Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s announcement of a visit to India on February 27, 2026, with meetings scheduled in Mumbai and Delhi, represents one of the most significant diplomatic developments in the India-Canada bilateral relationship in several years. The visit, part of a three-nation Indo-Pacific tour covering India, Australia, and Japan, comes after an extended period of acute tension triggered by the June 2023 killing of Khalistani separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia, which the Canadian government under Justin Trudeau attributed to Indian government agents. The relationship had deteriorated to its lowest point in decades, with mutual expulsion of diplomats, suspension of trade negotiations, and intense public recrimination between the two governments.
The visit’s announcement follows a series of carefully managed confidence-building measures — including External Affairs Minister S. Jaishankar’s meeting with his Canadian counterpart Anita Anand in Munich, National Security Advisor Ajit Doval’s visit to Canada in early February 2026, and PM Modi’s meeting with Carney on the sidelines of the G7 summit in June 2025. Together, these represent a deliberate, graduated diplomatic rehabilitation that has significant implications for India’s trade, diaspora relations, and Indo-Pacific strategic positioning.
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Table of Contents
The Downward Spiral: Understanding the Context
Five Important Key Points
- The India-Canada relationship reached its nadir following PM Trudeau’s September 2023 statement in the Canadian Parliament alleging “credible allegations” of Indian government involvement in the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, which India categorically denied.
- Trade between India and Canada was approximately $9 billion in 2022-23, with negotiations for a Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) suspended following the diplomatic rupture.
- The trial of four individuals arrested in connection with the Nijjar killing is expected to begin in 2026, and the Canadian Attorney-General has reportedly requested court permission to suppress certain evidence on grounds of potential injury to international relations and national security.
- NSA Ajit Doval’s visit to Canada in early February 2026 — the first such high-level security dialogue in years — produced a “shared work-plan” for bilateral cooperation on national security and law enforcement, signalling a pragmatic desire to compartmentalise the Nijjar issue from the broader bilateral relationship.
- PM Carney’s visit will focus on trade partnership, energy cooperation (including fossil fuel and nuclear energy), critical minerals, AI, talent mobility, and defence, representing a comprehensive agenda that reflects both countries’ interest in economic diversification away from the United States.
The Trudeau-era tension with India was characterised by a fundamental mismatch in strategic priorities. For Canada, the Nijjar issue was a matter of sovereign integrity and the rule of law — a foreign government allegedly conducting an extrajudicial killing on Canadian soil was, in Ottawa’s framing, an intolerable violation of Canadian sovereignty. For India, Canada’s perceived tolerance of Khalistani separatist activity — including fundraising for secessionist causes, propaganda against India, and what India characterised as operational support for terrorist networks — was the foundational grievance that preceded and contextualised the Nijjar killing.
The change in Canadian government from Trudeau to Carney — whose Liberal Party won the January 2025 federal election — has facilitated a reset without either side explicitly conceding ground on the substantive issues in dispute. Carney, a former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor with a technocratic rather than partisan background, has adopted a more pragmatic foreign policy posture focused on economic diversification and trade partnership, which has created political space for diplomatic normalisation.
Strategic Rationale for India-Canada Engagement
From India’s perspective, the restoration of functional relations with Canada serves multiple strategic interests. Canada is home to approximately 1.8 million persons of Indian origin, the largest Indian diaspora community in any Western country by proportion, and the relationship between the two governments directly affects the interests of this community — in terms of immigration, education, business, and cultural ties. The deterioration of diplomatic relations had created practical difficulties for Indian students, workers, and businesses in Canada.
Trade and investment linkages are also substantial. Canada’s large reserves of critical minerals — including lithium, cobalt, nickel, and rare earth elements — are directly relevant to India’s electric vehicle and clean energy transition ambitions. The Carney visit’s emphasis on critical minerals cooperation reflects a recognition on both sides that supply chain diversification away from China-dominated mineral processing is a shared strategic interest.
Canada’s nuclear industry, particularly its CANDU reactor technology, has historical ties to India’s civilian nuclear programme. The potential for renewed cooperation in nuclear energy — civilian power generation being a key component of both countries’ long-term decarbonisation strategies — represents a significant area of bilateral opportunity that has been dormant during the period of diplomatic estrangement.
From Canada’s perspective, the imperative for trade diversification has become more acute in the context of the Trump administration’s tariff threats. With the United States representing approximately 75 percent of Canadian exports, the structural vulnerability of Canada’s trade position to American policy volatility has created a powerful incentive to accelerate engagement with the Indo-Pacific. India — as the world’s most populous country and fastest-growing major economy — is a natural candidate for deepened trade and investment ties.
