Last month’s trip to India by Minister of Energy and Natural Resources Tim Hodgson produced the first sectoral deliverables of the Canada–India reset launched by Prime Ministers Mark Carney and Narendra Modi in 2025.
The trip signalled a shift from crisis management toward a clearer focus on economic outcomes—areas where both governments can demonstrate progress, build constituencies for stability, and restore confidence through practical cooperation.
Those takeaways have set the stage for Mr. Carney’s visit to India in early March, a trip that, so far, also includes Australia and may add other stops. The visit is expected to yield agreements on a range of bilateral issues, amid the launch of negotiations for the Canada-India Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement (CEPA).
During the Hodgson visit, Canada and India re-launched the Canada–India Ministerial Energy Dialogue and issued a Joint Statement on energy cooperation, signalling intent to expand trade and investment across both conventional and clean energy. That matters, because energy—unlike the more politically fraught issues that have strained the relationship—can deliver visible, commercially grounded outcomes.
India’s Energy Needs: Scale, Security, and Strategic Diversification
India’s energy trajectory provides the structural logic for deeper cooperation. Sustained economic growth requires rising energy consumption; rising consumption requires a secure and diversified supply.
India is projected to account for more than one-third of global energy demand growth over the next two decades. It is already the world’s third-largest oil consumer and fourth-largest LNG importer, with refining capacity that positions it as a major global energy hub. In 2024, India imported nearly 88 per cent of all the crude oil and 47 per cent of the natural gas it consumed.
But energy today is inseparable from geopolitics. As New Delhi navigates trade negotiations with Washington, it faces increasing pressure to reduce imports of discounted Russian crude. A tentative U.S.–India trade arrangement has reportedly been linked to expectations that India will gradually shift sourcing patterns away from Russia while expanding purchases from American suppliers.
Whether this reorientation proceeds rapidly or incrementally, the direction of travel is clear: India’s energy portfolio is under review.
However, New Delhi is unlikely to trade one dependency for another. Its strategy remains diversification — across suppliers, across fuels, and across geopolitical alignments. That creates space for additional partners.
Canada is not positioned to displace Gulf suppliers or suddenly dominate India’s import mix. But it can credibly become part of India’s diversified supply portfolio — particularly for crude oil and uranium in the near term, and LNG and critical minerals over the medium term.
In an environment where supply security and political reliability are increasingly priced into energy decisions, Canada’s reputation as a stable, rules-based producer carries weight.
Canada’s Opportunity: Diversification and the Energy Superpower Narrative
Deeper energy cooperation with India is also in Canada’s interest. Canadian energy exports remain overwhelmingly concentrated in the United States. While in India, Minister Hodgson described Canada’s roughly 98 per cent export dependence on the U.S. market as a “strategic blunder.” That concentration may have been commercially efficient in the past. It is now strategically risky.
If Ottawa is serious about positioning Canada as an “energy superpower” and reducing exposure to a single market, it needs credible Indo-Pacific demand partners. India is the clearest candidate in that category.
Infrastructure now makes diversification more plausible than at any point in recent decades. The completion of the Trans Mountain Expansion (TMX) pipeline now makes it possible for Canada to ship crude to Asian markets. LNG and LPG export capacity on the Pacific coast is also expanding. None of this guarantees exports to India — pricing, refinery configurations, shipping economics, and long-term contracts will ultimately determine flows — but the structural constraints that once limited diversification are easing.
If India does reduce its intake of Russian crude over time, competition for replacement volumes will be intense. Gulf producers and the United States will seek to fill any gap. Canada’s opportunity is not automatic. It must be secured through sustained engagement, regulatory clarity, competitive pricing, and alignment between federal and provincial export strategies.
The Trade Baseline: Real but Limited
The strategic case may be strong, but current baseline energy exports remain modest. Canada’s total energy exports to India were approximately $761.5 million in 2024, while imports of energy products from India were about $206 million. Most Canadian exports consisted of coal (about $602 million) and crude oil and bitumen (about $158 million).
This composition underscores two realities. First, there is already a foundation of conventional energy trade. Second, the relationship remains far below the scale implied by today’s political signalling. Bridging that gap will require more than goodwill. It will require sustained engagement to reduce friction and build trust, align regulatory frameworks, and provide predictability for long-term investment.
