While the me­dia was agog some weeks ago about im­me­di­ate steps that the gov­ern­ment of Canada may take up to undo the dam­age done to the rep­u­ta­tion of the Sikh com­mu­nity in gen­eral and Sikh Cana­di­ans in par­tic­u­lar by the Pub­lic Safety Canada Re­port of 2018; there has been no of­fi­cial ac­tion in this re­gard.

With the World Sikh Or­gan­i­sa­tion, rep­re­sen­ta­tives of the Sikh com­mu­nity and Cana­dian Gur­d­waras met with Min­is­ter of Pub­lic Safety and Emer­gency Pre­pared­ness Ralph Goodale and im­pressed upon him the dis­tress caused to the Sikhs by the Pub­lic Safety Canada Re­port of 2018 which in­cluded for the first time,  “Sikh (Khal­is­tani) Ex­trem­ism” in Pub­lic Safety Canada’s 2018 Pub­lic Re­port on the Ter­ror­ism Threat to Canada, with­out pro­vid­ing any de­tails what­so­ever to prove the wild al­le­ga­tions.

The re­port has been widely crit­i­cized for us­ing lan­guage that un­fairly stig­ma­tizes en­tire re­li­gious com­mu­ni­ties. The in­clu­sion of “Sikh (Khal­is­tani) Ex­trem­ism” is of deep con­cern as the Re­port does not point to any cur­rent in­ci­dent of vi­o­lence or ter­ror­ism as­so­ci­ated with the Sikh com­mu­nity in Canada.

The WSO press state­ment con­firmed that Min­is­ter Goodale heard the con­cerns of the Sikh com­mu­nity and ex­pressed his in­ten­tion to ad­dress the con­cerns in an ap­pro­pri­ate man­ner.  “We look for­ward to an on­go­ing di­a­logue and timely res­o­lu­tion of this mat­ter.” said WSO coun­sel Bal­preet Singh.