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Tasha Kheiriddin: In India, Carney might be being pragmatic, but principled?

Foreign interference is being practiced by both enemies and allies

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RIP Canada’s Indo-Pacific Strategy, we hardly knew you. As Prime Minister Mark Carney alights in Australia this week, fresh from a trade mission to India, the basic premise of the strategy — “to seize opportunities in the national interest of Canadians, while defending the values they hold dear” — has been junked in favour of realpolitik: doing business with countries other than the United States, even if their values don’t quite align with ours.

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Exhibit A: China. In 2022, the strategy described the Middle Kingdom as “an increasingly disruptive global power” whose rise was “enabled by the same international rules and norms that it now increasingly disregards.” In 2026, none of this has changed. However, Beijing has benefitted enormously from the aggressive and unpredictable behaviour of the United States, which in the past year has tariffed, threatened, and invaded other countries with impunity.

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Faced with this, Carney declared at Davos that Canada aims to be “both principled and pragmatic — principled in our commitment to fundamental values … and pragmatic … that not every partner will share all of our values.”

Carney’s remarks came a week after a high-profile visit to Beijing where he announced a “strategic partnership” with China. Xi Jinping’s government agreed to remove damaging agricultural tariffs, announcing last week that it would suspend tariffs on Canadian canola meal, peas, lobster and crab starting March 1. In return, Canada dropped our 100 per cent tariff on Chinese EVs, allowing the import of up to 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles at a most-favoured-nation tariff of 6.1 per cent.

Now we have Exhibit B, India. This week, Carney announced a $2.6-billion uranium supply deal and a possible free trade deal by year-end after a successful visit to New Delhi with Prime Minister Narendra Modi, as well as new openings for Indian students, who had seen their numbers plummet following Canada’s cutbacks to student visas and temporary workers.

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There is no question that Canada shares far more common values with India than with China, including respect for democracy and the rule of law. When it comes to choosing a key partner in the Indo Pacific, India comes out ahead. But that’s not to say that the country hasn’t engaged in activities that run foul of our, uh, principles.

Canada’s relationship with India famously went sideways in 2023 over accusations that “agents” of Modi’s government may have been behind the murder of a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. In 2026, fresh allegations of similar foreign interference surfaced just before Carney was set to take off for New Delhi. When asked about this, an unnamed senior Canadian official asserted that “If we believed that the government of India was actively interfering in the Canadian democratic process, we probably would not be taking this trip.”

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Note the use of the word “probably.” Not definitely. When Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand was asked to confirm these remarks, she said cryptically, “the words of the senior official are not words that I personally would use.” Public Safety Minister Gary Anandasangaree said, “There are certainly issues around safety and security of Canadians that we continue to engage in.” Carney then cancelled a press conference where questions were likely to arise, ostensibly because his meeting with Modi ran long and his flight to Australia couldn’t be delayed.

Given the new world order we find ourselves in, what are Canada’s options? Foreign interference is being practiced by both enemies and allies. Just two weeks ago, a report by the Montreal Institute for Global Security named China as a chief culprit of transnational repression in Canada. At the same time, American officials are cheering the notion of an independent Alberta and meeting with Alberta separatists. As for our foreign interference registry, it still has not seen the light of day, 18 months after Parliament approved it.

When it comes to trade and foreign affairs, we now live in the era of “pick your poison.” Carney’s passage to India is just par for the course.

Tasha Kheiriddin is Postmedia’s national politics columnist.

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