Nuclear: A Durable Anchor
If crude represents the near-term lever, nuclear may become the most strategically significant deliverable of the reset. Long-term uranium contracts embed trust and create interdependence measured in decades.
Canada and India are close to finalizing a 10-year uranium supply agreement reportedly worth around $2.8 billion, with Cameco positioned as the supplier. Such a deal could be among the key outcomes of Prime Minister Carney’s visit to India.
If concluded, the Cameco deal would demonstrate that the Canada-India reset can produce durable, commercially meaningful results. It would align India’s expanding need for low-carbon baseload power with Canada’s strength as a leading uranium producer while linking federal and provincial economic priorities in a politically defensible way.
Critical Minerals: The Next Phase of Energy Co-operation
Energy cooperation increasingly extends beyond fuels into the minerals that underpin the energy transition and advanced manufacturing. For India, critical minerals are a strategic constraint. EV supply chains, battery storage, grid expansion, and industrial upgrading all depend on secure inputs and resilient supply chains.
For Canada, critical minerals represent a strategic opportunity—not only as an exporter of resources, but as a partner in building diversified value chains that reduce exposure to concentrated processing and geopolitical chokepoints.
The strategic prize is not simply exporting more raw material. It is building integrated value-chain partnerships—processing, recycling, technology collaboration, and supply-chain resilience—that generate industrial capacity and jobs in both countries. This is where the relationship can move beyond transactional commodity trade toward deeper economic integration.
Energy as Proof of Concept—and a Bridge to CEPA
The Canada–India reset will remain fragile if it is defined solely by political symbolism. It requires tangible deliverables that create constituencies for stability—companies, provinces, investors, and communities with a stake in continuity and deeper engagement.
Energy is uniquely suited to that role. It is commercially grounded, scalable, and directly linked to jobs, investment, and industrial policy on both sides. It also operates on long-time horizons. Pipelines, LNG terminals, uranium contracts, and mineral processing facilities are not transactional—they embed relationships in infrastructure and capital commitments that outlast political cycles.
Energy cooperation can also reinforce the broader trade agenda. The CEPA talks will be complex and time-consuming. Energy, however, does not need to wait. Commercial agreements, long-term supply contracts, and structured investment partnerships can advance in parallel, building confidence and demonstrating that the relationship is capable of producing economic value.
In that sense, energy can function as the reset’s most practical “working channel”—the area where both governments prove that the shift from crisis management to economic partnership is real.
If bilateral trade is to double over the coming decade, energy—both conventional and clean—will need to be a central driver.
What to Expect from Carney’s Visit
Prime Minister Carney’s trip to India will reveal whether the reset is maturing into an economic partnership or remains confined to diplomatic intent. Expectations for the trip include agreements spanning uranium, energy, and critical minerals, alongside potential movement on CEPA. When it comes to energy cooperation, the clearest signals that the reset is moving from intent to implementation will be commercial and specific:
- MOUs or framework agreements on crude supply or downstream cooperation;
- Movement on Indian investment or offtake tied to Canadian LNG projects;
- Confirmation of a long-term uranium agreement;
- Concrete steps toward a structured critical minerals partnership anchored in defined value chains.
But beyond individual announcements, the visit will signal something larger: whether Canada and India are prepared to anchor their reset in long-term economic interdependence.
The scaffolding is now in place. Institutional channels have been restored. Political intent has been expressed. What remains is execution—contracts, capital deployment, regulatory alignment, and the domestic political will in Canada to align infrastructure and permitting processes with export ambition.
Canada and India are not natural energy partners by geography. They are becoming strategic partners by necessity and design: one offers scale of demand, the other scale of resource; one seeks supply diversification, the other export diversification.
If Carney’s visit can secure even a handful of durable deliverables—particularly on uranium and critical minerals—it will demonstrate that the reset is capable of moving from rhetoric to structural alignment. In a geopolitical environment defined by volatility and leverage, that kind of durability is not just desirable—it is strategic.
This piece first appeared in Policy magazine on February 18, 2026.
