New Canadian PM Mark Carney is a Technocrat, Will Want to Increase Trade With India

With the election of a new prime minister in Canada, there are hopes that relations between India and Canada will improve. Under Justin Trudeau, the previous one, ties had plummeted after he made allegations that India had a role in the killing of a Canadian citizen Hardeep Singh Nijjar.

“Trudeau had five Sikhs in his cabinet and was responding to diaspora politics," says veteran journalist Daniel Lak in a podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia. Lak was with Al Jazeera as the US and Canada correspondent and earlier had served in India, Pakistan and Nepal as a BBC correspondent.

He says Sikhs have been coming to Canada for over a century and most of them are here to make a life for themselves rather than get involved in what he calls ‘diaspora politics’. “They are 2% of the Canadian population and have established themselves in several sectors including transportation. “I get India’s anger,” he says, at the Indian insistence that supporters of Khalistan be restrained.