Tara Singh Hayer, OBC (November 15, 1936–November 18, 1998) was a Sikh Canadian newspaper publisher who was murdered.
Hayer was born in Paddi Jagir, a small village in Punjab, India. He emigrated to Canada in 1970, where he worked as a miner, teacher, truck-driver, manager of a trucking firm, and journalist before establishing a community newspaper, the Indo-Canadian Times, in 1978.
Hayer initially supported a theocratic sectarian-based Sikh homeland called Khalistan in the Punjab region in India but after the continuous terrorist acts against non-Sikhs in Punjab and then the later bombing of Air India Flight 182, Hayer began to speak out against violence in the Sikh separatist movement.
In August 1988, he survived an attempt on his life that left him in a wheelchair.[1]
In 1992, he was honored with the Commemorative Medal for the 125th Anniversary of Canada and a Certificate of Appreciation from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP). Among his other awards, Mr. Hayer received the Journalist Award by the Municipality of Surrey for courageous and outstanding contribution to Punjabi Journalism in Canada, and the International Award of Distinction for Journalism from the International Association of Punjabi Authors and Artists. In 1995, he received the Order of British Columbia[2].
On October 15, 1995, Hayer gave an affidavit to the RCMP regarding a 1985 meeting in London, England in the offices of the Punjabi-language newspaper Desh Pardesh, where he overheard a conversation between Tarsem Singh Purewal, the editor of Desh Pardesh, and accused bomber Ajaib Singh Bagri. According to Hayer:
On January 24 of the same year, Purewal was killed near the offices of Desh Pardesh, leaving Hayer as the only other witness.
On November 18, 1998, Hayer was shot to death, execution-style, while getting out of his car in the garage of his home in Surrey. His statement is now inadmissible as evidence in court and was later cited as a reason why the suspects in the bombing were eventually acquitted in 2005.
In 1999, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression renamed its Press Freedom Award the "Tara Singh Hayer Press Freedom Award" in Hayer's honour. Each year, the award is given to a Canadian journalist who, through his or her work, has made an important contribution to reinforcing and promoting the principle of freedom of the press in Canada or elsewhere. In 2000 journalist Gordon Donaldson added Hayer to the Canadian News Hall of Fame. He was the first Canadian of neither English nor French origin to be added to the Hall.[4]
In Loss of Faith, a book written by Vancouver Sun reporter Kim Bolan, Bolan suggests that Hayer's murder might have preventable. Bolan argues that the RCMP ignored or bungled the numerous clues that suggested the 1988 attempt on his life was part of a larger conspiracy. Bolan also argues that the RCMP's attempts to penetrate radical Sikh organizations brought the police up “against powerful people with connections to the highest political levels in Canada.” The National Post noted that in December 1998, just a month after Hayer’s funeral, Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien appeared at a fundraising dinner attended by Ripudaman Singh Malik and various other Flight 182 suspects.[5]