Oh dear, I fear this might be a very Trudeau-like epistle – full of apologies. The first one is the apology for that disrespectful title, but it struck me funny and I just had to stick with it.
The second apology is for any racist tone you might detect in the article. I honestly try not to be racist about Mr. Singh, but I’m afraid that if I’m 100% honest my first impression, gut-level reaction to Jagmeet Singh is coloured by some level of cultural aversion. I look at him and I see that turban and I think “God it must be hot and sweaty under all those wraps.” And I see that long beard and I think it’s messy and I’m just a tad put off.
So, then I step back and I advise myself in a firm tone of voice, to get over that and look at things objectively. Is Jagmeet Singh’s devotion to the Sikh religion really a problem that Canadians ought to consider before voting? And I’m afraid that I do, in fact, think it’s a problem for two somewhat related reasons.
The first is that Jagmeet Singh’s turban and his ceremonial dagger (the kirpan) signal his devotion to his Sikh culture connections. And those connections are not insignificant. In June of 2016, Singh proposed a Private Member’s bill in the Ontario Legislature to have the government of Ontario formally recognize the November 1984 state organized violence perpetrated against the Sikhs throughout India as a genocide. Singh’s motion was defeated, but bore fruit a year later when a Liberal MPP proposed a very similar bill and it was passed.
That was not the end of it. In April 2024, Singh posted a Facebook message that says “As we mark the end of Sikh Heritage, we must continue to put pressure on the Canadian government to formally recognize the #SikhGenocide…. If you are an activist and ready to join this movement text (a number was given) ” . In June 2024, on Instagram, he posted a message that promised “This November the NDP will seek official recognition of the 1984 Sikh Genocide in Canadian Parliament.” And indeed, on the NDP party website is form seeking signatures on a petition which Singh presented to Parliament on June 14th of this year. The government posted a detailed response to the petition which said, in part, “There have been multiple investigations into the events of 1984 appointed by several Indian governments. These have included two Commissions of Inquiry and eight Inquiry Committees since 1984….The legal determination of genocide must be done by a competent national or international court or tribunal, bearing in mind that the legal definition of genocide is precise and complex, as outlined in international treaties such as the Genocide Convention and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, to which Canada is party.” That response seems prudent to me. Why would Canada rush to judgement in advance of a finding by a responsible international tribunal?
I hold no brief for the Indian government in 1984. There seems to be no disputing the fact that thousands of Sikhs were killed in 1984 in pogroms after the assassination of Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards. But, do I care if we label it a genocide? Not a Goddamn bit. That bit of international name calling won’t bring back the dead. It will, however, further complicate the already strained relationships between Canada and India.
I recognize, of course, that the current government of India is not terribly admirable. As we all know, the Indian government stands accused of arranging assassinations of Canadian citizens on Canadian soil. In 2022, The Economist reported that “In an index of societal discrimination against minorities compiled by Bar Ilan University in Israel, India scores worse than Saudi Arabia and no better than Iran”. So, perhaps we’re happy not to be closely associated with the government of Narendra Modi. But that country is still a major trading partner, and might become either an important defence partner or a significant enemy in an increasingly hostile world. I may respect Mr. Singh’s individual position with respect to the government of India, but that doesn’t make it good international policy for Canada.
According to Wikipedia, Indo-Canadians make up about 5.1% of our population, of whom slightly more than a third are Sikhs. I have no objection to electing a prime minister from a minority slice of our population, but I would be concerned about his ability to separate Canada’s needs from those of the Indo-Sikh diaspora.
So politically, culturally, Singh is strongly influenced by Sikh interests. What about the religious aspect of being a Sikh? And in that question lies my second reason for concern about Singh’s Sikhism.
As regards Singh’s cultural Sikhism, I am troubled by the thought that I might be guilty of rationalizing my own racist response to his culture. I have no such reservations about my reaction to his religion. I have written three times in these articles that religion has no place in politics (In Praise of Secularism, March 2022, The Wrong Place for God, November 2023 and Why Christian Heritage Month is a Bad Idea, December 2023). In the November 2023 article, I wrote this: “When your political candidate tells you that they are a good upstanding Christian (Muslim, Sikh, Jew), challenge them. You should ask them to explain how that impacts policy. Ask them to assure you that religion plays no part in their political decision-making, and that they will rely on fact and data, not the Bible or the Koran, in making important decisions that can affect the direction of the country.
