All the News that fit to print on Countering Indian Foreign Interference?

Or, Not for all?

There is more drama on the Indian foreign interference file and some bleak pointers about the future of Indo-Canadian relations.

On October 29, the House of Commons Public Safety committee called a meeting to discuss Indian foreign interference in Canada, following a motion by an NDP member. It featured testimony from a raft of senior officials, including Nathalie Drouin, the PM’s National Security and Intelligence Adviser;  David Morrison, the Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs; Michael Duheme, the RCMP Commissioner; Daniel Rogers, the newly appointed CSIS Director; and Tricia Geddes, the new Deputy Minister of Public Safety. ^[1]

The committee meeting was unusually awash in information and there was much to learn from the glimpse inside Canada’s diplomatic and national security efforts, despite the usual, often time-wasting, partisan warfare between the parties.

Some of that partisan warfare was amplified in media reporting on the testimony, with some considerable slippage on the known facts in one prominent case.  I’ll come to that later in this piece.

What are the key takeaways from the testimony?

For me, there were three.

The first: much was revealed about the recent Canadian strategic approach to India on foreign interference.

The second: some extraordinary signs of the extent to which the Indian government would go to stiff Canadian officials.

The third: the chronology and drivers behind the decision to take a “unilateral approach” by expelling Indian diplomats and going public with details of what the Canadian government new about India’s foreign interference.

The Canadian strategy, crafted by senior officials following the Nijjar murder in June 2023, had two tracks. One was a law enforcement investigation led by the RCMP, which would turn up some deeply alarming stuff; the other involved diplomatic efforts to engage with India, find ground for cooperation and force an end to Indian foreign interference.

On the diplomatic track no less than six meetings were held between August 2023 and March 2024 with India’s national security adviser; discussions were also held with India’s High Commissioner in Canada.  None resulted in any suggestion that the Indian government was prepared to budge from its official line of denying any involvement in an extrajudicial murder in Canada, continuing to call Canadian allegations preposterous, suggesting that Canada had no evidence, and arguing that the real problem was Canada’s refusal to take extremist Sikh violence seriously.

As this frustrating stalemate persisted, Canadian officials moved from imaging various cooperative scenarios that might play out with India to putting forward a more stark set of policy options.

One policy approach was appreciated from the outset to be unlikely—that India would wave immunity for its diplomats in Canada who were suspected of being involved in foreign interference, and allow the RCMP to interrogate them.

A second would have required a significant change of front on the part of India. The Canadian demand would be for India to hold itself accountable, put the operations of the proxy Bishnoi gang on ice, make a public statement that it would conduct an investigation into the Canadian claims, voluntarily recall its offending diplomats from Canada, and agree to a “high-level” dialogue on counter-terrorism. The last point was seen as a concession and meant as bait.

If the Indian government wouldn’t play ball on this second option, then Canadian officials would opt for what they called the “unilateral” play—a combination of an RCMP public announcement on what it had learned about the extent and criminal nature of Indian foreign interference in Canada, combined with the expulsion of Indian diplomats. 

We all know what went down—unilateral hardball.

But how did we get there?  This is where testimony at the Public Safety committee was truly fascinating.

There were three drivers—mounting frustration with India’s denials and refusal to cooperate; growing fears on the part of the RCMP that bad things were about to escalate on Canadian soil and that their ability to protect Canadians was in jeopardy; and the Indian government’s ongoing disinformation campaign of reverse blame.

Frustration. Imagine this. The RCMP deputy commissioner for federal policing/ national security , Mark Flynn, made two recent attempts to meet with his Indian law enforcement counterparts to get some movement.  Plans for the first meeting were scuttled when the Indian Government refused him a visa.  Plans for a second meeting involved travel to Washington on October 10, 2024, where an Indian government official simply failed to show up. He became the man with the wheelie suitcase, but not much more.

On the back of those calculated and insulting rebuffs, a last-minute plan was concocted to have a trio of Canadians senior officials—Flynn, Natalie Drouin and David Morrison, travel to Singapore at short notice on October 12, 2024, to hold one final, make-or-break meeting with the Indian National Security Adviser.  That’s a long trip.  It yielded nothing, beyond a broken promise. The Canadian officials thought that there had been an agreed decision to take a pause, keep the meeting confidential and reconvene on October 14. Instead, Indian officials leaked the talks, maintained their old line—nothing to see here--and showed no interest in an October 14 meeting.

