Mark Carney's Global Sales Pitch: Hawling Canada's Assets

It’s probably unfair, but as Mark Carney winds up his latest international sales trip, I can’t shake the image of the prime minister as a modern day Willy Loman, lugging his battered suitcase from capital to capital, hawking Canada’s canola crop and energy assets like they’re a snazzy new set of brogues. Carney, unlike Loman, is neither old nor worn out and Canada isn’t a hopeless case. But the impression persists of a country raised with a dream and a drive to succeed, yet which finds itself in middle age, still out on the road peddling itself as a place with more to offer than softwood lumber and maple syrup. After almost a year of slogging through foreign markets in efforts to sell Canada, Carney can justifiably claim to have left few doors unknocked-on. He checked in with all the usual customers — France, Britain, Mexico, all those European countries huddled together in Brussels — but also pitched a bevy of other prospects not usually topping the trade list: Egypt, Latvia, Malaysia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates … Not all were formal business junkets but you can never tell when you’ll make a sale. The second stop on this latest trek was the first by any Canadian prime minister to Qatar, which has spent decades building itself into a tiny powerhouse of big money and big ambitions without anyone in Ottawa seeming to notice or bothering to visit. We didn’t need to court small Middle Eastern monarchies, because we had the U.S. to buy our stuff. But now we don’t, and can’t be sure we ever will again. The planet-wide uncertainty the Trump administration has unleashed is the impetus behind the frantic jockeying underway since it became apparent there’d be no going back to the cozy days of yore. The new reality is only a year old but already it’s clear that with old embedded relationships in shreds, new ones have to be established, even if that means pounding pavements in neighbourhoods we’d just as soon avoid. That’s what took Carney to Beijing to make nice with a country few if any Canadians have forgiven for the brutality of its treatment of Michael Spavor and Michael Kovrig, its brazen theft of technology, its flagrant interference in democratic practices or its efforts to brow-beat Chinese Canadians into helping do its dirty work. Not to mention the human rights record that has been an ongoing irritant in previous efforts to forge better ties and increased trade. Carney’s deal to allow greater access to Chinese vehicles in return for an easing of levies on canola seeds and other products is as unequivocal an admission as you’ll get that finding new business partners outside the U.S. requires swallowing some pride, and longstanding Canadian principles. If we want to avoid sleeping with Donald Trump we’ll have to accept snuggling up to Xi Jinping. Close your eyes, hold your nose and think of Saskatchewan’s farmers. It may not be anything to celebrate, but it’s evidence at least that Ottawa, and hopefully many Canadians, have accepted the need to move past the easy, lazy days of moralistic lecturing while riding America’s economic coattails. If we want the world to take us more seriously, as something other than a self-righteous nag, we need to start doing the same ourselves. It wouldn’t have happened under Justin Trudeau, who wasn’t taken seriously in Washington, Beijing, New Delhi or many other capitals. Guy Saint-Jacques, who as Canada’s ambassador to China helped organize Trudeau’s first visit to Beijing as prime minister, told Quebec’s LaPresse that matters almost immediately slipped off the rails. “Mr. Trudeau arrives, a new prime minister, young, naive, and arrogant, trying to lecture the Chinese, telling them: ‘I’m going to help you, just like my father helped you return to the United Nations and regain your rightful place on the international stage,” Saint-Jacques recounted. “He clearly hadn’t read my messages and reports.” China’s president never looks much more than wooden when hosting visiting dignitaries, but Beijing’s treatment of Carney was notably more civil than the undisguised contempt Beijing reserved for Trudeau. Their meeting marked the beginning of a new “strategic partnership,” Carney proclaimed. “The world has changed much since that last visit. I believe the progress that we have made in the partnership sets us up well for the new world order.” From Beijing he was off to Qatar, which has been run by the same unelected family since 1868, where the emir appoints everyone important, political parties are banned and the limits on personal freedoms earn regular scathing reports from human rights groups. The official readout on the meeting heralded formation of “a Joint Canada-Qatar Commission” on investment, “negotiations on a framework” for co-operation on security matters, more flights to and from Canada and establishment of a local office to facilitate “defence” sales. Not a lot of meat there, but it’s only the first visit. Cementing the new world order takes time. Perhaps more promising was a commitment by Qatar “to make significant strategic investments” in the list of “Canadian nation-building projects” on which the Carney government has staked its future. Much advance fussing took place over the possibility Donald Trump would take umbrage at Canada doing deals with rival partners, but the eventual response was benign. “That’s what he should be doing … If you can get a deal with China, you should do that,” Trump averred, though in classic you-can’t-trust-the-U.S. style, Trump’s trade representative speedily said something different Carney was questioned on just exactly what he meant by a “new world order,” a phrase that tends to light up the eyes of conspiracy theorists and other cranks. According to the prime minister it means the end of the system we’ve been used to since free trade and multilateralism were merged into one big global shopping centre. “The question is, what gets built in its place?” The answer, he said, is still in the works, but so far means “coalitions” of “like-minded countries” doing deals in shared “subsectors” to mutual benefit. “It doesn’t mean you agree on everything,” he stressed, just in case anyone thought Ottawa was about to welcome Beijing’s uglier actions. Where the nasty stuff exists, “we do engage with countries, (but) we calibrate that engagement depending on our values and our interests, so that engagement is more narrow when there are those issues.” So, dealing with China on cars and canola is OK, but no pretending we’re happy about it or consider China’s leadership as anything but a brutal bunch of thugs. “We take the world as it is — not as we wish it to be,” the prime minister stated bluntly. That’s a sentence you’d never have heard from Justin Trudeau. Canadians can agree or disagree on whether they approve, but it’s a clear and unembroidered statement of a change Canada has to make if it wants to protect the good fortune we’ve been given in an increasingly unreliable world. National Post