The Ninety Day Window

 

Canada Must Look Inward Before It Can Lead Outward

 

Dear friends,

 

The dust has settled. The photographs are posted or published. The communiqués have been issued. India’s Commerce Minister has returned to India. And Canada, having hosted the largest trade delegation India has ever dispatched to any country, now faces the only question that actually matters.

 

What happens next?

 

In May, we had asked: Is Canada ready? Today, the honest answer is not yet. But being ready is a choice. The ninety days between now and Prime Minister Carney’s Canada Investment Summit on September 14-15 in Toronto will be the most consequential window of opportunity in the Canada-India bilateral relationship. What Canada does during this short period will determine whether the momentum of May becomes the transformation of September or just another well photographed missed opportunity.

 

This letter is not a celebration. It is not a complaint. It is a map.

 

What the Delegation Told Us?

 

India’s Commerce Minister arrived in Canada with a schedule that ran the full bilateral spectrum. Minister Piyush Goyal met with the stakeholders from every relevant quarter – from the PMO and federal ministries, to sovereign wealth funds and major institutional investors, to trade associations and diaspora community organisations. The resolve was unmistakable. The urgency was real. From Ottawa to Toronto, this was not a courtesy tour. It was a statement of intent.

 

Five sectors showed serious, substantive engagement during the week: agri-food & CEPA progress, energy & critical minerals, technology & digital economy partnerships, financial services & capital market access, manufacturing and industrial investment. The signals across all five were encouraging. The people on the Indian side who showed up were decision makers – people who move capital and launch important projects.

 

CIF was in the room for several of those conversations. What we heard was real. What we saw was promising.

 

What we did not see, and what this letter is partly about, was enough of Canada in the room.

 

The Room That Canada Did Not Build

 

When given the opportunity, CIF convened fifty individuals in a single meeting. In that room were Canadians, most of them from the Indian diaspora, who have spent years constructing trade relationships, shipment by shipment, partnership by partnership, across the Canada-India corridor. Their combined active trade accounts for ten percent of all bilateral trade between the two countries.

 

Ten percent. In one room.

 

These same people were not on the radar of Global Affairs Canada. They were not in the rooms that Export Development Canada was working. They were not consulted, convened, or leveraged by the institutions whose explicit mandate is to build Canadian trade.

 

India’s Commerce Minister found time for the people who built the trade. Canada’s own institutions had not.

 

And then something happened that I want to describe plainly, because it deserves to be on the record.

 

India’s Commerce Minister, running the most packed bilateral trade schedule, carved out the time for our meeting. It was his last stop before the airport. Downtown Toronto to Pearson in evening peak traffic. He stayed. He interacted with the members. He listened and he spoke with the candour of someone who understood exactly the weight of what he was in the room for. Whether he missed his flight or made it by a margin, I will leave it unspoken. What I will not leave unspoken is what that act represented.

 

It represented a government and Minister that recognises where trade is actually built. Not in protocol meetings and prepared remarks, but in rooms with the people who have already done the work and who can do exponentially more if given the recognition and the tools.

 

Canada needs to learn that lesson. Urgently.

 

 

Our own Minister responsible for trade has not found time to meet with CIF since taking office, in spite of numerous requests. I say this not as a personal complaint but as a structural observation with direct consequences. The expertise, the relationships, the cultural fluency, and the decades of accumulated trust that Canada needs to compete in India already exist inside Canadian communities. They are sitting in the offices of people who built a billion-dollar trade corridor without a single EDC phone call. Ignoring that asset is not neutral. It is a choice and it is a costly one.

 

The constructive call to action is specific and achievable:

 

1. Global Affairs Canada and Export Development Canada must establish a formal, standing consultation mechanism with community connected trade organisations – not after summits, before them. The knowledge these communities hold is Canada’s most underutilised trade asset.

 

2. Canada’s Minister responsible for international trade must make regular, direct engagement with organisations like CIF a standing commitment; not a calendar aspiration. The Indian side does this. We should too.

 

3. The September Investment Summit must include a visible, substantive role for community built trade relationships not as colour or diversity optics, but as content. The people in that room two weeks ago belong at every table where Canada-India trade is envisioned and aspired.

 

 

The Ninety-Day Agenda: What Canada Must Fix Before September

 

Beyond recognition, there are three structural problems Canada must address before the September summit. They are not new problems. They are old problems that this extraordinary diplomatic moment has made impossible to ignore any longer.

 

A.  Tax and Cost of Doing Business -The Spreadsheet Canada Is Losing

 

Indian conglomerates and sovereign wealth funds making North American location decisions run spreadsheets before they issue press releases. On those spreadsheets right now, Canada is underperforming.

 

Canada’s combined federal and provincial corporate tax rate ranges from 23 to 31 percent depending on province and business type – sitting at the higher end of G7 comparators for large general corporations. Capital gains tax uncertainty has produced documented capital flight and talent loss. Compliance red tape cost Canadian businesses an estimated $51.5 billion in 2024 alone, with the average business spending 735 hours – thirty two working days – buried in regulatory paperwork. And for all the government’s emphasis on new business investment, Canada has been in what the Canadian Federation of Independent Business now formally calls an “entrepreneurial drought”: for six consecutive quarters, more businesses have closed than opened. In the second quarter of 2025, the business exit rate hit 5.6 percent while new business entries fell to 4.8 percent – the weakest startup activity Canada has seen after the pandemic years. 55% of current small business owners say they would not recommend starting a business today. 73% are not confident in the federal government’s economic direction.

 

These are not opposition talking points. They are Statistics Canada data and CFIB research. And they matter for the bilateral relationship because the domestic investment environment and the foreign investment environment are not separate systems. They are the same system. A country that cannot retain and grow its own entrepreneurial class will struggle to convince the world’s most ambitious investors that it is the right long-term home for capital.