I have found little evidence that Singh is a deeply religious man. On the other hand, neither have I found any evidence that says he’s not. But the more you assure me that he is a devout peace-loving and observant Sikh, the more concerned I am. I want a secular leader, not a religious one.
I think that in deciding whether we vote for someone to be PM, we are influenced by three P’s – Personality, Performance and Policy. The foregoing tells you that there are aspects of him as a personality that bother me. Let’s have a look at those other two P’s, starting with performance.
As the NDP leader, I think Singh has performed remarkably well. He made day care, pharma care and dental care part of our political dialogue, and by virtue of the Supply and Confidence agreement, he kept them there. Although Poilievre and the Conservatives will argue that the NDP are complicit in keeping the evil Liberals in power, a reasonable person would argue that Singh kept the NDP out of an early election that they could little afford (NDP are never as well funded as the other major parties) and advanced his agenda to at least a point where it will be difficult to roll back the changes that he has forced the Trudeau government to bring about.
Singh speaks very well. He has a tendency to duck and dodge questions and answers some of them without getting to the meat of the question’s purpose, but in that he is no different from any other politician. He irritates me with his constant refrain that he wants the wealthy to pay their fair share. (Taxes aren’t fair or unfair. They’re effective or they’re not.) But fundamentally, I think you’d have to rate him as pretty effective in his current role.
And that brings us to policy, and the question of whether the country is ready for a full blast of NDP policies. The NDP have a published platform document with commitments and intentions on a broad range of issues. The document is 115 pages long, and I am going to resist the temptation to try to summarize it for you. It’s just too big.
It’s a very aspirational document – the NDP have always been the party to aspire to government support in every facet of our lives. They would like to bring us free pharmacare, free dental care, free post-secondary education, affordable day care, a guaranteed annual income, half a million new homes. A great many of their aims are things that I can sympathize with and support. Of course, the question becomes how will we pay for these additions to our social safety net? The final two pages of the 115 page platform document deal with the “who pays?” question. They assure us that “we will manage debt and deficits responsibly, borrowing when required, and moving to balance when it is prudent to do so… Canada’s long-run finances will be fiscally sustainable”. Specific tax proposals include:
- Increasing corporate taxes
- Increasing income tax rate for people earning more than $210K
- A wealth tax on people with greater than $10M assets
- Increasing capital gains tax vulnerability to 75% of capital gains
- 20% foreign buyer tax on real estate.
I might be a little bit concerned about that weak commitment to a balanced budget (only “when it is prudent”), but the rest doesn’t
bother me as much as it might have in the past. I think Joe Biden’s economic policies have demonstrated that increased government spending is not necessarily a bad thing. If the NDP get elected and if they resist the temptation to try to fulfill all their promises at once, they might succeed. But there are some policy positions that are disturbing.
Israel and Palestine – The NDP calls for Canada to “stop the selling of arms to Israel until the end of the illegal occupation.” I cannot live with this one. It’s a simple-minded and impractical approach to a very complex problem. I firmly believe that Israel needs to find a way to bring this conflict to a close, if only to prevent further erosion of international support for their position. But depriving Israel of arms means that we’re happy to see Israel overrun by their enemies. Who will stop Iran and Russia from supplying Hamas and Hezbollah? What happens if Israel’s enemies have arms and Israel doesn’t? In a Canada that is home to both Palestinians and Jews, we need to seek less judgemental and accusatory solutions to the problem. Did Jagmeet Singh forget that Hamas initiated this conflict and that Hamas is still perpetrating war crimes by holding Israeli civilians hostage?
