Canada’s deputy minister for foreign affairs Marta Morgan spoke with her Indian counterpart Foreign Secretary Vinay Mohan Kwatra on Thursday, capping a busy week of engagement between India and Canada that witnessed foreign office and trade discussions and established a potential course for greater bilateral dialogue later this month.
In a tweet, Morgan, the senior-most bureaucrat at Global Affairs Canada, the country’s foreign ministry, said they discussed “prosperity and stability in the Indo-Pacific region” as well as Ukraine, and global food security, and “deepening cooperation between our two democracies”.
That conversation could be the precursor of two high-profile meetings this month: Prime Minister Narendra Modi could meet his Canadian counterpart Justin Trudeau at either the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting or CHOGM in Kigali, Rwanda or the G7 Summit at Schloss Elmau, Germany, later this month. There is some doubt over Trudeau’s participation as he recently rested positive for Covid-19, but ahead of that the Canadian prime minister’s office had formally announced he will be attending both summits, as well as the Nato Summit in Madrid.
At a reception organised by the Canada India Foundation (CIF) in Toronto on Wednesday evening, India’s High Commissioner to Ottawa Ajay Bisaria said a meeting was likely but depended upon scheduled lining up.
Also likely is a meeting between External Affairs Minister S Jaishankar and Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly, though this too has yet to be confirmed.
But Canada’s Minister of International Trade International Trade, Export Promotion, Small Business and Economic Development Mary Ng and Commerce and Industry Minister Piyush Goyal held a nearly two-hour long meeting in Geneva, on the margins of the World Trade Organisation’s 12th Ministerial Conference or MC12 there.
She tweeted that the meeting was “part of our Early Progress Trade Agreement negotiations”.
Trudeau himself was expected to attend an event in Ottawa celebrating the ongoing 75th anniversary of India’s Independence on Tuesday but the coronavirus infection prevented him from doing so, though Joly was present as chief guest on his behalf and extended his greetings.
