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As Mark Carney landed in Mumbai, India, he had one main job, clean up Justin Trudeau’s mess.

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You could apply that same line to so much of what Carney needs to do.

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Unfortunately, the new Liberal leader isn’t willing to jettison everything the old Liberal leader pushed and endorsed.

Thankfully, Carney is willing to move past the multiple failures of Trudeau when it comes to relations with India. As the world’s most populous democracy, as a fellow member of the Commonwealth of Nations, as a common law country, there is much reason to recommend stronger ties, especially trade ties, with India.

Thanks to anti-colonial tendencies following independence in 1947 and throughout the Cold War, India and Canada never developed the close relationship that should have existed – this despite the large Indian diaspora community in Canada going back decades.

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Over the past 30-40 years, however, ties have grown closer and prime minister Stephen Harper started a push towards a free trade deal between the two countries in 2012.

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Trudeau undid the progress Harper made with India

In the spring of 2015, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and then-prime minister Harper moved closer to a free trade deal.

Then October 2015 happened and Justin Trudeau replaced Stephen Harper as Canada’s PM. Trudeau was never one to put national interests above partisan political ones, so instead of pursuing free trade with India, he pursued votes in Canada by using Indian politics at home.

There was his famous 2018 visit to India with his tickle trunk of costumes that had Indian media rolling their eyes as Trudeau and his whole family tried hard to look like the stars of a Bollywood movie.

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On that same trip it was revealed that Trudeau invited a Canadian originally from India named Jaspal Atwal who had been convicted of the 1986 attempted murder of Punjab minister Malkiat Singh Sidhu while on a visit to Canada.

Atwal had been added to the Canadian delegation by a Liberal MP and cleared by Trudeau’s PMO to attend events with senior members of the India government.

During his time in office, Trudeau picked fights with India

After that, Trudeau picked fights with the PM Modi by involving himself in protests between the Indian government and farmers, something that was quickly resolved in India but remained a political issue in Canada.

Trudeau’s government also courted support from Khalistani separatist forces who seek to establish a separate Sikh homeland in the Punjab province of India.

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And for course, Trudeau famously accused India of murdering a Canadian citizen – though there are questions of how that citizenship happened – who was a leader in the Sikh separatist movement.

That last move broke ties between the two countries, and now Mark Carney is trying to get relations back on track.

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Carney’s government says no evidence of Indian foreign interference

During a background briefing for journalists ahead of Carney’s trip, a senior bureaucrat repeatedly said the Canadian government no longer believes the Indian government is involved in foreign interference in this country. That’s a claim that no one should believe, they clearly are, though not as bad as China, and if Carney is willing to make China a new strategic partner of Canada, then surely, we can move forward with India.

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When Harper and Modi signed their joint statement on trade and the economy in April 2015, there was one provincial premier in attendance – Saskatchewan’s Brad Wall. Today, his successor, Scott Moe, is on Mark Carney’s trade mission to India.

Supplying food, fuel and fertilizer, Saskatchewan is the leading province for exports from Canada to India, but Premier Moe says we are trailing other countries where we once led.

“I would say, from a trade perspective, that we’ve fallen behind a number of other countries around the world,” Moe told reporters the other day.

That includes on India’s interest in buying Canadian energy, something Trudeau wasn’t interested in providing. Despite that, an Indian official told CBC that his country is “willing to buy whatever Canada is offering on crude, on LPG, on LNG.”

Carney has a big job ahead of him in India and Canada has a big opportunity, so let’s hope for success.

blilley@postmedia.com

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