Trade trumps diplomatic tensions in B.C. premier's India visit

Before landing place in republic of india for a six-day merchandise foreign mission, B.C. Premiere David Eby's main objective was to pack in as many meetings and garner as much interest in his province's resources as possible.

Less than a year ago, that would have seemed virtually impossible to achieve in a country that was deep into a tense diplomatic rift with Canada.  

"Without a doubt, there's huge interest in the mining activity in British Columbia,"  especially for critical minerals like nickel and copper, Eby said.

Both Canada and India are looking to diversify their trade partners in light of U.S President Donald Trump's steep tariffs on the two countries — and, in Canada's case, repeated sovereignty threats. 

India's exports to the U.S. Have been slapped with 50 per cent tariffs, half of which Trump has claimed is punishment for the South Asian country's purchases of discounted Russian crude oil. Meanwhile, B.C's softwood lumber industry is struggling under a 45 per cent duty. 

Making economic inroads is also tricky, given the reason behind the rupture in Canada-India ties: allegations from Ottawa that Indian government agents were involved in the extrajudicial killing of a Canadian Sikh activist. The criminal case is ongoing. 

However, Eby believes it's possible to both raise the issue of transnational repression, while also "entering discussions with trading partners where we may have active disagreements." 

During his whirlwind trip, the premier found that while Indian firms are closely watching the progress of B.C.'s liquefied natural gas projects, most of the enthusiasm was around buying raw materials to help transition to clean energy.

"The overwhelming message that I'm getting is that India wants to reduce its energy imports,” he said. Indian companies, he added, believe that involves moving to solar power and combining that with battery storage.

"So they need nickel, they need cobalt, they need lithium, and in terms of connecting all these different things, they need copper," he said. "Those are metals and minerals that can be produced in British Columbia and are being produced." 

He said he was struck by the sense of economic confidence from the executives with whom he spoke, in terms of future growth and the idea that it's "just full speed ahead" for India. 

Having recently moved into fourth place among the world’s economies and boasting consistent seven per cent economic growth, the country is being courted left and right. 

German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was in Delhi, too, the same week as Eby, also looking for investment and trade opportunities. European Union leaders will visit later this month for India's Republic Day celebrations and are widely expected to take the opportunity to sign a new trade deal. 

New Delhi has long embraced in its foreign policy the idea of strategic autonomy, or making independent decisions based on national interest instead of being tied to rigid alliances. To that end, it’s also recently clinched agreements with the U.K. And the United Arab Emirates. 

The premier's trip, a pared-down trade mission that brought along just a few staffers and Ravi Kahlon, his minister of jobs and economic growth, came barely two months after Ontario's trade minister Vic Fedeli visited the country, in a separate bid to drum up opportunities.

Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe also spoke at length with India's foreign minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar when the latter visited Canada in November. 

A month before that, Canada's foreign affairs minister Anita Anand was in India talking about how pragmatism and economic diplomacy were crucially important to both countries, as part of a concerted effort to repair their two-year rift. 

The relationship broke down into an acrimonious back-and-forth in September 2023, when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau accused India of playing a role in the killing of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar outside a gurdwara, a Sikh place of worship, in Surrey, B.C., in June that year. 

India dismissed the allegations as absurd and politically motivated. Ties further devolved a year later, as the countries expelled each other’s top diplomats. (They were reinstated last year.)

In the Nijjar case, four Indian nationals have been charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Canadian authorities are still investigating alleged transnational repression — the targeted silencing of a diaspora community — focusing on Sikhs in Canada. 

Who was Hardeep Singh Nijjar, the man India is accused of killing?

A small crowd, members of the activist group Sikhs for Justice, expressed displeasure over Eby's India trade mission in front of the B.C. Legislature in Victoria on Jan. 8. 

The premier said he was a "strong believer" that Canadian officials had to continue to raise concerns about transnational repression with Indian leaders, but that those conversations "should happen … federal government to federal government." 

"There's a criminal trial process going on," Eby said.  

"But also we need to make sure that we're protecting ourselves economically." 

The Canada-India thaw was initiated once Mark Carney was elected prime minister, after he swiftly invited his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, to the G7 meeting in Kananaskis, Alta., last June.

The repairing of ties between the two countries  “had its own momentum,” said Sanjay Ruparelia, professor of politics who holds the Jarislowsky Democracy Chair at Toronto Metropolitan University.  

"But clearly the threats posed by Donald Trump to both economies have pushed both to push this [process] faster," said Ruparelia. 

As Eby was in India, Canada's prime minister was in China, signing a tariff quota deal on electric vehicles and canola with Beijing. 

Ruparelia sees Ottawa's latest pragmatic actions on trade as borrowing from India's foreign policy playbook, even using specific language such as the term "variable geometry,” often described as a flexible approach to international co-operation. 

India's foreign minister Jaishankar has often promoted the concept, and it was the entire focus of an op-ed that Carney wrote for the Economist magazine in November. 

"It is not the kind of language we would have seen two years ago being used by a Canadian prime minister," Ruparelia said.

"That tells you just how much the world has changed for Canada," he said, as its leaders join other countries in trying to figure out how to deal with an unpredictable United States. 

Foreign correspondent

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