Ottawa/New Delhi: Even as India and Canada have expelled six of each other’s diplomats over the killing of an Indo-Canadian Khalistani activist, Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Mélanie Joly has warned that the around 15 Indian diplomats still in the country “are clearly on notice” and need to respect Canadian law.
“They’re clearly on notice,” Joly said at a press conference in Montreal. “Six of them have been expelled, including the high commissioner in Ottawa. Others were mainly from Toronto and Vancouver.
“Clearly, we won’t tolerate any diplomats that are in contravention of the Vienna Convention,” CBC news reported.
Joly’s comments come days after the head of the Royal Canada Mounted Police accused the Indian government, its agents and diplomats of links to widespread criminal activity in Canada, including coercion, extortion and killings.
On Thursday, the Indian government denied working with criminals in Canada to target Sikh separatists.
Joly said the threat was real.
“There was definitely a threat and that’s exactly why the RCMP decided to take the extraordinary measure of making public the fact that Canadians were being intimidated, [were] victims of extortion or even [received] death threats because agents and diplomats from India were linked to these criminal actions,” Joly told a press conference in Montreal.
Asked whether more Indian diplomats could be expelled from Canada, Mélanie Joly said the government won’t tolerate any diplomats who contravene the Vienna Convention or put the lives of Canadians at risk. The Canadian government announced the expulsion of six Indian diplomats and consular officials on Monday.
Joly said that while Russia has targeted Germany and the United Kingdom with this kind of transnational repression, it’s never been seen before in Canada at this scale and the government “needed to stand firm on this issue.”
“We’ve never seen that in our history,” said Joly. “That level of transnational repression cannot happen on Canadian soil.”
Canada’s most recent High Commissioner to India Cameron MacKay said: “Some very serious red lines have been crossed and it’s for that reason that Canada has taken the strong diplomatic and law enforcement action that it has up to now,” he told CBC’s Power and Politics .
“The Indian government position up until now has been to deny and vilify Canada and to distract its domestic audience from the real facts of what’s been happening here. They do that by attacking Canada,” he claimed.
Repairing diplomatic relations with Canada is “not high” on India’s agenda right now, MacKay said, adding it will take a “good long while” before relations return to anything like normal. He said over the long run, Canada “does want a better relationship with India. There’s a lot we can and should be doing together.”
On October 14, in a tit-for-tat move, India announced it was expelling six Canadian diplomats, including the Acting and Deputy High Commissioners, even as it withdrew its own High Commissioner and five other diplomats from Ottawa, over the investigations into the killing of Indo-Canadian pro-Khalistani activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar last year.
The Canadian diplomats have been asked to leave India by or before 11:59 PM on Saturday, October 19, 2024.
India has also said that the Trudeau government has “not shared a shred of evidence” so far with New Delhi on PM Justin Trudeau’s allegations made in the Canadian parliament last year alleging an Indian hand in the killing of Nijjar.
