Sometimes it’s what we don’t say about something that tells the real story. This appears to be the case with Conservative Party of Canada Leader Pierre Poilievre’s silence following the RCMP’s shocking allegations Monday regarding the Indian government’s illegal activities. Poilievre is the most terminally ill political leader in Canadian history, and he rarely misses an opportunity to share his opinion on anything that involves Justin Trudeau. And yet he didn’t bother to say a word about the biggest political bombshell we’ve seen fall on Canada in a long time. Instead, he posted a generic Thanksgiving message on Twitter and called it a day.

But oh, what a day it was. As Global’s Mercedes Stephenson and Stewart Bell reported, “agents working at the Indian High Commission in Ottawa and the consulates in Vancouver and Toronto have been behind dozens of violent crimes across the country.” Canada targeting opponents of the Modi government. » These six Indian diplomats, including High Commissioner Sanjay Kumar Verma, were also allegedly involved in the plot to assassinate Sikh leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in June 2023. And as noted by Robert Fife and Marieke Walsh of the Globe and Mail in their own reporting, information about this campaign of state-sponsored violence in Canada was “shared with Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s national security adviser, Ajit Doval, and Home Minister, Amit Shah” .

The Conservative Party of Canada released a statement on Poilievre’s behalf – in which, of course, he blamed Justin Trudeau for everything – but Poilievre didn’t even see fit to share it with his supporters. Instead, they were laundered through the social media accounts of CCP MPs Michael Chong, Jasraj Singh Hallan and Tim Uppal. Poilievre didn’t bother to retweet them either.

Indeed, you would never have heard of the RCMP’s allegations against the Indian government if you got your news about Canadian politics from Poilievre’s feed, which featured tweets about a custom cabinet maker in Etobicoke, a group of Tae Kwan Do students in Brampton and he went door to door for a CCP candidate in Mississauga-Lakeshore. There’s no chance it was an accident.

Incidentally, his statement did not mention India’s well-documented efforts to interfere in Canadian elections, including the Conservative leadership race that Poilievre won after the disqualification of one of his main rivals, Patrick Brown. As the Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference learned, an October 2022 CSIS intelligence assessment concluded that “agents of the Indian government appear to have interfered in the leadership race of the Conservative Party (sic ) in 2022 by buying memberships from one candidate while undermining another.”

It is reasonable to assume that Indian government agents were not buying membership from Brampton Mayor Patrick Brown. As one member of Brown’s campaign team told Baaz, an online media outlet targeting the Sikh diaspora, “we knew that local pro-Modi organizations alongside Indian government actors were rallying against Brown’s campaign because they were concerned about the strong support we were receiving from Brown. the Sikh and Muslim communities. According to Baaz’s 2023 report, one of the MPs who sided with Brown was told by Indian government officials that they should withdraw their support for him. It turns out that two of them did so in early June.

There is no way to know whether the Indian government had anything to do with Brown’s possible disqualification from the race in July 2022. As Brown’s campaign argued in its official statement at the time, the decision to remove him was based on anonymous allegations that they were never involved. given the opportunity to evaluate – and seemed motivated by the desire to protect the favorite. “We were expecting a coronation for Pierre Poilievre”, specifies the press release. “When the final membership numbers came in, it became clear that Poilievre didn’t have the points to win this race.”

Generally speaking, I would classify this kind of manipulation under the rubric of “predictable sour grapes.” Losing campaigns always find creative ways to blame others for their loss, including those who are disqualified for breaking the rules. But Poilievre’s behavior since then, including his continued refusal to undergo the necessary security checks to be briefed on classified intelligence related to foreign interference – something every other party leader has done – continues to raise the same question : what is he so afraid of here?

If he wants to become Canada’s next prime minister, Poilievre must set the record straight once and for all about his relationship with the Indian government. He needs to be fully briefed on the issue of foreign interference in our elections, if only to better understand the full magnitude of what he may face one day. He needs to explain why he has been so unusually silent about the RCMP’s findings and why he seems to reflexively side with the Narendra Modi government rather than ours. And he must prove, once and for all, that he is willing to put Canada’s best interests ahead of his own.