Ottawa (Ontario) – The Hon. Pierre Poilievre, Leader of the Conservative Party of Canada and the Official Opposition, released the following statement on Sikh Heritage Month:

“In April, Canada celebrates Sikh Heritage Month – a time to recognize and learn about the incredible contributions that Sikhs have made to our country. From the early days of the 20th century, Sikhs have been making their way to Canada, bringing with them a wealth of history, culture and traditions that have enriched our land and made our country a more vibrant and inviting place.

“As they left the Land of the Five Rivers, travelling to Canadian shores to build new lives for themselves and their children, Sikhs brought to Canada the values at the heart of their faith – love, compassion, charity, and faithfulness. Many came with very little money or possessions. But as Sikhs have built what are now deep roots in Canada over many generations, these values have never faded and have sustained generations of future Sikh Canadians.

“Today, with nearly 800,000 Sikhs calling Canada their home, our country is proud to boast the largest Sikh diaspora population anywhere in the world. Sikhs have excelled in every sector and industry across our country and have made immense contributions to Canada’s growth as a nation. For the past 120 years, their gurdwaras have become beacons of light within their communities, offering a helping hand and hope to the downtrodden.

“On behalf of the Conservative Party of Canada, I’d like to extend my best wishes to the Sikh community as they prepare for the celebration of Vaisakhi later this month and offer my deepest thanks to Sikhs for their incredible contributions to our country. I encourage all Canadians to learn about the incredible history and heritage of Sikhism.”

Ottawa: Walmart Canada is not trying to profit from food inflation, president and CEOGonzalo Gebara told a parliamentary committee studying food inflation Monday evening.
Gebara told MPs that Walmart Canada’s gross profit rate for its food business declined last year, as did the company’s total operating profit in dollars. However, he declined to provide specific numbers for the private business, saying Walmart Canada has provided relevant financial information to the Competition Bureau.
MPs pressed Gebara on the fees and penalties that grocers charge suppliers. These fees are one of the topics being discussed as part of efforts to create a grocery code of conduct.
Gebara said Walmart Canada has received a draft of the code of conduct recently and is reviewing it.
“We will support any initiative that would bring better conditions and the ability to have more transparency in the whole chain,” he said.
Gebara’s comments before the committee followed a highly anticipated appearance by the leaders of Canada’s three biggest grocery chains on March 8.
The CEOs and presidents of Loblaw Cos. Ltd., Metro Inc. and Empire Co. Ltd. told the committee that food inflation is not being caused by profit-mongering, and insisted their margins on food have remained low.
Federal politicians have been calling for more transparency from the grocery industry as food price inflation has been significantly outpacing overall inflation.
Galen Weston, the billionaire chairman and president of Loblaw, told MPs it’s “impossible” that grocers could be causing food inflation, and said the company makes bigger profits off the non-food parts of its business such as apparel and pharmacy.
Grocery prices were up 10.6 per cent in February compared with a year ago, while overall inflation was 5.2 per cent.
During the past year, the Bank of Canada has repeatedly raised interest rates in an effort to quell inflation’s rampage.
A report last fall out of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University found that all three of the big grocery companies posted higher profits in the first half of 2022 compared with their average earnings over the past five years.
The March 8 meeting featured NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh repeatedly asking Weston, “How much profit is too much profit?”
Weston argued that “reasonable profitability is an important part of operating a successful business,” while earlier Empire president and CEO Michael Medline took a similar tack, saying, “It is folly to suggest that an unprofitable grocery business is somehow better for customers and better for shelf prices.”
At the March 8 meeting, the heads of Metro and Empire both questioned why MPs seemed to be excluding American retail giants like Walmart and Costco from their research into food inflation. The committee agreed unanimously to invite the leaders of those two retailers’ Canadian arms to speak before them.

With files from The Associated Press

Ottawa: Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault says Canada will take a “hard long look” at a call from global climate scientists to hit its long-term greenhouse gas emissions targets 10 years earlier than planned.
The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the call in a new report Monday warning the world is teetering dangerously close to missing its critical targets to keep global warming in check.
The panel’s previous reports have warned that global warming must be limited to less than 2 C, and as close to 1.5 C as possible.
United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says hitting that goal is going to mean rich countries like Canada get to net-zero emissions by 2040, not by the 2050 target that most have planned around.
Guilbeault says Canada will study the report but it can’t change its targets on a whim, because a target is meaningless without a realistic plan to reach it.
Canada has set at least eight different emissions targets since 1988, and has failed to meet any of them to date.

