Trudeau in India, Playing to Dressup
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The invitation, which was extended by Canada’s High Commissioner to India, is being rescinded after CBC News asked the Prime Minister’s Office about it.
“I can confirm that the High Commission is in the process of rescinding Mr. Atwal’s invitation,” said PMO spokeswoman Eleanore Catenaro in an email to CBC News.
His appearance at an official tour event could prove highly embarrassing for Trudeau, who has been at pains during his Indian trip to assure his hosts that Canada supports a united India and rejects violent extremism.
Atwal, who did not travel to India with the Trudeaus’ entourage, was convicted of the attempted murder of an Indian cabinet minister, Malkiat Singh Sidhu, on Vancouver Island in 1986.
At the time, he was a member of the International Sikh Youth Federation, banned as a terrorist group in Canada, the U.K., the U.S. and India.
He’s also been convicted in an automobile fraud case and was charged, but not convicted, in a 1985 near-fatal attack on Ujjal Dosanjh, an opponent of the Sikh separatist movement who later became premier of British Columbia.
Trudeau arrived in Mumbai Monday evening and stayed for a number of meetings on Tuesday before travelling to Amritsar and Delhi.
On Wednesday in Delhi, Trudeau firmly insisted that he rejects Sikh extremism.
It is not clear how Atwal got onto the guest lists at both the Mumbai and Delhi events.
The International Sikh Youth Federation was declared a terrorist organization by the Canadian government in the early 1980s.
Atwal was one of four men who ambushed and shot at Sidhu’s car on a rural road on Vancouver Island in 1986, badly wounding him.
More recently, the Insurance Corp. of British Columbia won a $28,000 judgment against Atwal over a stolen car ring involving Atwal’s son, Vik, and dozens of others.
Atwal has denied any involvement in the attack on Dosanjh, but admits his role in the attempt to assassinate Sidhu.
The Prime Minister’s Office said it would not comment on security matters.
Trudeau has been under pressure throughout his India tour to answer Indian concerns about Sikh separatism in Canada. Today, he was asked about the public display of “martyr” posters honouring Talwinder Parmar, the leader of the 1985 Air India bomb plot, which took 331 lives.
“I do not think we should ever be glorifying mass-murderers,” Trudeau said, “and I’m happy to condemn that.”
A provincial Liberal staffer in B.C. resigned after giving Atwal a ticket to attend the delivery of the provincial budget in 2012.
Justin Trudeau is ridiculed by Indians for his ‘fake, tacky and annoying’ wardrobe of traditional outfits – and finally dons a suit after criticism
Justin Trudeau has been ridiculed on social media by Indians for his ‘tacky’ and over the top outfit choices while on his first visit to their nation as Prime Minister.
While many praised his clothing during the first two days of his trip, patience was wearing thin by the time he attended a Bollywood gala on Tuesday night, before the tide turned against him on Wednesday.
Ministers, authors, journalists and ordinary Indians lined up to mock him on Wednesday, saying his wardrobe was ‘fake and annoying’.
Perhaps taking note of the criticism, the Canadian leader donned a suit on Thursday as he visited Jama Masjid, one of India’s largest mosques.
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Leading the criticism was Omar Abdullah, former chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, who tweeted on Wednesday saying Trudeau’s preening was ‘all just a bit much.’
‘We Indians do not dress like this every day sir, not even in Bollywood.’
Bhaavna Arora, a bestselling Indian author, also chimed in, accusing Trudeau of wearing ‘fancy dress’ and saying she found it ‘fake and annoying’.
Shekhar Gupta, founder of Indian newspaper ThePrint also mocked the Canadian Prime Minister, accusing him of ‘running a week-long “election campaign” in India in fancy dress.’
Kabir Taneja, an associate fellow at think-tank ORF and based in South Delhi, also took issue with Trudeau wearing traditional Sikh dress at the airport.
‘Bro Golden Temple is not at the airport,’ he wrote. ‘Have some chill.’
While Indian newspapers had initially praised Trudeau’s attempt to cross cultural boundaries with his outfits – describing the red kurta he wore on the first day of his visit as ‘resplendent’ and ‘festive’ – by Wednesday they lost patience as well.
‘Too flashy even for an Indian’, proclaimed Outlook India while The Print suggested that he looked like he was auditioning to be a model.
The tipping point seemed to have come the day before when Trudeau met the great and good of Bollywood, whose own looks arguably inspired some of his own.
But while the actors dressed down for the occasion, opting largely for black suits and shirts, Trudeau went all-out with a gaudy golden number.
India Today described the choice of clothing as ‘tacky’, suggesting it was insulting to his guests.
The paper wrote: ‘We understand that the Trudeaus do not understand Indian clothing as well as Indian dignitaries do, but for someone who’s been fond of wearing Indian kurtas even back home, it’s not wrong to expect a touch of class.’
