Canada’s new Combating Hate Act is not just another amendment to its Criminal Code. It is a belated admission that something has gone wrong in the name of tolerance and free speech.
For years, India has warned that a small but aggressive section of pro-Khalistan activists in Canada has misused democratic freedoms to glorify violence, intimidate communities, poison India-Canada relations and keep Punjab’s old wounds alive on foreign streets. For years, these concerns were dismissed as Indian overreaction, diplomatic irritation or domestic Canadian political inconvenience.
Now Canada has passed Bill C-9, strengthening laws against hate propaganda, intimidation and obstruction of access to places of worship, schools, community centres and other spaces used by identifiable groups. Officially, the law is not aimed at any one community. It protects temples, gurdwaras, mosques, churches, synagogues and community institutions. That is how a democracy should legislate.
But no one should miss the context in which many Indo-Canadian and Hindu groups have welcomed it: repeated demonstrations outside Hindu temples, violent imagery, intimidation of worshippers and public glorification of figures associated with terrorism.
This is exactly the danger I have been writing about in my earlier pieces on Canada and Khalistan. In “India-Canada Relations: Jagmeet Singh’s Exit Opens the Door,” I had argued that the end of the Trudeau-Jagmeet Singh phase had created a rare opening for a reset. In “From Discord to Diplomacy,” I wrote that such a reset could not be built on optics alone. It needed trust, intelligence cooperation and political honesty.
Later, in “CSIS Confirms Khalistani Extremism: A Wake-Up Call for India-Canada,” I argued that the issue had moved beyond Indian complaint. It had entered Canada’s own security vocabulary. In “K on Financial Steroids – Courtesy Kaneda,” I warned that extremism does not survive on slogans alone. It needs money, platforms, community capture and political indulgence.
Bill C-9 must be seen in that larger chain.
Canada is not doing India a favour.
Canada is protecting Canada.
The Air India Flight 182 bombing of 1985, the Kanishka tragedy, remains the worst terror attack in Canadian history. It killed 329 people, most of them Canadian citizens. That atrocity should have permanently settled one issue: extremism nurtured on Canadian soil does not remain someone else’s problem forever.
The issue is not Sikh assertion. It is not Sikh memory. It is not the demand for justice for 1984. These are legitimate subjects of history, politics and conscience. The wounds of 1984 cannot be healed by denial or selective memory.
But there is a line between remembering 1984 and glorifying assassins. There is a line between peaceful protest and intimidating worshippers. There is a line between political speech and displaying images of terrorists or floats celebrating the killing of Indira Gandhi and General A.S. Vaidya.
There is a line between asking for justice and poisoning young minds with hatred. Radicalisation of young minds who have just landed in Canadian soil fr education or for jobs is a matter of concern.
That line is what Canada has now tried to define in law.
Punjab paid in blood for the madness of the 1980s and 1990s. Sikhs suffered. Hindus suffered. Police families suffered. Farmers, traders and ordinary Punjabis suffered. Yet a section of the diaspora, on instructions of few agencies, romanticises that dark period from the safety of Canadian suburbs.
This is why the new law is welcome, but also why it will be judged only by enforcement. A law on paper is a press release. A law enforced fairly is policy.
If a group blocks access to a temple, gurdwara, mosque or synagogue, police must act. If a procession turns into terrorist glorification, the law must act. If intimidation is dressed up as activism, prosecutors must act. If one community’s place of worship is targeted in the name of another community’s grievance, the state cannot stand aside and call it multiculturalism.
At the same time, Canada must not overcorrect. Peaceful protest must remain protected. Political disagreement must remain protected. Religious debate must remain protected. Democracies are tested by speech they dislike.
But democracies also fail when they confuse liberty with license. Freedom of expression does not include the freedom to terrorise worshippers. Historical grievance does not include the right to celebrate murder.
One welcome correction in Bill C-9 is the distinction between the sacred swastika of Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions and the Nazi Hakenkreuz. This shows that one community’s trauma need not be addressed by insulting another community’s sacred symbol. Freedom of speech should not be mis-read and mis-used.
The larger question now is whether Canada will show the same clarity on Khalistani extremism. Hitherto, its flirtation with these elements only has burned its own house.
Canada cannot seek better ties with India on trade, students, investment and strategy while allowing its soil to become a theatre for anti-India intimidation. Nor should India frame this issue as Hindu versus Sikh. That is precisely the trap extremists, and their handlers want.
Canada has now accepted, at least in law, that free speech cannot become a shelter for terror glorification. The next test is whether it accepts this in practice.