems to be the case with Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre’s silence following Monday’s shocking allegations from the RCMP about the Indian government’s illegal activities. Poilievre is the most terminally online political leader in Canadian history, and he rarely misses an opportunity to share his opinion on something that involves Justin Trudeau. And yet, he couldn’t be bothered to say a word about the biggest political bombshell we’ve seen dropped on Canada in a long time. Instead, he posted a generic Thanksgiving Day greeting on Twitter and called it a day. 

But oh, what a day it was. As Global’s Mercedes Stephenson and Stewart Bell reported, “Agents working out of India’s high commission in Ottawa and consulates in Vancouver and Toronto were behind dozens of violent crimes across Canada that targeted opponents of the Modi government.” These six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, were also allegedly involved in the plot to murder of Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023.  And as the Globe and Mail’s Robert Fife and Marieke Walsh noted in their own reporting, information about this campaign of state-sponsored violence in Canada was “shared with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national-security adviser Ajit Doval and Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah.”

The Conservative Party of Canada did put out a statement on Poilievre’s behalf — one that, of course, blamed Justin Trudeau for everything — but Poilievre didn’t even see fit to share it with his followers. Instead, it was laundered through the social media accounts of CPC MPs Michael Chong, Jasraj Singh Hallan and Tim Uppal. Poilievre didn’t bother to retweet them, either.

Indeed, you’d never know about the RCMP’s allegations against the Indian government if you got your information about Canadian politics from Poilievre’s feed, which featured tweets about a custom cabinet maker in Etobicoke, a group of Tae Kwan Do students in Brampton, and the door knocking he did for a CPC candidate in Mississauga-Lakeshore. There’s no way that’s an accident. 

His statement, by the way, didn’t mention India’s well-documented efforts to interfere in Canadian elections, including the very Conservative leadership race that Poilievre went on to win after one of his key rivals, Patrick Brown, was disqualified. As the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference has heard, an October 2022 CSIS Intelligence Assessment concluded that “Government of India agents appear to have interfered in the Conservative’s (sic) 2022 leadership race by purchasing memberships for one candidate while undermining another.” 

It’s safe to assume the Indian government’s agents weren’t buying memberships for Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown. As one of Brown’s campaign team members told Baaz, an online news outlet catering to the Sikh diaspora, “we knew that local pro-Modi organizations alongside Indian government actors were mobilizing against the Brown campaign as they were concerned with the strong support we had from both the Sikh and Muslim communities.” According to Baaz’s 2023 reporting, one of the MPs who sided with Brown was told by Indian government officials that they should retract their support for him. As it happens, two of them did just that in early June. 

There’s no way of knowing if the Indian government had anything to do with Brown’s eventual disqualification from the race in July 2022. As the Brown campaign argued in its official statement at the time, the decision to remove him was based on anonymous allegations they were never given an opportunity to evaluate — and seemed driven by a desire to protect the front-runner. “It was expecting a coronation for Pierre Poilievre,” the statement says. “When the final membership numbers came in, it became clear Poilievre did not have the points to win this race.”

Generally speaking, I’d file this sort of spin under the heading of “predictably sour grapes.” Losing campaigns always find creative ways to blame other people for their loss, and that includes ones that get disqualified for breaking the rules. But Poilievre’s behaviour ever since, most notably his continued refusal to undergo the security screening needed to get briefed on classified intelligence related to foreign interference — something all other party leaders have done — keeps raising the same question: what is he so afraid of here? 

If he wants to be Canada’s next prime minister, Poilievre needs to clear the air on his relationship with the Government of India once and for all. He needs to get fully briefed on the issue of foreign interference in our elections, if only to better understand the full scope of what he might have to face one day. He needs to explain why he was so uncharacteristically quiet about the RCMP’s findings, and why he seems to reflexively side with Narendra Modi’s government rather than our own. And he needs to prove, once and for all, that he’s willing to put Canada’s best interests above his own.