‘We have to find places where we can find the people’

To be fair, India is a trickier place for Trudeau to go than, say, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who can visit the Asian subcontinent without having to worry about domestic political considerations.

Trudeau, however, has to think about expectations back home.

You might have heard the prime minister boast that he has more Sikhs in his cabinet than his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi. That’s a great expression of diversity, but it necessitates a stop in Punjab, the northwestern state that is both the spiritual home of Sikhs and the majority of Canada’s Indian diaspora.

Trudeau also will visit Gujarat, home state of both Modi and another large Indo-Canadian voting bloc. When a Canadian politician visits India, he or she is also campaigning. The denizens of Bengaluru might have money to invest, but Punjabis and Gujaratis deliver votes.

Chatter about politics will intrude on Trudeau’s stay in India because the trailing press will struggle to find enough hard news to keep it busy.

India, which has taken over from China as the fastest growing major economy, is an important target as Canada attempts to diversify its commercial partners. And while there is lots of potential, Canada’s relationship with India remains a work in progress.

In the mandate letter Trudeau wrote for his trade minister, India was one of only two countries mentioned by name. (China was the other.) This is Trudeau’s first trip, but there have been eleven ministerial visits during his watch, a sharp increase from the Harper years.

Desire only takes you so far. The proposed CanadaIndia Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement remains stuck, even though negotiators have been working on it since 2010. Talks over an investment-protection treaty have been deadlocked for even longer.

Modi is a little like U.S. President Donald Trump in that when he says India is open for business, he means he’d like you to come and spend money in his country. He is less keen about buying anything that he thinks could be made in India. His government’s latest budget raised import tariffs on smartphones and other electronics, for example. That won’t hurt Canada much, but the new duties reflect a larger protectionist impulse among India’s politicians and bureaucrats.

Canada’s exporters of lentils and peas know what I’m talking about.

They have done incredibly well in South Asia in recent years. When I met former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall in Mumbai in 2014, he boasted that his province was responsible for about half of Canada’s merchandise exports to India. That’s because Saskatchewan is an excellent place to grow lentils and chickpeas, staples of the Indian diet, and because it is home to one of the world’s big producers of fertilizer. A population of more than 1 billion people needs a lot of food.

But commodities are a shaky foundation on which relationship with India, it must move beyond protein and fossil fuels to include an emphasis on innovation and technology.

“We need to build a brain chain,” Kasi Rao, president of the Canada-India Business Council, said.

India’s gross domestic product will increase by the equivalent of about $2 billion over the next five years, while the population expands to 1.4 billion from 1.3 billion currently, according to forecast by the International Monetary Fund. A country that big, and growing that fast, will require lots of resources and Canada is among a small group of countries well placed to supply them.

But India and Canada are also well placed to help each other’s tech industries battle the giants of Silicon Valley and China.

Take SOTI Inc., a Mississauga, Ont.-based maker of mobile software.

The company is growing faster than Canada can support. Founder and chief executive Carl Rodrigues couldn’t find enough software engineers to keep up with surging orders. So he had a choice: settle for running payments brand, Paytm, recently released its app in Canada, highlighting the country’s potential as a staging ground for a bigger assault on the North American market.

It all looks so perfect on paper that you’d think David Ricardo had Canada and India in mind when he developed his theory of comparative advantage in the first part of the 1800s.

Reality is much different. Canada does more trade with seven other countries than it does with India, which, when you consider the U.S. accounts for threequarters of our international sales, means we effectively do nothing of significance with an economy that is growing around 7 per cent per year.

That’s because it is very difficult for outsiders to make money there.

Business in India is conducted in person, and it takes more than half a day to get there from Toronto. The Indian market is huge, but it still is a very poor country, meaning a company has to sacrifice profit margins to be competitive there. And even though things are getting better, India still sits in the bottom half of the World Bank’s annual ease of doing business rankings. For example, it takes 1,445 days to enforce a contract, longer than 15 years ago, according to the World Bank’s calculations. Throw in some serious culture shock, and you can understand why so many Canadian executives gave up over the past few decades.

“If you walk into India and you think it’s just like Canada, you are going to be in trouble,” said Rodrigues, who was born in the southern Indian state of Goa and moved to Canada as a boy. “We found someone who knows the Indian market,” he added. “This guy managed to make stuff happen in a faster way.”

Trudeau’s trip, and the relentless stream of ministerial visits that he has ordered, also will make stuff happen in a faster way. Canadians tend to see trade missions as boondoggles, but they matter in Asia, where politicians retain significant sway over private business decisions.

We might think it stupid and shallow, but those with whom we are trying to cut deals don’t. That’s why we should hope Trudeau hasn’t caused too much offence by snubbing Bengaluru. Maybe next time.