The Canada-India travel market has already taken a hit from Canada’s drastic reduction in foreign student visas. Now, on the eve of a major Indian holiday, a growing diplomatic crisis between the two countries has travellers worried about getting on a plane to India.
“My business is down by 80% and I’m not even joking about it,” Money Behl, a Brampton, Ont.-based immigration consultant, told the CBC. “Everybody is suffering with this.”
Behl said clients who have already booked tickets for the religious festival of Diwali on Nov. 1 are second-guessing their decision to leave the country. Even one of his own employees, Rubinder Kaul, is nervous to leave Canada because she has a temporary work visa.
“The main concern for me is: What if they ban the re-entry to Canada? Because I’m not a permanent resident here yet,” Kaul told the outlet.
Behl has been telling clients to hold tight and wait for more information from the Indian Consulate, according to the article.
But if the airlines are worried, it’s not showing. Air India is moving ahead with plans to double its Delhi-Toronto service starting next month, and Air Canada will launch a new Calgary-London-Delhi flight. That’s despite a decline in travel between the countries during the peak student travel period of July to September, according to an unnamed airline exec cited in the India-based travel website AviationA2Z.
With more than 2.2 million passengers per year, the Canada-India travel market largely serves students, business travellers, migrants and people visiting family and friends, the website reports.
Indian nationals make up the vast majority of foreign students studying in Canada on visas, but in January the Canadian government announced a 35% reduction in the number of student visas it would grant this year – to 360,000. A further 10% reduction is expected for 2025.
The diplomatic feud between Canada and India has been growing since last year, when India suspended diplomatic services for weeks after Ottawa accused its government of assassinating a Sikh separatist on Canadian soil. Tensions escalated on Monday when both countries recalled their top diplomats.
Kuldeep Bansal, a longtime immigration consultant in Vancouver, predicts immediate and significant delays in visas due to the reduction in diplomatic staff.
“If normal processing was four-to-six weeks, expect it to double during these high times,” Bansal told CityNews Vancouver. “Anybody planning to fly in December, January; they should be applying right now.”
Diplomats “who remain in India will focus on work that requires an in-country presence, such as urgent processing, visa printing, risk assessment, and overseeing key partners, including visa application centres, panel physicians, and clinics that perform immigration medical exams,” according to Immigration, Refugees, and Citizenship Canada, via Vancouver’s 1130 News Radio.
The turbulence comes amid growing concern about geopolitical instability among frequent travellers, according to Global Rescue, a service that employs US Navy SEALs, medical personnel and others to extract travellers from precarious situations.
In a 2024 survey, the group found that “a new set of travel risks is emerging. Among the world’s most experienced travelers, geopolitical instability has overtaken other concerns, with 30% of respondents citing it as the most significant risk when planning international travel.”