Climate policy – The NDP has been a supporter of climate change policy, and their platform document calls for a more aggressive target (50% of 2005 emissions by 2030) than current government direction which is 40 to 45% in the same timeframe. But while the platform document affirms that NDP will continue with carbon pricing “while making it fairer” (whatever that means), Singh has more recently dropped his support for carbon pricing. He suggests that fighting climate change “can’t be done by letting working families bear the cost of climate change while big polluters make bigger and bigger profits.” I am very impatient with the argument that some-how we’re going to find a way to fight climate change, but without any costs that impact citizens. I tackled the carbon tax issue in March, and I noted then that “there’s no doubt that the whole basket of climate control measures imposes a cost on everybody…And since there’s nobody here but us chickens, I guess we’re going to pay.” Every politician in the country is claiming that they are eager to fight climate change and that they will find a way to do it that has zero impact on the consumer, and they are all full of shit. Can’t happen. Withdrawing his support for the carbon pricing program is simply Jagmeet Singh allowing political opportunism to overcome policy. I think his climate policy is pretty damn weak, and I believe that climate policy has to be, must absolutely be, a key issue in any future Canadian election.
Health Care – The NDP is the home of medicare, and it is not surprising to hear them advocating for improvements to the health care system. I can’t disagree with their goal. However, I am bothered by their paranoia surrounding private health care. Their platform document contains snippets like these: “Meanwhile, powerful people and companies who oppose public health care are continuing to quietly push for privatization, …. New Democrats believe that the federal government has a critical role to play in upholding and enforcing the Canada Health Act, especially against the creeping threat of privatization and user fees…. We will end private, for-profit long-term care.”
There is no solid basis for his persistent belief that government can and will organize a health service better than a private agency might. Our health care processes are ranked 9th out of 11 rich countries surveyed but 4th on per capita spending on health care. That data doesn’t argue persuasively that public management of health care is the be all and end all, does it? I looked at medical care in January of 2023, and surveyed how the best countries in the world are doing it. And the answer is that in top-performing nations, there is often a private-public mix in the delivery of health care services. I don’t care for Mr. Singh’s vociferous defence of public health care. It’s narrow minded. I’d rather hear him commit to establishing world best practices without deciding up front that he already knows what the best possible model is.
National defence – The NDP policy section on National Defence contains the following statements:
“We will ensure that funding supports our national defence and international commitments”. That sounds good, but it’s rather vague. Are you committed to getting defence spending above the NATO target of 2% of GDP or not? And if you are, what is the timeframe for that promise?
“In contracting for new military equipment, including ships and fighter jets, New Democrats will ensure maximum industrial benefits and jobs”. That sounds good, but it’s not. One of the great problems facing Canada’s military is that we are incredibly bad at getting a contract through the bureaucracy and issued to a defence supplier for execution. So, we wind up doing things like specifying a modification for a civilian helicopter so we can do the work in Quebec, and we wind up with a helicopter orphan – no-one else in the world is running or servicing the things. Perhaps that process did well for the aircraft industry in Canada, but it didn’t do well for the soldiers who might have to put their lives on the line. The process needs to be drastically simplified so that our military leadership can select from available options in the munitions marketplace and buy it quickly. Singh’s stance on tying jobs to defence contracts is a serious loser.
New Democrats oppose the privatization of services on Canadian Forces bases across the country. This sounds like the privatization paranoia in the health industry, and I have the same problem with it here. There is no good evidence that government bureaucracies can out-perform private industry in efficiency and effectiveness. If it turns out that Acme Laundry Services can effectively manage the laundry for an army base somewhere, why should we insist that we will hire and train a soldier to that? Shouldn’t we train the soldier to perform a core function like firing a gun or running a radar set? This is a long-standing policy of the NDP – that they are anti-corporation and anti-profit almost to the point of being anti-capitalist. I don’t think it’s a healthy mind-set. It closes down options before they are properly evaluated.
OK, that’s all the time I have for Mr. Singh. He seems like an intelligent and likeable guy who has performed well in his current role. I’m rather negative on his Sikh activism but maybe that’s just me being a racist and I should resist that tendency and try to look past the negatives that come with that. And the NDP have a comprehensive set of policies that would do good things for people who need a strong social safety net, but they also have policies on Israel, on climate control, on medicine and on national defence that are problematic. Finally, they have a “government first” mentally that would threaten to dramatically increase the size of government bureaucracy in Canada. My personal jury is out on this one. I might go here if the other two parties mess up badly, but only as a nervous second choice.