Meet Navjeet Singh, the subject of considerable discussion in the Manitoba legislature last week. Mr Singh is a Sikh -- they have to take off their turbans for mug shots -- who came to Canuckistan from India in 2020 as an international student.
At the notorious Singh School of Truck Driving in Brampton ON, he learned how to shut off the cab data recorder (like an airplane's "black box") and to doctor driving logs. In 2022 he got a work permit, and, still residing in Brampton, went to work for Diversity Transport Lines.
Mr Singh was behind the wheel of a semi when, in November of 2024, it collided with a car near the rural Manitoba town of Altona, killing a mother and daughter coming home from shopping.
The truck had run through a stop sign on a clear evening. Witnesses and wreckage indicated that it had been travelling at high speed. The Mounties went to the hospital to talk to Mr Singh, who was unimjured but (he said) too shaken up to provide a statement. He promised to come to the station for an interview the next day, and the cops, fearful of being called "racist", opted at that point not to lay charges.
Within a matter of hours Mr Singh had left both the hospital and, as it turns out, the Great No-longer-white North. He was charged in absentia with dangerous driving causing death, and was finally arrested last August at Toronto's Pearson International Airport after re-entering the country on an Ethiopian Airlines flight from India.
Mr Singh's lawyer told a Manitoba provincial court that he returned voluntarily to face justice... after eluding it for nine months. Counsel for the Crown suggested that the accused be locked in a closet from which the air could be sucked out through a straw [Ed., please factcheck that] and argued his release would "endanger public confidence in the justice system."
The presiding judge, keeping in mind the Trudeau dictum that "diversity is Canada's strength", granted bail anyway, on the strength of a C$7500 (= $5400 in real money) provided by another Singh. The judge also required Mr Singh to surrender his passport and driver's licence, to obviate the risk he would take another Indian vacation or resume his career.
Mr Singh faces other conditions, including a curfew and total ban on driving, the imposition of which gave rise to muffled guffaws in the well of the court, since it is well known that such orders are almost never enforced. Just last week Ontario Provincial Police pulled over a driver who had been driving at 144 km/h in a 100 km/h zone, only to find that his licence has been suspended for 40 years. The 60-year-old driver from Toronto had already been convicted of driving while suspended 20 times!
Just in case Mr Singh tries to do another bunk, airport personnel have been asked to be on the lookout for anyone named Singh, sporting a beard and a turban, trying to board a flight to India. Laughter is still echoing through the corridors of YWG and YYZ.
If you're ordering a ride from Uber, can you ask for a white, native-born driver? Wouldn't that be racist? 
