India wants to buy any energy product it can from Canada and its officials are urging the federal government to streamline approvals for various projects so it can tap into new supplies to feed a rapidly growing country with relatively few natural resources of its own.
That’s the message India’s high commissioner to Canada, Dinesh Patnaik, relayed in an interview with CBC News before Prime Minister Mark Carney left for a five-day visit to the country. It’s a trip that will be laser-focused on cutting new business deals and getting negotiations for a free trade agreement underway as part of a push to diversify from the American market.
“On energy, there is an appetite which even Canada cannot fulfill and we are willing to buy whatever Canada is offering on crude, on LPG, on LNG,” Patnaik said, referring to oil and gas products.
Patnaik said turbocharging the trading relationship will help the two countries turn the page on years of bilateral bad blood.
Relations between the two countries have been frosty since former prime minister Justin Trudeau accused unnamed Indian agents of involvement in the 2023 killing of a Canadian Sikh separatist. India denies any involvement.
But things have improved markedly since Carney invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 in Alberta last year.
It was there that the two leaders agreed to pursue a comprehensive economic agreement that is expected to move a few steps closer to reality in the coming days as the two leaders come face-to-face again in Delhi.
“It’s going to all come together so energy can redefine our relationship completely. Up until now, what we have been doing is just a drop in the bucket,” Patnaik said.
That message was echoed by Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has long been an advocate for closer trade ties with the Indo-Pacific economic powerhouse given just how much energy and agricultural products his province has that India wants to buy.
“Politics aside, at the end of the day, we’ve had some challenges in those relationships over the course of the better part of the last decade under the previous prime minister,” said Moe.
“We have a prime minister now that is focused on advancing those trade relations.”
To that end, Patnaik said India is interested in getting its hands on a lot more Canadian uranium in particular to power its growing nuclear sector.
India operates 25 reactors with eight more under construction. The government there is targeting a tenfold increase in nuclear capacity from roughly 8.7 gigawatts now to 100 gigawatts by 2047 — and Canada, as the world’s second-largest uranium producer with huge proven high-grade deposits in Saskatchewan, could help achieve that ambition, Patnaik said.
“We are willing to take whatever,” the high commissioner said, adding Indian companies are open to ownership stakes in Canadian uranium mines and buying more of this country’s world-leading nuclear technology.
“Nuclear is a huge field in which we want to work together.”
Moe is hoping Carney can broker a uranium supply agreement with India — and it’s something a senior government official told CBC News could come about during this trip as Carney and Modi consider a series of memorandums of understanding.
A 10-year deal worth some $3 billion US is what’s under consideration on uranium, according to a Forbes report. An agreement would be a big boon for the prairie province and its largest uranium supplier, Cameco.
Patnaik said India doesn’t want to be a captive customer, dependent on a handful of energy suppliers.
Until recently, India bought much of its oil from Russia despite the ongoing war in Ukraine — something that angered U.S. President Donald Trump.
Trump levied huge tariffs on India — piling a 25 per cent tariff on top of the other “reciprocal” tariffs he already had in place on Indian products — and only lifted them earlier this month after Modi apparently agreed to stop relying on the Russian oil sector.
In exchange for tariff relief, India agreed to buy U.S. oil and U.S.-controlled Venezuelan exports instead, Trump said.
But, with wider U.S. trade talks on pause, Patnaik said India also wants Canadian oil to round out its supply.
“Given what’s happened geopolitically across the globe, we want to diversify our supply base,” he said. “The amount we need and the amount the world needs, no single country will be able to supply all of that.”
The trouble, Patnaik said, is so much Canadian oil is currently destined for a single customer: the U.S.
According to Canadian Energy Regulator data, approximately 93 per cent of Canada’s total crude oil exports were destined for the States in 2024. That puts Canadian oil companies — and the governments that depend on taxes and royalties from that sector — at a disadvantage because they sell their product at higher global prices.
Patnaik applauded Carney’s endorsement of a new oil pipeline to the Pacific, a project that, if built, will help break that dependence and feed more Canadian crude to other markets, mostly in Asia.
A B.C. export terminal would be a lot closer to India than the U.S. Gulf Coast, which is where India gets most of its Canadian crude now — a quirk of the North American market whereby a lot of Canadian oil, even oil destined for places overseas, flows through the U.S. given domestic pipeline constraints.
“You’re an energy superpower but you only supply one country,” Patnaik said.
“We would be your biggest client — I think that is possible in the near future. The perception from India was Canada was a difficult country, a more bureaucratic, over-regulated country,” he said.
With Carey at the helm now, “I think people trust him to be able to do much more,” he said.
As part of its drive to establish a cleaner energy system and reduce its reliance on coal, India is also looking to raise the share of gas in its energy mix to 15 per cent by 2030 from the present 6.2 per cent.
India, already the world’s fourth-largest buyer of LNG, is on the hunt for more supply to meet those ambitious transition targets.
With seven LNG export projects in various stages of development — including two Carney has already referred to the Major Projects Office for expedited approvals — Canada could become the suppler of choice for India and its more than 1.4 billion people.
Asked about India’s demand for more access to Canadian energy, Natural Resources Minister Tim Hodgson said Canada and India, as middle powers, need to draw closer together in the face of “hegemons” like the U.S. that are weaponizing economic integration — and part of that includes selling that country more of what it needs.
“The prime minister has said he would like us to double our trade with India by the end of the decade. I think there’s a willingness from India to do the same.
“I was quite frankly blown away by the positive reception we were getting in India when I was there a couple of weeks ago,” he said.
Sen. Peter Boehm, a former top diplomat who now chairs the Senate’s foreign affairs and international trade committee, said Carney’s trip has the potential to deliver huge opportunities for the Canadian economy now that the relationship has moved on from a “crisis management” phase.
“India needs a lot of energy. There’s a lot — a lot — of potential there,” Boehm said.
“Some 98 per cent of our energy is going to the United States and that’s uncertain right now in terms of continuity — branching out is the way to go.”
