Jagmeet Singh needs to get it straight on the Air India bombing: Jonathan Kay

https://www.google.ca/amp/www.cbc.ca/amp/1.4362425

CBC News

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Fatah contacted Singh five years ago, and made inquiries very similar in tone to those that the new NDP leader faced on Power & Politics. And Singh's answers in 2012 were distressingly similar to those he delivered in 2017. "I asked MPP Jagmeet Singh whether he considered Rajoana a terrorist, and why he didn't mention this fact in his speech," Fatah wrote. "He refused to answer my question. I asked him if he supported the Khalistan [Sikh separatist] movement and got no answer."

Putting Singh on the spot

Fatah is, like Singh, a man of Punjabi heritage. And so, as compared with Milewski, it's a little bit more difficult to casually slap the racist label on him. It's also very difficult to slap that label on the Air India 182 Families' Association and its chair, Bal Gupta, who responded to Singh's Power & Politicsperformance by saying: "He should have disowned the glorification of terrorism, even suspected terrorism or promoters of terrorism." On the subject of Milewski, Gupta said, "I think [he] did a good job to put him on the spot."

Gupta's own wife Ramwati was one of the 329 victims — most of whom were Canadian — killed when Flight 182 blew up. When I read his words, and those of other Canadians whose lives are permanently scarred by what happened on June 23, 1985, it seems astonishing to me that when a would-be Canadian prime minister is asked fairly simple and predictable questions about the greatest terrorist attack in our nation's history, he bungles the answers badly and then suggests that the whole debacle was part of some racist gotcha.

I'm going to be charitable to the NDP and assume that Singh isn't actually a conspiracy theorist. He's just a leader who, for the usual crass partisan reasons, doesn't want to alienate a small sub-constituency within his base. But thanks to Milewski, that balancing act is unsustainable. And Singh now has a decision to make. Simply put: very few Canadians want to vote for a prime minister who tells politically convenient fairy tales about an epic act of mass murder.



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