The Canadian government has approved Royal Bank of Canada's deal to acquire HSBC Holdings' Canadian operations with conditions, the country's finance department said in a statement on Thursday.

As part of the deal, Canadian Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland has secured commitments from RBC to establish a global banking hub in Vancouver and support more than 1,000 jobs while creating about 440 net-new jobs in British Columbia.

Canada's Competition Bureau approved the C$13.5 billion ($10.17 billion) deal in September, saying it was unlikely to hurt competition, but said it would "result in a loss of rivalry between Canada's largest and seventh-largest banks."

The bureau also said HSBC Canada's competitive impact was limited when compared to other financial institutions and found that the unit of the British bank had achieved limited market penetration in most financial services.

RBC and HSBC did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.

The deal, first announced in late 2022, had received backlash from Canada's House of Commons and Conservative party leader Pierre Poilievre.

Poilievre has urged Ottawa to reject the deal and said that blocking it was a clear step the government could take to address affordability concerns.

RBC has said it expects the deal to close in the first quarter of 2024.

HSBC, which once advertised itself as the "world's local bank," has more than 130 branches and 780,000 customers in Canada. The Canadian exit came as a part of its strategy to shrink its global footprint and focus on the Chinese market. ($1 = 1.3278 Canadian dollars) (Reporting by Jaiveer Singh Shekhawat and Nilutpal Timsina in Bengaluru and Nivedita Balu in Toronto; Editing by Shounak Dasgupta, Christopher Cushing and Leslie Adler)