WSO has asked the Canadian Minister of Public Safety to prove that Sikh extremism is a threat to Canada. This is a fight for facts, not semantics.

WSO and Liberal party Members of Parliament, including MP Randeep Sarai and NDP MP Matthew Dube, among others, have questioned the Public Safety Canada Report’s mention about Sikh extremism, forcing the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Ralph Goodale to publicly announced that his ministry would look into the wording of the reference to Sikhs and that there will not be any general maligning of a community.

Significantly, many other Sikh members of parliament are publicly silent on the issue. It is time they speak out. The Liberals should catalog how Sikh leaders have made their way to the top of Canadian politics and how this involvement has brought a new dimension to Sikh aspirations within Canada.

The World Sikh Organisation has written a missive to the minister, asking him the meaning of “some individuals in Canada continue to support Sikh (Khalistani) extremist ideologies and movements.” The letter by WSO president Mukhbir Singh forthrightly states, “We wish to be very clear- advocacy for Sikh human rights or Khalistan is not extremism and to suggest that it poses a danger to Canada is absolutely ludicrous.  There is nothing to suggest there is anything happening in Canada’s Sikh community except peaceful activism. We are deeply disappointed that our community has been stigmatized due what to appears to be foreign interference and pressure.”

As a run-up to the general elections in 2019, with the formidable Jagmeet Singh of NDP posing a national challenge to the Liberals, the party is shooting in the foot by annoying the Sikh electorate of the country. It will do them a lot of good politically to set the record straight by admitting a mistake and withdrawing all reference to Sikhs altogether from the 2018 Public Safety Canada report.

Is it just words as Minister Goodale has pointed out? As WSO and MP Randeep Sarai have stated it is beyond that. There has been no incident of mass violence in relation to Sikhs affecting Canadians in Canada or beyond the shores of the country. On the country there has been an exponential increase in peaceful and human rights activism, which should be music to the hears of all Canadians.

Soon after Public Safety Canada made public its 2018 Report on Terrorism Threat to Canada with reference to Sikh (Khalistani) terrorism, World Sikh News editorially commented that the Canadian government withdraw the report. And we were not the only ones. Canadian Members of Parliament, Sikh rights bodies within Canada led by the World Sikh Organisation, political bodies in Punjab and human activists expressed outrage at the first-time unsubstantiated reference in the report to Sikhs, with the only reference being that of the 1985 Air India bombing.

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The Sikh world joins the World Sikh Organisation of Canada in asking the Canadian minister, “Prove that Sikh extremism is a threat to Canada.” If not, do not reduce it to a semantic fight, show heart and withdraw the reference to Sikhs in toto.