The Nijjar Case: Compartmentalisation and Legal Proceedings
The most delicate element of the diplomatic reset is the management of the Nijjar case. The trial of four individuals arrested in connection with the killing is expected to begin in 2026, and its outcome will inevitably shape public and political narratives in Canada about India’s conduct. The Canadian Attorney-General’s reported request to suppress certain evidence on grounds of its potential to injure international relations and national security — understood to relate to intelligence-sharing arrangements and perhaps evidence of the operational linkages — signals that the Canadian government is managing the legal proceedings with diplomatic sensitivity.
India has consistently denied any government involvement in the Nijjar killing and has consistently characterised Nijjar as a terrorist — he was designated as such under India’s UAPA — and the organisations he was associated with as entities that actively promoted violent secessionism. This fundamental difference in the characterisation of Nijjar (victim of state violence in the Canadian framing; terrorist whose death the Indian government denies responsibility for) cannot be reconciled through diplomatic communications and will eventually have to be addressed through the legal process or the political acceptance of an unresolved disagreement.
The NSA-level agreement on a “shared work-plan” for national security and law enforcement cooperation is a pragmatic acknowledgement that both countries have ongoing security interests — in counter-terrorism, counter-narcotics, and cybersecurity — that can be advanced separately from the question of accountability for the Nijjar killing.
Implications for India’s Indo-Pacific Strategy
Carney’s inclusion of India alongside Australia and Japan in a single Indo-Pacific tour is symbolically significant. All three countries are Quad members, and the tour’s design reflects Canada’s desire to deepen its engagement with the Quad’s informal network of democracies with shared interests in a free and open Indo-Pacific. While Canada is not a Quad member and is unlikely to join formally given its existing alliance commitments through NATO and NORAD, its alignment with Quad-affiliated countries on trade and technology cooperation is consistent with a broader Western strategy of building resilient supply chains and technology partnerships across the Indo-Pacific.
For India, Canada’s engagement offers an additional partner in the diversification of critical minerals supply chains, AI governance frameworks, and clean energy technology that complements the relationships India has been building through I2U2 (India-Israel-UAE-US), the Mineral Security Partnership, and bilateral technology partnerships with the United States, Japan, and Australia.
Economic Dimensions: CEPA Negotiations and Trade Potential
PM Modi and PM Carney are expected to discuss the resumption of Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA) negotiations, which were suspended in 2023 following the diplomatic rupture. India has successfully concluded CEPAs with the UAE (2022), Australia (2022), and is in advanced negotiations with the UK, EU, Canada, and others. A Canada-India CEPA would cover goods, services, investment, intellectual property, and sustainable development, with particular significance in areas including pharmaceuticals, information technology, agriculture, financial services, and clean energy.
India’s interest in increasing trade to $30 billion by 2030 — double the current level — reflects an ambitious but achievable target given the complementarities between the two economies. Canadian pension funds, which manage over CAD $2 trillion in assets, have been significant investors in Indian infrastructure in the past and could be re-engaged as major capital sources for India’s infrastructure and renewable energy programmes.
Way Forward
The current diplomatic moment requires both countries to build institutional resilience into the bilateral relationship that makes it less vulnerable to single-issue disruptions of the kind seen in 2023–2024. This means establishing regular bilateral consultation mechanisms at ministerial and official levels, creating institutionalised frameworks for security cooperation that allow difficult conversations to be had without cascading into diplomatic crises, and developing the economic relationship to a depth and breadth that provides both governments with strong domestic constituencies for stable bilateral ties.
The Canadian diaspora of Indian origin — while internally diverse in its political views — broadly benefits from strong India-Canada relations and represents a natural constituency for sustained engagement across trade, education, culture, and security dimensions.
Relevance for UPSC and SSC Examinations
This topic is directly relevant to UPSC GS Paper 2 (India’s foreign policy, bilateral relationships, Indo-Pacific strategy, diaspora policy) and connects to GS Paper 3 (trade policy, critical minerals, clean energy). The India-Canada relationship and its connection to the Khalistan issue, India’s foreign policy doctrine of strategic autonomy, and the Quad framework are important examination themes.
For SSC, questions on India’s major bilateral relationships, important diplomatic developments, and India’s position in global multilateral frameworks are regularly featured in General Awareness sections. The resumption of India-Canada CEPA negotiations and Canada’s role in India’s critical minerals strategy are likely examination-relevant developments.