Prime Minister Stephen Harper made good on his promise to work more closely with India today.
Following talks on his recent visit, Harper signed a nuclear co-operation agreement with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, allowing Canadian companies to trade nuclear technology and uranium to India for the first time in 35 years.
The deal was announced at the Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting in Trinidad and Tobago. Talks began back in 2008 and went through four rounds of negotiation before today's announcement. The previous round had been held in Toronto last Monday.
No such deals had been in place since Canada stopped nuclear trade with India after it launched its weapons program in 1974.
"This agreement is a testimony to the undeniable potential that Canada and India can offer each other and the world," Harper said. "Increased collaboration with India's civilian nuclear energy market will allow Canadian companies to benefit from greater access to one of the world's largest and fastest expanding economies."
The agreement still has to get parliamentary approval to go through, meaning Harper's minority government will require support from at least one opposition party to pass. Full details of the agreement will not be released until it is formally tabled in the House of Commons.
The deal is expected to bolster Canada's estimated $6.6 billion in annual nuclear-energy industry revenue.
Harper has been very vocal about the importance of reaching out to India lately, including his recent tour of the country during which he visited the sites of the Mumbai terrorist attacks as well as the set of a Bollywood dance show.
He hinted at the deal getting completed during that trip, citing the need to improve recent cool relations between the two nations.
"We are not living in the 1970s. We are living in 2009," Harper said at a joint news conference with Singh in New Delhi during his visit, referring to India's first nuclear weapons test.
"Notwithstanding the challenges that face this country in the neighbourhood in which it lives, this is a stable and reliable friend of our country and we have no reservations pursuing this kind of (civilian nuclear) agreement."
This is not the first such bilateral nuclear trade agreement for India, which has existing pacts with the United States, France and Russia.
Though the prime minister spoke publicly about working on the deal, a meeting between Harper and nuclear business leaders from both sides was left off his Indian tour itinerary with no photo ops arranged, suggesting that the Conservatives still deem the issue to be politically sensitive.
