On a Saturday morning in Brampton, the plazas fill early — for the sweet shops, the gold jewellers, the travel agents whose windows still advertise fares to Amritsar and Delhi. Nothing in the scene suggests two governments that have spent years barely on speaking terms. That is the paradox of the Canada–India relationship, and it is worth sitting with. At the level of states, the tie has rarely been colder. At the level of people, it has rarely been denser.
The freeze at the top is not imaginary. In the summer of 2023, Canada publicly linked agents of the Indian government to the killing of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Canadian citizen, shot outside a gurdwara in Surrey, British Columbia. New Delhi rejected the accusation as absurd, expelled Canadian diplomats, and for a stretch suspended visa services for Canadians. Trade negotiators who had been closing in on an early-progress agreement put down their pens. By every conventional measure of diplomacy, the relationship went into the deep freeze, and it has not fully thawed since.
Underneath, almost none of it stopped.
Canada is home to something like 1.8 million people of Indian origin, among the largest such communities anywhere outside India, and one of the fastest-growing parts of the Canadian population. They are not a lobby or a bloc. They are dentists in Surrey and truckers in Brampton, engineers in Waterloo and grandmothers in Scarborough, and the connective tissue they maintain to India — the flights, the weddings, the remittances, the property, the phone calls at odd hours — does not pause when ambassadors are sent home. For years India was also the single largest source of international students arriving in Canada, at one point close to two in five study permits. That pipeline built entire local economies, from the colleges of southern Ontario to the basement rentals around them.
None of it was routed through a treaty. That is the point the two capitals keep missing: the relationship does not belong to them. It was not built at summits, and it cannot be switched off by canceling one. When Ottawa and New Delhi trade expulsions, the diaspora reads the headlines, winces, and books the flight anyway.
Which is not to say the quarrel is harmless. A diplomatic freeze has real costs, and they fall, as usual, on the people rather than the principals. Visa backlogs strand families. Students who once saw Canada as the obvious destination now factor in a political risk they did not have to weigh before. The trade deal that might have widened the whole relationship sits in a drawer, and every year it stays there is a year of tariffs and friction that need not exist. A relationship this large can absorb a great deal of official coldness — but “absorb” is not the same as “unharmed.”
There is a harder truth beneath the diplomacy, too, and honesty requires naming it. The rupture was not manufactured. A country was told that a foreign government may have had a hand in a killing on its soil; that is not a grievance a serious state can simply file away for the sake of trade. Canada’s insistence on the point is not the obstacle to a mature relationship. It is the precondition for one. The task is not to pretend the disagreement away but to keep it from strangling everything else the two societies do together — which, left to themselves, they show no sign of wanting to stop.
That is the strange arithmetic of Canada and India. The governments have the smaller relationship; the peoples have the larger one. In most bilateral ties the reverse is true, and the official channel is the thing holding the private one aloft. Here it is inverted. The state is the weak link, and the family, the campus and the shop floor are what keep the whole structure standing.
The travel agents in Brampton will keep booking the flights. Whether Ottawa and New Delhi ever again build something official on top of what their peoples have already built is the question the next few years will answer — and, for once, the answer sits almost entirely with the two governments, because everyone else has already decided.