Diplomatic options exhausted. Rush back home. RCMP press conference, expulsions, the “unilateral” option.” Call it the nuclear option (though an unfortunate choice of words with a nuclear power). It was never the preferred Canadian recourse. But Canadian officials felt backed into a corner. That’s also where India is, until it can figure a way out of its “plausible deniability” approach.  Sooner or later plausible deniability about covert operations will fail you, and the Modi government is finding this out. (See my previous substack column: “Murder Inc Knows no Borders, October 19, 2024:

https://wesleywark.substack.com/p/murder-inc-knows-no-borders

If diplomacy is chess, the positions are bad.  The outlook bleak. But its India’s move.

Much of this message went missing in one prominent story, delivered by the Globe and Mail’s Ottawa Bureau chief, Bob Fife. ^[2] Here, some fact-checking is in order. (I hope this doesn’t become my life’s un-renumerated task).

The original headline of his piece, as first published online, was “Top Officials admit leaking details on India foreign interference with Washington Post that were not shared with Canadians.”  Some more cautious headline writer at Globe HQ changed the title in the print edition front-page story on October 30, to “Official admits she told US paper details of India’s interference not shared with public.”  Note what fell to the cutting room floor: “admit leaking details…” News flash to Globe—you might want to go back and change the title of the online version, still hanging out there.

Fife’s gonzo lead paragraph, eyeball pinning stuff, stayed true to the original headline. It stated:

“Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s national security and intelligence adviser has confirmed she leaked sensitive information about the Indian government’ s alleged role in murder, extortion and coercion to the Washington Post that was not shared with the Canada public.”

Fact-check. What the NSIA, Mme. Drouin, confirmed was that she and Mr. Morrison gave a briefing on background to Washington Post reporters on October 13. This was not a “leak” in the understood sense of the term as an unauthorized disclosure of classified information, but was described by Mme. Drouin as part of a communications plan to bring to an international audience through the Washington Post and a trusted U.S. journalist some aspects about what the Canadian government knew about Indian government’s foreign interference in Canada. The background brief was in part motivated by a desire to get ahead of Indian disinformation, which Canadian officials were clearly tiring of. Can’t blame them. But the better alternative might haver been a pooled background brief to include Canadian media reps. (The then NSIA, Daniel Jean had tried this back in 2018 during the Prime Minister’s disastrous trip to India, with semi-disastrous results, so maybe there was a collective bad memory at play).

Mme. Drouin also confirmed to the committee that no classified intelligence was disclosed; something also confirmed by the RCMP Commissioner. So, the only part of the Fife lead that passes fact-checking is that the information was not shared with the Canadian public, though the Canadian public were to learn a great deal about Indian FI through the RCMP press conference on October 14 (the same day that the Washington Post published their article using the Canadian background briefing in part)  and the subsequent press conference that followed the RCMP announcement, by the Prime Minister, the Minister of Public Safety and the Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Next up. Fife’s second paragraph stated:

“The leak from Nathalie Drouin and David Morrison, deputy minister of foreign affairs, accused India’s powerful Home Affairs Minister Amit Shah of directing violent operations from New Delhi.”

Fact check. Drouin and Morrison did not provide the name of Amit Shah to the Washington Post during their background briefing. The WAPO reporters, Greg Miller and Gerry Shih, clever people, uncovered that name from their own sources. They asked David Morrison to “confirm” that Shah was the senior Government Minister involved in Indian FI in Canada. WAPO had the name, Morrison confirmed.  Is this a distinction without a difference? No. WAPO was clearly going to publish the name on the basis of their own sources and did not indicate in their report that Morrison had confirmed the identity of Shah.  All good journalistic practice. One can ask whether David Morrison made the right judgement call to confirm what the Washington Post knew, but in for a penny in for a pound.

A little further down in the Fife story, but staying on page 1 of the print edition, here’s another Pinocchio moment:

“The information given to the Washington Post included identifying not only Mr. Shah but also linking India to the slaying of Sikh activist Sukhdool Singh Gill, who was shot in Winnipeg on September 20, 2023.”

Fact check.  Fife implies that this information was provided by Drouin and Morrison to the WAPO. There is no evidence for this. The link to the murder of Gill was being openly reported in the Indian media and presumably came to the attention of the WAPO reporters through that means or via their own sources, or both.

Readers deserve better, but enough of that (for now).

Parliamentarians need to take their own step back from such reporting, and bring a more critical eye. Canadians should do so as well.

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^[1] House of Commons Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security (SECU), October 29, 2024; for the web cast (and eventually the transcript),go to: https://www.ourcommons.ca/Committees/en/SECU/Meetings

^[2] Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail, October 30, 2024, “Top officials admit leaking details on India foreign interference with Washington Post that were not shared with Canadians,” https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-india-foreign-interference-washington-post-canada/