So, will it be a learning experience, or is it a sign of things to come?
There’s no way to sugarcoat it. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s trip to India flirted pretty closely with complete disaster.
In the beginning, it looked as if the whole venture was going to run ashore on the shoals of Indian indifference. (Prime Minister Trudeau is probably now wishing that had been the overall outcome.)
While there was lots of style — plenty of public appearances and photo-ops (maybe too many) of Trudeau and his family in Indian garb — the substance seemed to have been left off the early agenda.
And that was before things started to go completely wrong, in what looked like a series of unforced errors.
For example, early on, Trudeau announced $1 billion in investment by Indian companies in Canada, but officials later had to backtrack and point out that only $250 million of that investment was actually in Canada, with the rest being money that Canadian companies are investing in India.
But that was only the beginning.
It looked very much like the entire trip was going from just being off the rails to full-fledged train wreck status.
Most notably, a Canadian parliamentarian added Jaspar Atwal to the guest list for a formal event hosted by the Canadian High Commission in India, with everyone failing, somehow, to notice that Atwal was allegedly a former member of an illegal Sikh separatist group who had been convicted of the attempted murder of an Indian cabinet minister on Vancouver Island in 1986.
It’s hard to believe that the Canadian government, aware of how sensitive the Indian government is about Sikh extremism, would not have done the background checks that would have disclosed Atwal’s history.
Later, a senior government official told reporters — after obtaining commitments not to be identified — that the Atwal invitation might in fact be a sort of sabotage by Indian politicians.
It looked very much like the entire trip was going from just being off the rails to full-fledged train wreck status.
In Trudeau’s defence, the trip ended on a much higher note than might have been expected, when his meeting with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Canada’s tough stand against Sikh terrorist groups, received good reviews.
All in all, though, this was not a prime minister, nor his office, on their “A” game.
Trudeau has been able to use photo-ops and his popularity to smooth over concerns about his relative political inexperience and his occasional apparent lack of depth.
The India trip proved image is not enough.
And that brings us back to the question at the very beginning of this editorial: will the prime minister and his officials take the necessary time to dissect what went wrong, and try to ensure that sort of thing doesn’t happen again, or will they simply hope that the disorder in other federal parties continues, and that Trudeau’s personal style is enough to weather the storm?
Let’s hope it’s the former.
