E-Paper
Canadian officials visit India for high-level meetings as ties continue to improve
Canada's Speaker of the House and ministers will visit India, enhancing bilateral ties after tensions from past allegations.
As the Speaker of Canada’s House of Commons participates in a Commonwealth meeting in New Delhi starting Wednesday, he will be followed in quick succession by at least two Ministers who are expected to visit India in the coming weeks.
Speaker Francis Scarpaleggia will attend the three-day 28th Conference of Speakers and Presiding Officers of the Commonwealth.
Meanwhile, high-level Ministerial visits are expected in the early months of this year. Tim Hodgson, Canada’s Minister of Energy and Natural Resources, is expected to attend the India Energy Week Strategic Conference scheduled to be held in Goa from January 27 to 30, a person familiar with the matter informed the Hindustan Times.
Energy is among the sectors where India and Canada are looking at as part of the renewal of the bilateral relationship between the two countries. Hodgson is also likely to meet his Indian counterparts on the margins of the Goa event.
Expected to follow Hodgson to India is Canada’s Minister of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon. He is likely to be Canada’s representative at the AI Impact Summit to be held in New Delhi from February 16 to 20. He is also expected to hold bilateral meetings while at the summit, the person cited earlier said.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was invited to attend the summit but will instead travel to India later in the first quarter of this year, for his maiden bilateral visit to India.
The series of visits to India on the agenda for the early part of the year highlight the continuing process of enhancing ties between India and Canada. That process commenced after Carney invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Kananaskis in June last year, and the reset was consolidated as they held another bilateral meeting on the margins of the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Johannesburg in November. That meeting led to the two countries announcing fresh negotiations towards a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement or CEPA, and those talks are scheduled to begin in February after Canada completes its public consultations process by the end of this month.
The renewal in ties came after they had cratered following then Canadian PM Justin Trudeau’s statement in the House on September 18, 2023, that there were “credible allegations” of a potential link between Indian agents and the killing of pro-Khalistan figure Hardeep Sigh Nijjar in Surrey, British Columbia, three months earlier. India had dismissed those accusations as “absurd” and “motivated.”