 

The September Investment Summit must include a concrete, transparent, benchmarked tax competitiveness commitment. Not a review. Not a promise of a review. A commitment with timelines, metrics, and accountability. That announcement needs to be in preparation now – not in August.

 

B.  Agri-Food. Negotiate It Like the Strategic Pillar It Is

 

Canada is the world’s largest exporter of pulses. Since 2024, Canada has shipped over $1.3 billion worth of yellow peas and lentils to India alone. India is Canada’s single most important pulse export market. Historically India is the largest destination for Canadian lentils and, in 2024, the largest single market for Canadian peas. Canola is critical to India’s edible oil security. An emerging corridor in value added and processed food products – specialty ingredients, nutraceuticals, fortified pulse proteins – represents the next generation of bilateral trade that CEPA must enable, not merely accommodate.

 

Yet this corridor is under active pressure. India imposed a 30 percent tariff on peas of all origins in November 2025, and a 10 percent tariff on lentils. The CEPA agricultural chapters are the mechanism by which these pressures get resolved structurally rather than managed crisis by crisis. They must be negotiated with the same ambition Canada brings to LNG and critical minerals.

 

The ask is precise: CEPA’s agri-food chapters must not become the trade-off currency used to protect other sectoral interests at the negotiating table. Canadian farmers in Saskatchewan, Alberta, and Manitoba and the rural communities whose economic survival depends on the India market deserve to know that their government is negotiating for them with the same seriousness India’s Commerce Minister showed when he stayed for that meeting in Toronto.

 

C.  Indigenous Partnership. Canada’s Structural Advantage Nobody Is Selling

 

Canada has something no LNG or critical minerals competitor can credibly offer Indian investors: a developing but genuinely evolving framework for Indigenous partnerships in resource development that, when structured properly, produces durable social licence, faster regulatory clearance, reduced sovereign risk, and stronger long-term operating certainty.

 

Australia cannot say this. Qatar cannot say this. The United States cannot say this.

 

Canada can. And it should be saying it specifically and strategically to every Indian energy and infrastructure investor coming to the September summit. Projects developed in genuine partnership with Indigenous communities face measurably less legal exposure, move through regulatory processes with greater predictability, and carry lower long term reputational risk for institutional investors with Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) mandates. This is not a feel-good footnote. It is a hard commercial advantage that Canada has not yet learned to articulate as one.

 

CIF In June: The Breadth of What Bilateral Means

 

On International Day of Yoga, June 21st, CIF marked a milestone that belongs in this newsletter precisely because it sits outside the usual frame of trade diplomacy.

 

CIF & UHN (University Health Network) with support from All India Institute Of Ayurveda (AIIA) formalised a partnership with a plaque unveiling at UHN’s Rumsey Rehabilitation Centre in Toronto. Alongside it, CIF issued a formal policy call to the Premier of Ontario to regulate Yoga therapy as a recognised profession in the province.

 

I mention this not as a digression but as a statement of what the Canada-India relationship is at its deepest. It is wide enough and substantive enough to produce a uranium supply agreement and a Yoga therapy framework in the same month. Trade is not only goods and capital. It is the movement of knowledge, practice, and human wellbeing across borders. The institutions building this relationship – CIF among them – are doing so across the full spectrum of human life. That breadth is a strength. It is also a reminder that the people sitting around the bilateral table are not only financiers and negotiators. They are community builders. And they deserve to be recognised as such.

 

What September Must Deliver: CIF’s Public Commitments

 

CIF stated in May that we would report back on three specific outcomes from the Minster Goyal’s delegation visit. The honest assessment is that it is still early – the architecture of serious commitment is visible across all five sectors, but conversion to signed agreements and capital allocations is still underway. We will continue to watch and report.

 

What we can state clearly today is what September must produce. CIF is putting five specific, verifiable outcomes on the record as our standard for the Canada Investment Summit:

 

1. 1. Announced capital commitments with named sectors, timelines, and accountability mechanisms – not MoUs, not letters of intent. Signed commitments with names attached.

 

1. 1. A concrete, legislated regulatory reform signal at a minimum one approval process with a fixed, enforceable timeline publicly committed before the Summit doors open.

 

1. 1. A bilateral agri-food trade framework with named targets embedded in the CEPA negotiating mandate – plainly stated, not diplomatically vague.

 

1. 1. A public commitment to tax competitiveness reform benchmarked against G7 peers – with a timeline for delivery, not a promise to consider one.

 

1. A formal mechanism for community connected trade organisations to participate in Canada’s bilateral trade architecture – not as guests at the table, but as architects of what gets built there.

 

CIF will report against all five in the July newsletter. That is our commitment. It is also our standard – for ourselves and for the governments whose decisions will define this moment.

 

Ninety Days. No Excuses.

 

In Canada, summer has historically been the season when political momentum quietly dissipates. Files go quiet. The urgency that animated spring gets deferred to autumn. This summer cannot be that summer.

 

More than $1 trillion in foreign investment exited the Canadian economy between 2015 and 2024 in what RBC Economics has called the largest capital exodus in modern Canadian history. The September Investment Summit is Canada’s most visible attempt to reverse that trajectory. It will be watched by every investor who received an invitation and every government that is quietly competing for the same long-term capital.

 

In July, CIF will report on each of the five commitments stated above. No diplomatic hedging. No grading on a curve. Either the commitments were made or they were not. That accountability – stated in advance, reported on delivery – is how CIF earns its place at this table. And it is the standard we are asking Canada’s institutions to meet.

 

The window is open. Ninety days. Not a rehearsal.

 

Thank You!