OTTAWA, Canada: India and Canada named new high commissioners to each other’s capitals Thursday as they restored relations 10 months after expelling the top envoys in a dispute over an alleged political assassination.
Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand said Christopher Cooter will be Canada’s new high commissioner to India. India’s foreign ministry said it will assign its current envoy to Spain, Dinesh Patnaik, to Ottawa “shortly.”
Relations between Canada and India have been strained since Canadian police accused New Delhi of playing a role in the June 2023 assassination of a Canadian Sikh activist near Vancouver. Police also have uncovered evidence of an intensifying campaign against Canadian citizens by agents of the Indian government.
Relations improved in June when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney invited Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to the G7 summit in Alberta and both countries agreed to restore their top diplomats.
Nijjar, 45, was fatally shot in his pickup truck after he left the Sikh temple he led in Surrey, British Columbia. An Indian-born citizen of Canada, he owned a plumbing business and was a leader in what remains of a once-strong movement to create an independent Sikh homeland.
Four Indian nationals living in Canada were charged with Niijar’s murder.
Former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau previously said Indian diplomats have been passing information about Canadians to the highest levels of the Indian government, and that Indian officials then shared that information with organized crime groups, resulting in violence against Canadians.
Trudeau said India violated Canada’s sovereignty. India rejected the accusations as absurd.
Canada is not the only country that has accused Indian officials of plotting an assassination on foreign soil. The US Justice Department announced criminal charges last year against a Indian government official in connection with an alleged foiled plot to kill a Sikh separatist leader living in New York City.
India has repeatedly criticized Canada for being soft on supporters of the Khalistan movement who live in Canada. The Khalistan movement is banned in India but has support among the Sikh diaspora, particularly in Canada. About 2 percent of Canada’s population is Sikh.
Cooter will take on the role after 35 years as a diplomat, including postings in Israel and South Africa, as well as in New Delhi 25 years ago.
Canada and India name new top envoys as they restore relations after a dispute
https://arab.news/m7jku
Canada and India name new top envoys as they restore relations after a dispute
- Ties strained over Canada's claim that the Indian government played a role in the 2023 assassination of a Canadian Sikh activist
- Canadian PM Carney and India's PM Modi agreed to restore their top diplomats when they met during the G7 summit last June
Spain fines Airbnb 64 mn euros for posting banned properties
- The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content“
MADRID: Spain’s leftist government said Monday it had fined Airbnb more than 64 million euros ($75 million), notably for posting listings for banned rental properties, at a time the country faces a housing crisis.
The fine is final, the consumer affairs ministry said in a statement, adding the US holiday-rental giant must “correct the violations by deleting illegal content.”
The ministry said 65,122 adverts on Airbnb breached consumer rules, including the promotion of properties without a license or those whose license number did not match with data in registers.
The fine is equivalent to six times the illegal profit made by Airbnb between the time the company was warned about the offending adverts and before they were taken down, the ministry added.
A tourism boom has driven the buoyant Spanish economy but fueled local concern about increasingly scarce and unaffordable housing, a top priority for the minority coalition government.
The world’s second most-visited country hosted a record 94 million foreign tourists in 2024 and is on course to surpass that figure this year.
But residents of hotspots such as Barcelona blame short-term rentals for the housing crisis and changing their neighborhoods.
In June, the consumer rights ministry also ordered online accommodation giant Booking.com to take down more than 4,000 illegal adverts.
“There are thousands of families who are living on the edge due to housing, while a few get rich with business models that expel people from their homes,” far-left consumer rights minister Pablo Bustinduy said in the ministry statement.
“We’ll prove it as many times as necessary: no company, no matter how big or powerful, is above the law. Even less so when it comes to housing,” he added on social network Bluesky.
