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Prime Minister Mark Carney and India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Kananaskis, Alta., in June, 2025.Amber Bracken/Reuters
You might not remember the days when then-prime minister Justin Trudeau went to India to reset relations, but if you close your eyes, you might just be able to conjure an image of Mr. Trudeau in Bollywood outfits. That was in 2018.
Mr. Trudeau’s predecessor, Stephen Harper, announced free-trade talks with India’s prime minister in 2010. They never came close. The resets have been many, but results have been few.
Mostly, Canada-India relations have swung between comedy and tragedy.
Now as Prime Minister Mark Carney travels to India, he’s aiming for yet another reset. There is a sense that things might be different this time.
For years, India promised to strike trade agreements but rarely delivered. Now, in a changing world, it has finalized a deal with the European Union. It, too, wants to diversify amid U.S. President Donald Trump’s trade chaos. This time, Mr. Carney might be able to announce trade talks that could actually come to fruition.
“The history of Canada-India relations is one of many missed opportunities, roadblocks and mistrust,” said Vina Nadjibulla, vice-president of the non-profit Asia-Pacific Foundation. “But there’s also a lot of potential in the relationship.”
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Yet there’s still a question about Canada-India relations that remains unanswered. What are we to each other?
Reliable economic partners? Security allies? Friends? Wary trade opportunists and spy-versus-spy adversaries?
In Mr. Carney’s January speech in Davos, he said Canada will calibrate its international relationships “so that their depth reflects our values.”
Yet his visit to India is supposed to turn the page after Mr. Carney’s predecessor, Mr. Trudeau, accused agents of India of involvement in the killing of a Canadian citizen, Hardeep Singh Nijjar, in a Surrey, B.C., parking lot.
India has long expressed frustration that Canada doesn’t more aggressively police pro-Khalistan activists in the Sikh-Canadian community, who favour carving an independent country out of northern India.
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In 2024, the RCMP alleged that agents of the Indian government were involved in a broader series of crimes that suggest that frustration had morphed into transnational repression in Canada.
Mr. Carney hasn’t said much about those things, sidestepping them after he invited Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 summit in Kananaskis in June. The Indian government continues to reject the allegations. The two countries have created a law-enforcement dialogue.
The values calibration isn’t visible to the Canadian public.
Admittedly, Mr. Carney is putting trade and investment first, and that’s a priority Canadians understand. The Prime Minister didn’t talk about foreign interference on his January trip to China, either. But the India reset is supposed to be something more.
“This is not a limited recalibration, like we saw with China,” Ms. Nadjibulla said. “This is going to be an attempt of rebuilding a relationship that has many dimensions.”
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Certainly, the whole world is knocking on India’s door for its trade potential and its rising geopolitical importance. Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron visited and declared a “special global strategic partnership” with India.
But it’s worth considering what Canada’s relationship with India is, or could become. There have been so many missteps.
In the 1970s, Canada accused India of using its gifted nuclear technology to make a bomb. The failure of Canadian authorities to prevent the 1985 Air India bombing, which killed 329 people en route from Canada to London, England, left a persistent impression in India that Canada fails to police pro-Khalistani terrorists.
Mr. Trudeau’s 2018 visit was marred when his PMO put Jaspal Atwal, a man convicted of the 1986 attempted assassination of a Punjabi minister, on the guest list, and his national security adviser then suggested that it was part of an Indian intelligence plot to embarrass the PM. In fact, the RCMP had been warned, but missed the voicemail.
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Canadian prime ministers have often visited India and delivered speeches about shared values between two democracies. It didn’t impress the hosts.
“What do we mean to each other? We are economic opportunities to each other,” said Stephen Nagy, senior fellow with the MacDonald-Laurier Institute and professor at the International Christian University in Tokyo.
“We don’t really share values. We do share, I think, a geopolitical concern with China’s growing weight in the Indo-Pacific and what it means for our security.”
Ms. Nadjibulla argues Canada should seek a deeper a relationship – not as close as Canada’s relationship with France, but not as wary as that with China.
Certainly, there needs to be some attempt at reset. But as Mr. Carney joins the global scramble to build trade with India, it’s still not clear how far a recalibration can go.
