Canadian soldiers aren’t props for celebrities
By Andrew Philips / National Affairs
You can’t be too careful these days. With all the fake news, misinformation and AI-generated “deep fakes” out there, you can’t take anything at face value. You have to be on your guard.
Which is why when I saw a headline this week saying a federal minister had lobbied for 100 Canadian soldiers to act as “backdrops” for a concert by an Indian pop star, my first thought was it must be one of those fakes. Or perhaps someone’s idea of a joke.
But no. It turns out a minister in the Trudeau government, Harjit Sajjan, really did try to convince the military to supply soldiers to be, in effect, props for a performance in Vancouver by one of India’s most popular singers and actors, Diljit Dosanjh.
Sajjan, the minister of emergency preparedness and a former defence minister, sent the request to the current defence minister, Bill Blair. Blair apparently passed it on to whoever’s in charge of these things in the Canadian Armed Forces and fortunately sanity prevailed. The military replied that “this request would not be feasible due to the tight timeline and personnel availability.”
This is a story that might well just slip by, especially in the depths of summer when no one’s paying attention. But it shouldn’t. It underlines this government’s fundamental lack of seriousness on issues of national security and, just as bad, its habit of playing diaspora politics rather than focusing on the national interest.
Sajjan isn’t having any of this. After the Globe and Mail reported his request for soldiers, he didn’t apologize or back down. On the contrary. He defended the idea as “a good opportunity for the Canadian Armed Forces to engage with and expand connections to a diverse community of young Canadians.”
But this wasn’t an event with broad public connections like a Canada Day concert, a Grey Cup halftime show or a multicultural festival. It may well be appropriate for the military to have a presence at such events to, quite literally, show the flag.
This was a private, commercial concert by a very popular singer from another country. You might as well ask the air force to do a flyover at a Taylor Swift concert. The military, to state the obvious, isn’t there to serve as props for pop stars – however popular.
Now, it’s impossible to miss the fact that Dosanjh is a megastar who was born in Punjab and makes much of those origins. He’s hugely popular in India and is reaching out to other countries; his Vancouver event was reportedly the biggest Punjabi music concert ever outside India.
Does any of this escape the Liberals? Of course not. They’re acutely attuned to currents in diaspora communities, including those from India and especially Punjab. Sajjan himself was born in Punjab and is one of several ministers with origins in India. Nothing wrong with that – but there is something wrong with trying to use the military in a way that may bring political benefits.
Sajjan came under fire recently for telling the armed forces to mount a rescue operation for 225 Afghan Sikhs during the fall of Kabul in August 2021. The suggestion was that Sajjan, defence minister at the time, diverted resources from others desperate to get out before the Taliban took over.
In light of that you’d think he’d be extra cautious about doing anything else that might be interpreted as pandering to Punjabi-Canadian voters. But apparently not.
There’s a bit more spillover from all this. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself dropped in at another concert by Dosanjh in July at the Rogers Centre in Toronto. There Trudeau referred to Dosanjh as “a guy from Punjab.”
That sounds banal but given the tense state of relations between India and Canada, it created a minor storm. The national secretary of the ruling party in India, the BJP, accused Trudeau of “deliberate mischief through wordplay” by emphasizing Dosanjh’s Punjabi identity, rather than his Indian one.
If the government is serious about repairing relations with India, shouldn’t it avoid even small missteps that feed India’s narrative about Canada being a hotbed of Sikh separatism? Unless, of course, it prefers to play for partisan advantage.