REGINA – Premier Scott Moe is back in Saskatchewan after a brief trip to the Niagara region to meet Indian officials on tariffs.
The government confirmed Wednesday afternoon that Moe travelled to the G7 Foreign Ministers' Meeting in Ontario, and met on Tuesday with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India's Minister of External Affairs, and officials from India’s delegation.
According to the province the meeting focused on steps to remove tariffs on yellow peas, after India had hit Canada with a 30 per cent tariff as of Nov. 1. But it also focused on other areas including potash, uranium and agri-food products.
Moe told reporters at the Legislature that his government had reached out to India after the yellow pea tariffs were imposed. He said Minister Jaishankar had said he was going to be in Canada.
“So he had set up a meeting, at his request of which we were pleased to go out and have a discussion,” said Moe, “not only on how we can move forward with respect to reducing the yellow pea tariff, but expanding our trade even beyond agri-food products, potash largely today.”
Moe pointed to the importance of trade with India, saying that “if we're truly going to… expand our economy by producing more and higher value goods in Canada, and expand beyond the United States of America, it's going to have to include countries like China and India.”
Moe pointed again at Saskatchewan as being at the forefront in supporting the federal government in “finding our way to a better environment when it comes to non-tariff or duty-free tariff, duty-free trade.”
As for the talks with India on the yellow pea tariffs, Moe said there was discussion on the “long-term reliability and sustainability that Saskatchewan and Canada are as a food provider, and the potential to be even a larger, play a larger role in providing energy security through uranium, for example, or maybe even oil at some point to the country of India.”
On whether tariffs on yellow peas might be removed, Moe said it was his government’s hope that “in the short term, or in the not-too-distant term, that they'd be able to be removed.”
“There's a number of reasons, and I won't get into the details of them, as to why the government of India may put tariffs on, blanket tariffs on. Hopefully, with the reliability that Saskatchewan and Canada bring to the table, we would be one of the earliest to be removed, if that is a sliding scale. I don't think those discussions are off-the-table items.”
