The shift in the global trend from trade in goods to trade in services, especially digital services has focused attention on the necessity of a modern and robust regulatory framework for it. The bilateral steps by India and Canada outlined in this paper can feed into current efforts by multilateral institutions to develop a universal framework for capturing services trade data.

Over the past decade, there has been a shift in global trade from trade in goods to trade in services. Unlike goods, services are intangible and consumed by the user directly, without intermediate supervision. Thus, the only way to ensure the quality of a service is to enforce standards on the service provider. This is the responsibility of domestic sector-specific regulatory institutions established by the government.

The Indian and Canadian regulatory systems have: mature regulators (telecommunications, financial services); disaggregated or immature regulators (education, health care, real estate); or no regulators (information technology [IT]); represented by their respective chambers of commerce on specific issues.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Akshay Mathur is former Director of Research, Gateway House.

Purvaja Modak is former Researcher, Geoeconomic Studies Programme, Gateway House.

Trade is important for both Canada and India. For Canada, as an industrialized economy endowed with enormous resource gifts but a small domestic market, trade is essential. Trade represents a large share of the economy and makes an important contribution to Canadians’ high standard of living. For India, while it is less dependent on trade due to a much larger domestic market, expanding exports and attracting investment are essential to sustain rapid economic growth, and to create jobs and economic prosperity for a large and growing labour force.

Trade is changing. Technology has been the principal driver of trade growth, through improvements in production, transportation and communications. Growth in communications capacity and decreases in the cost of computing have altered traditional economic development and, together with the internet, created the foundations for the most recent tectonic shift in the nature of business and trade – the emergence of an economy, in which the most important resource is data. 

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Don Stephenson is the Former Chief Trade Negotiator, India-Canada Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement.

India is now the world’s third-largest consumer of petroleum, with imports of more than four million barrels per day (bpd). This rate is projected to increase to nine million bpd by 2040.

Petroleum is the single largest item on India’s import bill and high oil prices are a risk to India’s economic growth. Over the past 15 years, India’s public sector oil companies have made more than 50 investments in oil and gas fields across the world to reduce the risk from high energy prices.

In contrast, Canada has the world’s third-largest petroleum reserves in the form of oil sands and is also the third-largest exporter of petroleum. Canada’s petroleum sector, which produces 5.2 million bpd of oil, is projected to grow to 6.5 million bpd by 2030, despite opposition from sections of the public and the inability thus far to put in needed pipeline infrastructure. Despite this growth, the India-Canada energy trade is minuscule and there is no significant current Indian investment in Canada’s energy sector either.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Amit Bhandari is Fellow, Energy and Environment Studies Programme, Gateway House.

Emerging economies, such as India, will need significant international investment in climate action in order to transition toward a future that is low-carbon and climate-resilient. India needs fossil fuels at an affordable price and needs to protect itself against price fluctuations. It can meet these needs by investing in Canadian oil companies, given the country’s political stability and rule of law. As an emerging economy, India could attract greater foreign direct investment into its economy through green bonds, a climate finance debt instrument that addresses environmental and climate-related challenges. Not only are green bond issuances linearly increasing over the years, but they also seem to be driven by institutional pressure, provided in part by the Securities and Exchange Board of India’s regulation, as well as by the informal advocacy efforts of market stakeholders. These findings are consistent with institutional theory and contribute to it by introducing the regulatory perspective of the green bond market.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

While India and Canada are each individually taking steps to enhance their cyber security capacity, increased collaboration between the two countries in the realm of cyber security would increase systemic trust while creating opportunities to promote the nations’ strategic and economic interests. There are several similarities in the cyber security threats that both countries face, including being the subjects of attacks with suspected Chinese origins, and mutual concerns over terrorism and election manipulation.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Aarun Shull is Managing Director and General Counsel, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

India and Canada face multiple common cyber security challenges. Not the least of these are digital black markets, where contraband and illegal services are bought and sold. These markets have abetted drug smuggling, facilitated cyber crimes and contributed to terrorist activities. Despite frequent security crackdowns, these marketplaces have proved to be resilient. This paper reviews the measures both India and Canada have taken to disrupt digital black markets and examines opportunities to expand current security cooperation strategies.

