Canada's Justin Trudeau departs from New Delhi after two days delay due to plane snag

Ottawa declined New Delhi’s offer to provide an aircraft for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his entourage to fly back home after his plane developed technical snags and he had to cancel his departure after attending the G20 summit in the national capital of India.

Trudeau and his entourage flew back to Ottawa on Tuesday after the technical snag in his aircraft was fixed. They remained stranded in New Delhi for two days, although the G20 summit got over on Sunday.

New Delhi had offered a VVIP aircraft of Air India to fly the Canadian Prime Minister to Ottawa, but he refused and preferred to wait for his own aircraft – a CC-150 Polaris Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) with the tail number '01' – to be fixed and cleared for flight, sources told DH on Tuesday.

The RCAF, however, had also sent two aircraft, including another CC-150 Polaris, to New Delhi to fly the Canadian Prime Minister back to Ottawa.

A technician also flew in with a replacement for the malfunctioning component of the aircraft. He fixed the technical glitch, and the aircraft was then cleared for flight.

Trudeau and his entourage were on their way to the airport after the conclusion of the G20 summit on Sunday. But before his cavalcade could reach the airport, his aides were informed that the aircraft that had flown him from Ottawa to Jakarta, where he had attended the Canada-ASEAN summit, and then to New Delhi for the G20 summit had developed a technical snag.

He then had to stay back in New Delhi.

The CC-150 Polaris aircraft used by the Canadian Prime Minister to fly to Jakarta and New Delhi was part of a fleet that was commissioned in the 1990s. The Canadian Government recently bought nine new and used aircraft to replace the ageing fleet of the VVIP aircraft.

Trudeau had a bilateral meeting with Prime Minister Narendra Modi in New Delhi apart from attending the G20 summit.

Modi conveyed to Trudeau New Delhi’s “strong concerns” over continuing activities of anti-India Khalistani Sikh extremists in Canada.

Trudeau, on the other hand, said after his meeting with Modi that while it was “extremely important” for the Canadian Government to defend the freedom of peaceful protest, it was also committed to prevent violence and push back hatred.

The relations between the two nations came under stress with New Delhi alleging that Ottawa failed to deal with the campaign run by the extremists in Canada to carve out a separate Khalistan from India. 

Rajeev Chandrasekhar, the minister of state for electronics and information technology, was at the airport to see off the Canadian Prime Minister on behalf of the Government of India on Tuesday.