By Mia Rabson
The Canadian Press

Ottawa: A cross-section of Canadian MPs are calling out an Indian government crackdown in the state of Punjab, and those criticizing internet restrictions are receiving threatening responses online.
For at least three days, authorities in Punjab have restricted communications and the size of gatherings as authorities search for Sikh separatist leader Amritpal Singh. The manhunt comes a month after he led a violent storming of a police station, according to international media reports.
“As Canadian members of Parliament, we’re trying to ensure that there is some safety for Canadians who are visiting there,” Conservative deputy leader Tim Uppal said in an interview Monday.
“We raised this as a concern. And the response was quite harsh _ a number of threats in there as well, and by people who have a very large following.”
The Edmonton MP was among a handful of parliamentarians, across party lines, who have voiced their concerns online this week _ even as millions of people in Punjab were reportedly denied access to the internet.
His colleague, Conservative MP Jasraj Singh Hallan, who is the party’s high-profile finance critic, said he was “closely following the situation.”
The office of Foreign Affairs Minister Melanie Joly has not yet responded to a media request, and other Liberal ministers have not commented. But at least two Liberal MPs from Toronto-area ridings with large Sikh populations have publicly expressed worry.
“I am receiving calls from my residents and am deeply concerned,” Sonia Sidhu said on Twitter earlier this week. “I hope the situation is resolved soon (and) Canadians travelling to the region are able to connect with their families and friends in Canada.”
Greater Toronto Area MP Iqwinder Gaheer also said constituents had reached out with concern. “Civil rights and liberties should be maintained in a democracy,” Gaheer tweeted, in a message shared by another Liberal MP, Gary Anandasangaree.
For his part, NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh is urging Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to get on the phone with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi “to express concern regarding the suspension of civil liberties and the safety of Canadians abroad,” he wrote on Twitter.
India denied Singh a visitor visa a decade ago, in what many saw as a response to his advocacy for Sikhs. He wrote on Twitter that the communications restrictions echo a dark past in India.
“These draconian measures are unsettling for many given their historical use to execute extrajudicial killings and enforced disappearances during the 1984 Sikh Genocide,” Singh wrote.
He was referring to riots that Canada has not officially recognized as a genocide, in which roughly 3,000 Sikhs were killed following the assassination of former Indian prime minister Indira Gandhi by her two Sikh bodyguards.
The World Sikh Organization noted that many of the MPs who are raising concerns have faced abuse online from accounts that identify themselves as supporters of Modi.
One such account called on people to “teach (Gaheer) a lesson” while another suggested people “drag the likes of (Jagmeet Singh) to India and teach them a bit about Indian laws.”
The Indian high commission in Ottawa has not yet responded to a request for comment.
For decades, India has called out Canadian governments of various stripes in response to activities of Sikh separatists who want an independent country called Khalistan.
Ottawa has insisted that the idea isn’t part of Canada’s foreign policy and that free speech allows Canadians to advocate for various causes.
Meanwhile, the NDP has been pushing the Liberals to denounce India’s treatment of minorities, a year after Human Rights Watch called out Modi’s government for a “serious regression in human rights and constitutional protections.”
The Trudeau government announced its intention to form deeper ties with India last November as part of its Indo-Pacific strategy, and ministers are likely to visit India through this year as it hosts the G20 presidency.