It is not only Trudeau’s dress sense that has seen him come under fire on his India tour – he has also been snubbed by Indian politicians because of his past support for Sikh separatist groups.
When he arrived in New Dehli on Saturday, instead of being greeted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi he was instead welcomed by a junior agriculture minister.
While Modi’s office insisted there was no subtext to the move, the leader is usually on hand to greet world leader with a hug at the airport.
Trudeau’s trip has also been criticised back home for his lack of official engagements – just one in eight days – making it m
The atmosphere in this mid-west town is “aggressively White.” |
If I had to think of one sentence that captures how I feel about the contemporary attitudes of multicultism in North America today, it would have to be Al Pacino’s classic line from the Third Godfather film “just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.” No matter how many examples one can point to the current anti-White craziness in our universities, and how the next leftist absurdity seems to outdo the one that just went viral before it, I can never get used to how bad the situation has gotten, and how much it continues to deteriorate. What better way to demonstrate this than by highlighting my own first-hand experience in academia of how even a simple recollection of a state fair is somehow seen as “discriminatory”?
In a recent writing course I am enrolled in, the entirety of the seminar was a class discussion revolving around David Foster’s Wallace’s Ticket To The Fair(PDF), an article he wrote in 1994 for Harper’s Magazine. This article is about the perceived horrors Foster experienced in a typical rural midwestern town, while temporarily leaving vibrant New York. One particular passage in this article stood out not just to myself but to the rest of the class:
There’s an atmosphere in the room — not racist, but aggressively white. It’s hard to describe — the atmosphere is the same at a lot of rural Midwest events. It is not like a black person who came in would be ill treated; it’s more like it would just never occur to a black person to come here (Wallace, p. 49).
While I was flabbergasted at how another person could not just randomly degrade, but also infer nefarious motives upon the same group of people he is a part of (while also priding himself as a respected journalist), the rest of my fellow students seemed to be pleasantly astonished at how “progressive” Mr. Foster Wallace was for his time. They also took great satisfaction in how he disavowed the White culture of the rural Midwest for even existing, as was the case from one description where he illustrated what he perceived as unfair socio-political engineering by parents at the expense of their children:
Kids remarkable for a kind of classic Rockwellian USA averageness, the products of balanced diets, vigorous daily exertion, and solid GOP upbringings (Wallace, p. 43).
According to them, without going into specifics, the words of Foster Wallace’s account of the state fair were enlightening, an intelligent reminder for all those privileged (re:White people, no matter a White person’s possible low economic status or possible abundance of problems) that racism will never be truly exercised unless diversity is instilled ubiquitously in full fashion.
Overall, this seminar showcased to me once again the trifecta of harmful contemporary cultural narratives targeting North Americans of European descent. The first theme, frequently touted by the vast majority of academics, is that even if one puts the seemingly never ending blame for the atrocities of slavery and genocide committed by Whites (because it was only White people who ever did these acts, don’t you know?) aside, European descendants still have nothing to be proud of their ancestors.
Many university curriculums today put forth the notion that despite being from the nations that saw huge technological, scientific, and educational advances in the last few centuries, all Westerners really did was exploit cultures from all over the world. This was echoed in class discussions about midwestern farmers, from statements either implied or explicitly stated, that Western farmers learned their methods from non-Europeans.
The second theme, which is familiar pretty much to every White person today and has been routinely covered on this site in other articles, is the multifaceted ideal that mass migration must be maintained — in absence of even discussing possible negative effects in order for White people to avenge themselves for the sins of their kind in earlier eras. In the US, it is the African American slave trade that is systematically used as a club to instil a feeling of guilt that is both illogical and unfair, whereas in Canada it is the displacement of Aboriginal communities, used in a similar vein to push for more amounts of foreigners to come across our shores.
However, at the same time, to try to even be inviting to other cultures, as a White person, while still holding some pride of your own roots is still a form of quasi imperialism to the far left, and their idea is that instead White people should listen to those from other cultures, encourage them to foster their own communities, no matter how large they continue to grow. This is why it is such a repeated series of talking points from most academics, most members of the media, and most Hollywood A-list acting types; they must keep confessing their original sin of racism on behalf of their kind, otherwise they lose all the benefits afforded to them of being a symbol as ‘one of the good Whites.’
The final, and in my opinion, most insidious theme that ties the other two together, is the theme that ‘racism’ will never be truly eradicated unless the entirety of contributions derived from Western societies are. This is being done by tactically combining the never ending shaming of White people and their culture with the removal of European originating figures, symbols, and speech utterances, all under the guise of being inclusive, inoffensive, and, of course, diverse. If the same people who claim to be were really concerned about the feelings of groups of people who have been harmed by exploitative historical figures, why would they be supporting people like Fidel Castro and Joseph Stalin?
