India and Canada signed a civil nuclear cooperation agreement on the sidelines of the G-20 Summit in Toronto late last month. In an e-mail interview, Ernie Regehr, a Centre for International Governance Innovation fellow, co-founder of Project Ploughshares, and adjunct associate professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at Conrad Grebel University College, explains broader India-Canada relations.
WPR: How would you characterize India-Canada bilateral relations, historically?
Ernie Regehr: India-Canada relations are remarkably modest considering the rather compelling circumstances that surround them. They share membership in the British Commonwealth. They are both politically resilient democracies. There are more than a million people of Indian descent in Canada. And both countries have impressive peacekeeping traditions. Yet, none of these factors generated the kind of relationship that was justifiably expected in the 1950s, when the friendship between Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent and Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, as well as the nuclear cooperation agreement they signed in 1955, symbolized the promise of things to come.
The trauma of India's 1974 test explosion of a nuclear device -- not only using spent fuel from a Canadian-supplied reactor but challenging the newly-minted Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) that Canada had championed -- placed a pervasive and ongoing pall over India-Canada relations.
WPR: What is the significance of this deal in terms of broader relations?
Regehr: Inasmuch as the fallout from a soured nuclear relationship was prominent in retarding India-Canada relations, the resumption of nuclear cooperation should spur new bilateral dynamics. Notwithstanding the proliferation implications of India's exemption from Nuclear Supplier Group guidelines and Canada's modification of its long-held policy against supplying states not bound by full-scope safeguards, the bilateral implications could be both economic and strategic.
The economic benefits are obvious. Canada's CANDU-based nuclear industry is in deep trouble, and India is really the only substantial prospect for technical cooperation, even if direct reactor sales to India remain a longshot. Uranium sales are sure to come, and overall economic cooperation is bound to advance -- indeed, it could hardly decline.
Strategically, Canada will look to India for support in Afghanistan, though Canada will have to be wary of inadvertently contributing to the already debilitating effects of India-Pakistan competition in that context. India's access to imported uranium for its civilian nuclear facilities creates the possibility -- and in Pakistan's view, the certainty -- of using more of its domestic supplies to accelerate production of fissile material for weapons purposes. Given the obvious need for Pakistani cooperation on Afghanistan, a policy of nuclear cooperation with India and non-cooperation with Pakistan will hardly simplify strategic dynamics.
WPR: What other areas of mutual interest or conflict could drive the relationship moving forward?
Regehr: Ironically, Canada and India could make common cause in nuclear disarmament diplomacy. India has been a rhetorical booster of "zero nuclear weapons," while insisting that the discriminatory NPT is not the vehicle through which to advance that objective. A proposed global nuclear weapons convention -- which received some reasonably prominent acknowledgment, if not outright endorsement, at the 2010 NPT Review Conference -- offers India a non-discriminatory vehicle for adding substance to its rhetoric. Collaboration between India and Canada, who have substantial and complementary nuclear competences, would benefit the related preparatory efforts -- on verification, export controls, warhead dismantlement, and developing more proliferation-resistant fuel cycle technologies and regulations, among other areas -- for such a convention.