By Dylan Robertson
The Canadian Press

Washington: U.S. President Joe Biden will spend two days in Canada beginning Thursday to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and speak to a joint session of Parliament, his first visit north of the border since taking the oath of office in 2021.
Visits to Canada have historically been a popular first foreign trip for new presidents _ Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump being the rare exceptions _ but COVID-19 intervened twice in the years since Biden’s inauguration to prevent one from happening.
Here are some of the issues the two leaders are likely to discuss.
Modernizing Norad: Until last month, the binational early-warning system known as the North American Aerospace Defence Command might have been best known for tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. But a February flurry of unidentified flying objects drifting through North American airspace, most notably what U.S. officials insist was a Chinese surveillance balloon, exposed what Norad commander Gen. Glen VanHerck described as a “domain awareness gap”: the archaic, Cold War-era system’s ability to track small, high-flying, slow-moving objects. Coupled with the brazen ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ongoing but largely opaque joint effort to upgrade Norad _ rarely mentioned in past Trudeau-Biden readouts _ is suddenly front and centre for both governments.
Helping Haiti: The list of foreign-policy hotspots around the world that instantly bring Canada to mind is a short one, but Haiti is surely near the top. And as Haiti has descended ever deeper into lawlessness in the wake of the 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moise, the need for military intervention has been growing _ and some senior U.S. officials have expressly name-checked Canada as the perfect country to lead the effort. Trudeau’s response has been diplomatic but firm: the crisis is best addressed from a distance. “Canada is elbows deep in terms of trying to help,” he said last month. “But we know from difficult experience that the best thing we can do to help is enable the Haitian leadership … to be driving their pathway out of this crisis.”
Mission-Critical-Minerals: No high-level conversation between the U.S. and Canada these days would be complete without talking about critical minerals, the 21st-century rocket fuel for the electric-vehicle revolution that Trudeau calls the “building blocks for the clean economy.” Canada has the minerals _ cobalt, lithium, magnesium and rare earth elements, among others _ and a strategy to develop them, but the industry is still in its infancy and the U.S. wants those minerals now. The issue has profound foreign-policy implications: China has long dominated the critical minerals supply chain, something the Biden administration is determined to change. “This really is one of the most transformative moments since the Industrial Revolution,” said Helaina Matza, the State Department’s deputy special co-ordinator for the G7’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. “We understand that we can’t do it alone.”
Water, water everywhere: Canada and the U.S. have been negotiating since 2018 to modernize the Columbia River Treaty, a 1961 agreement designed to protect a key cross-border watershed the size of Texas in the Pacific Northwest. Despite 15 separate rounds of talks, progress has been middling at best. Meanwhile, Canada is under U.S. pressure to allow the International Joint Commission _ the investigative arm of a separate 1909 boundary waters agreement _ to investigate toxic mining runoff in the B.C. Interior that Indigenous communities on both sides of the border say has been poisoning their lands and waters for years. Add to all of that the mounting pressure on Canada to supercharge efforts to extract and process critical minerals, and the plot promises to thicken.
Border blues: For what is probably the first time in two decades, Capitol Hill lawmakers are talking about a need to shore up American security along the Canada-U.S. border. That’s because there’s been an increase in the number of undocumented migrants entering the country via Canada _ and immigration hysteria is a popular political cudgel with Republicans. But Canada has more reason to be concerned: northbound irregular migration has become enough of a problem that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has publicly suggested renegotiating the Safe Third Country Agreement, the 2004 bilateral treaty that creates a loophole for would-be asylum seekers who can successfully sneak into either country. The U.S., however, is widely seen as having little appetite for doing so. It perhaps hasn’t helped matters that Canada has imposed new tax measures to discourage foreigners from owning real estate north of the border; some on Capitol Hill are pressing the Biden administration to demand an exemption.
A trade deal by any other name: Regardless of what the two leaders end up talking about, it will happen within the framework of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, known in Canada as CUSMA. The USMCA era of continental trade, which began in earnest in 2020, has not been without its hiccups, including disputes over U.S. access to Canada’s dairy market and the way the U.S. defines foreign automotive content. The Biden administration is also staunchly opposed to Canada’s plans for a digital services tax, which it considers a violation. The agreement is due to be reviewed in 2026, and a lot could happen _ especially on Capitol Hill and in the White House _ between now and then. It’s also worth noting that while it’s not covered by the trade deal, the softwood lumber dispute remains a perennial irritant. International Trade Minister Mary Ng met last week with industry leaders to discuss “unwarranted and illegal U.S. duties” on softwood lumber, vowing that a solution that protects Canadian jobs “is the only resolution that we will accept.”

By James McCarten
The Canadian Press