’Baseless allegations…’: MEA reacts to PM Trudeau’s comments, downplays impact on India-Canada economic ties

Amid the rising tensions between India and Canada, the Ministry of External Affairs on Thursday said that India and Canada share very strong and vibrant economic ties and, hopefully, that the current crisis won't spoil that.

“To tell you very frankly, India-Canada ties, economic ties are very strong and vibrant. We have a large Indian diaspora in Canada.. which is a bridge we maintain strong people-to-people link with Canada. We hope this particular crisis precipitated by Trudeau govt's baseless allegations is how we look at relations going forward,” MEA spokesperson Randhir Jaiswal said during the weekly press briefing.

On India's stand on the diplomatic ties, he added, “We have made our position very clear on this matter; several press releases have been issued in the last two days putting out our position, which is very clear that since September 2023, the Canadian government has not shared any shred of information with us. Yesterday, again, after the public hearing, we issued a statement saying that Canada has levelled serious allegations but has so far not given any evidence to back it up.”

“I would allude to the statement made by the State Department; we would say that as far as the allegations are concerned, PM Trudeau's own admission yesterday would indicate the value of our stance on the allegations. We will naturally reject false imputations against our diplomats,” he said.

India believes that Canada doesn’t take violence seriously: PM Trudeau

Meanwhile, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Wednesday said India believes that Canada doesn’t take violence or, terrorism or incitement to hatred seriously.

“I think that is an extremely important question, and that is a question that actually we have repeatedly been asking the government of India to assist us on and to get to the bottom of the question of whether it is or could be rogue elements within the government or whether it was a more systemic, systematic endeavour for the government of India is exactly the kind of thing that for investigators here on the ground in Canada, it is somewhat removed from being able to uncover the internal machinations of the Indian government of who went wrong or who did this or who did that,” Trudeau said.

“That's why from the very beginning we have been asking for India, the Indian government to take these allegations seriously and proceed with their own investigations and work with us on figuring out exactly how these egregious violations of Canadian sovereignty actually happened,” he said.