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India, Canada set to ‘reinvigorate’ negotiations on bilateral agreements to boost trade
After a couple of fallow years, India and Canada have set the stage to “reinvigorate” negotiations on two long-pending bilateral agreements aimed at boosting trade and investment.
After a couple of fallow years, India and Canada have set the stage to “reinvigorate” negotiations on two long-pending bilateral agreements aimed at boosting trade and investment.
India’s minister of state for commerce and industry Nirmala Sitharaman held a lengthy meeting with Canadian minister of international trade Chrystia Freeland in Toronto and those discussions focused on the Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement or CEPA and the Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement or FIPA.
Sitharaman is the first minister from the Modi government to visit Canada since the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assumed charge in Ottawa last November. But there will be added momentum to the process as finance minister Arun Jaitley is scheduled to hold a series of meetings in Toronto during a visit in early October.
As Freeland said during a joint interaction with the media: “We are really working now in an intense level and at the level of specifics, and a measure of the seriousness of our engagement is the fact we are having two such senior Indian economic ministers paying back-to-back visits to Canada.”
Sitharaman expressed the “wish” that the agreements may be concluded “at the earliest”, as she said, “We have given a clear mandate to our chief negotiators to get into detailed working and wipe out or iron out any differences that may exist or persist.”
Freeland pointed out she had been given a clear “mandate” by Trudeau to regard India as a “priority country for Canada.” As part of that effort, she had asked Canadian trade negotiators to travel to India this spring to “reactivate the negotiations, which they did”, she said.
While bilateral merchandise trade between the two countries increased by nearly 30% over the figure for 2014, to clock in at CA $8.3 billion in 2016, two-way investment flows totalled more than $4 billion at the end of 2015.
CEPA was expected to be signed by the end of 2013 and the two governments had hoped it would help boost bilateral trade to $15 billion by 2015. That never came to pass, partly as governments in both India and Canada changed in 2014 and 2015.
While the two ministers had met on the sidelines of international groupings such as OECD and WTO, this was a structured dialogue, which, Freeland said, was “not a protocol meeting” but “a practical working meeting.”
Sitharaman said it allowed both ministers to “see where the little gaps are that should be filled up. Sooner rather than later, we should be able to conclude both the agreements.”
