NEW DELHI, Oct 12:
India and Canada will be holding a very important meeting here on October 14 at which they would take stock of their cooperation in the areas of security, defence, counter-terrorism, space and nuclear energy.
India is currently the third largest source country of immigrants to Canada, and the population of the Indo-Canadian community was today estimated to be over one million. The fact makes Canada as one of the countries which are high on the foreign policy priorities of India.
Called the Second-India Canada Strategic Dialogue, the October 14 meeting would try to chart out the course for cooperation between the two countries during the forthcoming year. Besides the areas named above, there will also be economic initiatives relating to the Government’s development programme agenda and how Canada can contribute to it.
India and Canada have extremely close cooperation in international fora and so there will be discussion on international issues as well as on regional issues of interest. The two countries have very deep cooperation in counter-terrorism as both are its sufferers. Canada announced its first counter-terrorism strategy named ‘Building Resilience Against Terrorism’ in 2012.
The Canadian Government has launched a project Kanishka to fund research in order to better understand, prevent and counter terrorism.
The launching of this project was in response to the Commission of Inquiry into the Investigation of the Bombing of Air India Flight 182. This flight was operating on the Montreal-Delhi route on June 23 , 1985 when the Boeing 747-237B named after Emperor Kanishka was blown up by a bomb and it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean south of Ireland.
A total of 329 people were killed, including 280 Canadians, making it one of the largest the largest mass killings in recent history.
The strategic dialogue will be co-chaired by External Affairs Minister Sushma Swaraj and her Canadian counterpart John Baird who is arriving here today.
This dialogue mechanism was agreed to between India and Canada during the visit of Prime Minister Stephen Harper in 2012. The first dialogue was held last year in Toronto in September. Other important agreements that happened during the visit included agreement on the Appropriate (Administrative) Arrangements of the Nuclear Cooperation Agreement. The Arrangement agreement establishes a Joint Committee between Canada and India to ensure ongoing discussions and information sharing in a number of areas. It provide the framework through which nuclear cooperation for peaceful purposes is conducted between the countries.
Besides, the two countries had inked the Canada-India Social Security Agreement, the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) on cooperation in Information and Communication Technologies and Electronics, and the MoU between York University and the Indian Defence Research and Development Organisation. India and Canada have committed to take their trade to 15 billion dollars by 2015. (PTI)
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