Both countries can work bilaterally and move to discredit these marketplaces. At the multilateral level, the two countries can contribute to international security and cyberspace stability by building the capacity to fight cybercrime while raising these issues at the Group of Twenty and the Conference on Disarmament. In shaping such collaboration, both India and Canada will need to demonstrate innovative thinking in the manner already shown by the digital black markets.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Sameer Patil is Director, Center for International Security and Fellow, National Security Studies, Gateway House

The UN’s Paris Agreement is best known as the commitment by nations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to slow the rise in global temperatures. But less-heralded provisions of the pact go further than that. In an acknowledgment that emissions-reduction alone will not resolve the unfolding climate crisis, a call has been made for the development of carbon sinks to remove gases already in the atmosphere. These less-heralded greenhouse gas removal technologies are essential to achieving the pact’s goal of keeping the global average surface temperature from rising more than the 1.5 degrees Celsius. These steps are also a key to ensuring that India and Canada meet their ambitious climate-action goals without suffering severe socio-economic and climatic harm.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Chaitanya Giri is Fellow, Space and Ocean Studies, Gateway House.

Countries in the Global South are incentivized through funding schemes, such as the Solar Radiation Management Governance Initiative (SRMGI) Decimal Fund, to invest in pathways that could lead toward justification for deployment of climate intervention technologies, but without adequate consideration of the social dimensions of engagement in climate intervention research. Simply funding basic climate engineering modelling will not be effective in supporting climate intervention experimentation.

The paper recommends a three-step process to remedy this oversight and to do so, keeping in mind the imperatives of responsible research and action: Canada and India could engage with a leading African country to consider what participation in climate intervention research would mean in their context and to develop a viewpoint to engage on the topic at an international level; encourage Canadian and Indian counterparts to conduct national policy discussions on climate intervention research; and increase public awareness of climate intervention technologies, coupled with democratic participatory governance.

You can download the PDF version of this paper here.

Timiebi Aganaba-Jeanty, Assistant Professor, School for the Future of Innovation in Society, Arizona State University & Fellow, Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI).

On October 30, 2018, at the Fairmount Château Laurier in Ottawa, Canada, Gateway House: Indian Council on Global Relations and the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) will host Canada’s inaugural session of the India-Canada Track 1.5 Dialogue on Innovation, Growth and Prosperity. This session will bring together experts and government officials to examine issues related to cyber security, economic relations, geoengineering and climate leadership and to have a broader discussion on India and Canada’s diplomatic relations. Participants include Rohinton Medhora, President of CIGI; Manjeet Kripalani, Executive Director at Gateway House; representatives from India’s Ministry of External Affairs and Global Affairs Canada; and other distinguished representatives.

The increasingly digital economy is changing daily life in emerging and advanced economies alike; India and Canada are no exception. While both nations face their own unique challenges amid rapid technological advancement, their shared values create a unique opportunity for collaboration. The Canada-India Track 1.5 Dialogue on Innovation, Growth and Prosperity — a three-year partnership between the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) and Gateway House — was created to explore those opportunities.

By convening experts, government officials and business leaders, the Track 1.5 Dialogue will promote bilateral economic growth and innovation, and identify areas where improved cooperation could benefit both countries. In this video, CIGI President Rohinton P. Medhora, Gateway House Executive Director Manjeet Kripalani — along with government stakeholders from both Canada and India — introduce the Dialogue and what it hopes to accomplish.

Watch: Canadian Minister for National Defence, Harjit S Sajjan, discusses contemporary security issues, international peacekeeping, bilateral defence ties, and geopolitical arenas, relevant to India, Canada, and the world. See the exclusive interview.