Amid the much more serious accusation that India committed an assassination on Canadian soil, a Trudeau government minister didn’t immediately deny this week that India had something to do with the breakdown of Canada’s official VIP jet in New Delhi.
At the close of the G20 summit in India earlier this month, the Canadian delegation was stranded for 24 hours as the result of a technical malfunction on CanForce One, the RCAF CC-150 Polaris used to take the prime minister on overseas trips.
When Defence Minister Bill Blair was later asked by reporters if the breakdown was a result of “sabotage,” he gave a non-committal answer.
“I’m not going to comment on that,” said Blair. “There are, there are obviously ongoing concerns.”
This then prompted a quick clarification by Blair’s press secretary, Daniel Minden, who released a statement saying that Canada has “no reason” to believe it was sabotage, and the aircraft was most likely plagued by a “technical issue.”
The exchange was posted to social media by Steven Chase, an investigative reporter with the Globe and Mail.
Chase is a minor character in the ongoing India-Canada spat in that the Trudeau government has said they only went public with the assassination allegations on Monday in order to get ahead of a media report claiming as much.
Chase and the Globe’s Ottawa bureau chief, Robert Fife, were reportedly on the verge of publishing allegations that Canadian security agencies had signals intelligence showing a link between Indian diplomats and the June murder of Sikh nationalist Hardeep Singh Nijjar.
On Sept. 11, news first emerged that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the rest of Canada’s G20 delegation were unable to return home due to what the RCAF referred to as a “mechanical breakdown.”
“The problem involves a component that will have to be replaced,” read an email to Postmedia from DND spokesperson Andrew McKelvey. As mechanics were scrambled to fix the issue, a replacement CC-150 Polaris was dispatched from CFB Trenton.
As Canada waited for rescue, India reportedly offeredthem the use of Air India One, their country’s equivalent of CanForceOne, but the gesture was rejected.
Awkwardly, Trudeau became stranded in India immediately following a tense meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi in which the Canadian leader first accused his Indian counterpart of potentially overseeing an extrajudicial killing in British Columbia.
The accusation was originally omitted in an official Indian government account of the meeting, but included earlier this week in an official Indian denial of the Canadian allegations, raised by Trudeau in the House of Commons.
“Similar allegations were made by the Canadian Prime Minister to our Prime Minister, and were completely rejected,” read a Tuesday statement by India’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
As Indo-Canadian relations descended to record lows this week, Indian politicians have similarly been making no shortage of wild accusations against Canada. On Thursday, for instance, Indian MP Ravneet Singh Bittu claimed that Trudeau’s Liberal Party is funded in part by the “drug trade.”
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