Before landing in India for a six-day trade mission, BC Premier David Eby’s main objective was to gather as many meetings and drum up interest in his province’s resources as possible.
Less than a year later, in a country embroiled in a tense diplomatic rift with Canada, that seemed almost impossible to achieve.
“The goal was to hit the ground running, and we have,” he told CBC News in an interview in Mumbai.
“There’s no doubt there’s a lot of interest in mining in British Columbia,” especially for critical minerals like nickel and copper, Eby says.
Both Canada and India are looking to diversify their trading partners in the face of steep tariffs imposed by US President Donald Trump on the two countries — and, in Canada’s case, repeated sovereignty concerns.
India has been slapped with a 50 percent tariff on its exports to the US. Meanwhile, BC’s softwood lumber industry is struggling under a 45 percent duty.
“Russians have more access to the American market than British Columbians do now,” Eby told CBC.
It is difficult to make economic introspections, considering the cause of the break in relations between Canada and India: agents of the Indian government from Ottawa were involved in the extrajudicial killing of a Sikh activist in Canada. Criminal charges are pending.
However, EB believes that it is possible to raise the issue of oppression of both ethnic groups, adding that “we are starting a dialogue with the business partners where there may be active disputes.”
A view of India’s strategy
While the prime minister’s whirlwind visit has seen Indian companies closely monitor the progress of BC’s liquefied natural gas projects, much of the interest has been in procuring raw materials to help transition to clean energy.
“The overwhelming message I’m getting is that India wants to reduce its energy imports,” he said. Indian companies believe it involves moving to solar power and combining that with battery storage.
“So they need nickel, they need cobalt, they need lithium, they need copper in terms of connecting all these different things,” he said. “The metals and minerals that can be mined and are being mined in British Columbia.”
He said he was impressed with the sense of economic confidence from executives who spoke of future growth and the idea that India is “just going full speed ahead”.
The country is being pulled left and right as it has recently become the fourth largest economy in the world and has recorded a continuous economic growth of seven percent.
German Chancellor Friedrich Merz was also in Delhi, the same week as EB, also looking for investment and trade opportunities. EU leaders will visit India for Republic Day celebrations later this month and are widely expected to take the opportunity to sign a new trade deal.
In its foreign policy, New Delhi has been adopting the idea of strategic autonomy or making independent decisions based on national interests rather than being tied to strong alliances. To this end, it has recently reached an agreement with the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates.
How relationships are divided
The premier’s trip, a trade mission that brought a handful of staff and Jobs and Economic Development Minister Ravi Kahlon, came two months before Ontario Trade Minister Vic Fedelli visited the country in a separate bid to drum up opportunities.
Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe also held lengthy talks with Indian Foreign Minister Surahmaniam Jashankar during his visit to Canada in November.
A month before that, Canadian Foreign Minister Anita Anand visited India and spoke about how pragmatism and economic diplomacy are crucial for both countries as part of a concerted effort to mend their two-year-old rift.
The relationship He broke into chaos In September 2023, 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, BC, in June of that year.
India dismissed the allegations as frivolous and politically motivated. A year later, relations were further divided, with the countries expelling each other’s top diplomats. (they They are back. last year)
In the Nijar case, four Indian nationals were charged with first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. Canadian authorities are still investigating cross-border oppression — the silencing of the diaspora community — aimed at Sikhs in Canada.
Hardeep Singh Nijar was a devotee of Khalistan and president of a Sikh temple in Surrey, BC, where he worked as a plumber by day. The Indian government has labeled him a terrorist for years – a claim Nijar has repeatedly denied. So who was Nijar, and why did he think he was such a menace to India?
A handful of people, members of the Six for Justice activist group, protested the AB India trade mission in front of the BC Legislature in Victoria on January 8.
The prime minister said he was a “strong believer” that Canadian officials should raise concerns about transitional repression with Indian leaders, but said those discussions “need to happen … federal to federal.”
“Criminal proceedings are underway,” Eby said.
But we have to make sure that we are sustaining ourselves economically.
The effect of Trump’s tariffs
The Canada-India dynamic began after Mark Carney was elected prime minister and quickly invited his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, to the G7 summit in Kananaski, Alta., last June.
Sanjay Ruparelia, a politics professor who holds the Jarislovsky Chair in Democracy at Toronto Metropolitan University, said the mending of relations between the two countries “had its own momentum.”
“But obviously the threat that Donald Trump poses to both economies has pushed them both to push this[process]forward,” Ruparelia said.
While EB was in India, the Canadian Prime Minister was in China and signed a tariff quota agreement with Beijing on electric vehicles and canola.
Ruparelia sees Ottawa’s recent business moves as borrowing from India’s foreign policy playbook, even in language like the term “flexible geometry,” often described as a flexible approach to international cooperation.
India’s foreign minister Jaishankar often introduced the concept, and he was the general focus Carney wrote an op-ed for the Economist magazine In November.
“It’s not the kind of language we’d see used by a Canadian prime minister two years ago,” Ruparelia said.
“This tells you how much the world has changed for Canada,” he said, as the leaders joined other countries trying to figure out how to deal with an unexpected United States.