If they were really concerned with just making sure Canada remains a secular nation as inscribed in our constitution, why would they support Bill 103 when religious freedom is already protected by the state? It’s because it was never about removing religious practices and religious symbolism from Canada’s public squares, but rather only about removing those of a Western nature. It is why references of B.C. and A.D. from the Julian and Gregorian calendars have been removed, along with displays of crosses in certain areas. The fact that they continue to engage in erasing strategies like these, yet harp on the effects of acts our ancestors committed by citing how damaging taking away one’s culture out from under them can be without the smallest sense of irony, is demoralizing.
We students have no choice but to stand up and defend our Western heritage, otherwise we will have lost it all by the time we reach adulthood!
Published Monday, January 29, 2018 10:58AM EST
Last Updated Tuesday, January 30, 2018 7:42AM EST
Some foreign investors, particularly those from China, are taking advantage of Canadian loopholes to become ghost immigrants, according to David Lesperance, a tax and immigration consultant with Lesperance & Associates.
Lesperance cites one recent judge’s decision from a lawsuit in which the judge said Chinese millionaire Guoqing Fu bought multiple multi-million-dollar homes in Canada while claiming just $97 in worldwide income on his taxes. The judge’s 600-page ruling in the case was posted online earlier this month.
“That was really pushing the edge,” Lesperance told CTV’s Your Morning on Monday. He says the situation would have gone unnoticed if Fu’s family and his partners, the Xia family, had not turned on each other and exposed their activities in court.
“These were two parties…who fell out and decided to sue each other in civil court,” Lesperance said.
The judge’s ruling from the case indicates Fu “had a large and successful business in China,” yet he only claimed “a miniscule worldwide income of $97.11” on his Canadian income tax return, despite spending millions on three different homes. “This was an incredible assertion given the fact he owns one of the top 10 textile manufacturing and distribution companies, based in one of the biggest textile manufacturing centres of China,” the judge’s decision said.
Lesperance says wealthy foreigners are using these tactics to game the Canadian system because no one is investigating to verify that they’re actually physically living in Canada. He says the Canadian immigration system isn’t really looking at these people, and that the Canada Revenue Agency isn’t focused on them because it lacks the resources to do so.
A spokesperson for the CRA said it works with provincial and municipal governments to enforce local tax and principal residency laws.
“The government… is actively engaged in monitoring and addressing the overall health and stability of the housing market and financial system in Canada,” a spokesperson for the CRA told CTVNews.ca in a statement.
The CRA says it recovered $117.9 million by conducting 4,471 audits from April 2015 to September 2017 in B.C. It also recovered $331.2 million through 21,280 audits conducted over that same period in Ontario. The highest penalty was almost $2.5 million, according to the agency’s website.
“It is important to note that the mandate of the CRA is to administer the tax legislation provided by the Department of Finance,” the CRA spokesperson said, adding that issues of immigration fall under the mandate of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.
An IRCC spokesperson said the department is continually working to improve its systems to detect fraud.
“The government of Canada takes any kind of citizenship or immigration fraud seriously,” a spokesperson told CTVNews.ca in a statement. The spokesperson added that the IRCC works with the RCMP and the Canada Border Services agency to enforce the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act and its regulations, “including allegations of fraud.”
The IRCC points out that the CBSA is responsible for investigating suspected immigration fraud.
The CBSA has set up a hotline for reporting immigration or citizenship fraud.
Lesperance suggests foreign buyers are pulling off these schemes in Toronto, Vancouver and Montreal, where their homes are sitting empty despite high demand for housing in the area.
“While they are getting the benefits of Canadian permanent residence and citizenship, they are, like this gentleman, not contributing to the tax base,” Lesperance said. “They’re driving up house prices, they are denuding neighbourhoods of vibrancy and customers for local restaurants and businesses, and they’re not contributing to the tax base.”
Canada’s hottest markets have taken steps to curb this practice recently, by imposing foreign buyer taxes, as well as taxes on homes that sit vacant. Numbers released by Ontario in December show foreign home buying was down due to higher taxes in the latter part of the year.
Lesperance suggests the solution is for Revenue Canada to start cracking down on these individuals by auditing them – a process that is much easier to do now than it was 20 years ago because of social media and the internet.
“If they do that they will send a shock through this community,” he said. He suggests a wave of audits would force these investors to decide between paying their taxes in Canada or abandoning their pursuit of citizenship altogether.
Lesperance says this has been going on at least since the 1990s, when someone informed him about it by handing him what he calls a “scoundrel’s guide to circumventing the Immigration and Citizenship Act.”
Lesperance says the tactic is not isolated to one particular group.
“It’s not endemic to one particular group of immigrants,” Lesperance said. “It’s just endemic to immigrants who look at the situation and say, ‘It’s easy to cheat, I get all the benefits, the costs are low and they’re not chasing me.’
“And at the end of the day, you get citizenship.”