Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was on Tuesday forced to cancel an in-person event with Indo-Canadian supporters of the Liberal Party in the province of British Columbia over security concerns after protesters gathered outside the event venue.
Nearly a hundred protesters gathered outside the Aria Banquet Hall in Surrey, a town in the metro Vancouver area, with a large population of Indo-Canadians, where the ruling Party had scheduled a fundraiser. The crowd shouted anti-Trudeau slogans and also hurled racial epithets at the attendees, many of whom were Sikh, according to a report from the Canadian Press news agency.’
Trudeau cancelled his in-person visit and instead addressed the gathering virtually, calling the incident an attack on the democratic rights of Canadians. Minister of national defence Anita Anand attended the fundraiser in person.
A spokesperson for the Surrey unit of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) Corporal Vanessa Munn told Canadian media that due to the “size and composition of the protest group and for the safety of everyone in attendance, a decision was made that it was not safe for the Prime Minister to attend the location”.
Addressing the matter on Wednesday during an unrelated fixture in Saskatoon, in the province of Saskatchewan, Trudeau said, “Last night in BC, hundreds of people…came out to exercise their democratic rights to support the political party that they believed in and were faced with harassment, racist insults, threats of violence.”
“The safety of Canadians choosing to make their voices heard in politics should never be in question as it was last night and as we’re increasingly seeing across the country.
“Nobody should feel endangered or harassed because of their support for one political party or another. And that’s something I think we all need to be vigilant about,” Trudeau said.
Reacting to the incident, Randeep Sarai, Liberal Party MP from Surrey Centre, said in a post on Twitter, “Although I fully support the right to protest, the consistent showcasing of racism and hate is unacceptable — especially in our own backyard.”
His colleague and MP from Surrey-Newton Sukh Dhaliwal tweeted that what happened was “pure racism and hate” and called it “unacceptable”.
Divisions in Canada have been particularly stark since the general elections last September, especially over mandates imposed by the government related to Covid-19 vaccines.
It was not clear why the protesters gathered in Surrey on Tuesday, but it was a reminder of the occupation of the Canadian capital of Ottawa in February by the so-called Freedom Convoy 2022, who were demonstrating against the vaccine mandate, which remains in place across the country despite provinces largely withdrawing their own Covid restrictions.
The occupation ended after Trudeau took the extreme action of imposing a state of emergency, which was withdrawn after nine days.
Trudeau faced noisy protests in Surrey while he was campaigning there in September for the elections, while an event in the town of Bolton in Ontario was cancelled in August due to the gathering of a large number of protesters. Angry protesters also threw gravel at him during a stop in London, Ontario, that September.
