Dubai: Senior Opposition politicians in Canada are calling on the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stepher Harper to talk directly to UAE officials to end the impasse over limited landing rights for Etihad and Emirates airlines at Toronto.
With the UAE now requiring all Canadian passport holders to pre-obtain visit visas, media reports say the UAE's ambassador to Canada, Mohammad Abdullah Al Gafli, has been unable to get a face-to-face meeting for the past three months with Canada's Foreign Affairs Minister, Lawrence Cannon.
Reports say that the Department of Foreign Affairs in Ottawa is routing Al Gafli's calls to one of Cannon's aides.
High stakes
Some 27,000 Canadians live in the UAE and trade between the countries is worth Dh5.5 billion.
A number of leading Canadian multinational construction, transport, aviation and engineering companies, actively pursuing lucrative contracts in the UAE, fear that the escalating dispute will have a negative effect on the outcome of those contracts — a hard blow given the static growth rate in Canada's bruised manufacturing sector centred along the Windsor-to-Montreal corridor.
"When you're not actually speaking face-to-face diplomatically, then guess what? Relations don't go well," Paul Dewar, the foreign affairs critic from the New Democratics, an opposition party, was quoted as saying.
In the latest salvo in the dispute over landing rights at Canadian airports, the Calgary Herald, the newspaper published in Harper's hometown, called the UAE "utterly juvenile", adding that it was "behaving like a two-year-old in a grocery store cookie aisle".
It called the new visa regulations "hamfisted rules to make foreign business pay dearly for flying there."
