Why Mexicans Don't Drink Molson. Andrea Mandel-Campbell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ on the wall, they are not convinced that the vast majority of Canadians are getting the message. Back in Vancouver, trade commissioner Bill Johnston has his doubts. From his corner office, the veteran federal trade commissioner surveys the sparkling high-rises and ocean beyond with an air of blithe resignation that betrays his disappointment. For years he has been trying to coax Canadian companies to trade in their cushy domestic berth for more distant shores.

      “They call it the sailboat mentality,” shrugs Johnston. “Why would you get on a plane and fly halfway around the world to have tea with a bunch of strangers when you could spend the weekend on your sailboat or at the cottage?”

      Across the country, Stanley Hartt’s Bay Street office in Toronto affords a very different view. His exclusive eleventh-floor perch looks out on the glass and steel towers that form the vertebrae of the country’s financial spine. But the Montreal-born lawyer, former deputy finance minister and now chairman of Citigroup Global Markets Canada is gripped by the same sense of foreboding. Every day, he says, Canadian companies pass up opportunities to trade and invest just across the border in the United States — never mind Asia.

      “We have a chance to buy large U.S. companies and we don’t. We think it’s too big and we don’t want to bet the company, so we tend to creep back to the Canadian market. It’s a market we know and feel comfortable in, and we’re not hard pressed,” he says. “We are very happy to coast. There’s such abundance here, we’ve decided to pump it out and sell it. Who needs to do value-added when you can just stay home and have a nice life?”

      The pervasive sense that “everything will be okay” has even raised alarm bells in slow-moving, navel-gazing Ottawa. Within the well-insulated offices of the bunker-like Lester B. Pearson building — home to the ministry of foreign affairs and international trade — senior bureaucrats have coined a phrase to describe the growing danger of continued unconcern: complacency risk.

      Nowhere has that risk become clearer than in the case of Japan. The world’s second-largest economy, the Land of the Rising Sun has been a target of Canadian efforts to diversify trade for nearly half a century. Those efforts reaped little return, until a housing boom in the 1980s sparked a massive demand for Canadian lumber. Canadian exports, led by wood products, peaked at $13 billion in 1995 before a banking crisis in Japan plunged the country into a decade-long recession. Canadian sales to Japan followed suit, contracting 26 per cent in the last decade.²⁵

      It is easy to blame Japan’s economic woes for the precipitous decline. But while forestry products companies turned their attention to the thriving U.S. market, the Swedes, Finns, Russians and Southeast Asians have been filling the void the Canadians left behind. By 1997, the Scandinavians, with only a couple of years in the Japanese market, were exporting 1.8 million cubic feet of lumber — a feat that took their Canadian counterparts decades to achieve.²⁶ As a result, Canada’s share of Japanese imports is half what it was in 1989. “We could have been raising exports all along, but instead we turned away,” says John Powles, a Vancouver-based trade consultant. “Nobody ever thought of turning around our advantage and developing a strong sales team. So the Japanese went elsewhere. And we let it happen.

      “We could have been much more competitive if we had put the effort in,” adds the long-time Japan hand. “But the U.S. was strong, so we shrugged our shoulders. Then the softwood lumber dispute with the United States happened, and the Japanese market was lost to Scandinavia.”

      Canada appears set to suffer a similar fate in Europe, the country’s only other significant export market outside the United States. Its declining market share is being eroded by the addition of twelve new member countries to the EU. The new entrants, many of whom have low labour costs, educated populations and undeveloped resources, compete head-on with Canadian goods, ranging from lumber to car engines. Many predict that without a concerted effort, Canada will be completely cut out of the EU. “Trade is going down,” says transatlantic trade consultant Boris Rousseff. “Canadians would have to make an enormous effort to change the tide. Or they can just sell 100 per cent of their goods to the U.S.”

      As Canada has already learned the hard way — softwood lumber and the ban on Canadian live-cattle exports are the most recent examples— complete reliance on the United States is neither smart nor sustainable. “I don’t think we can live off the U.S. forever, and it’s very dangerous to think we can,” says Lorna Wright, an associate professor of international business at York University’s Schulich School of Business. “As a country you need to be diversified. If an individual company is at capacity, selling all its widgets to Buffalo, that’s fine. But as a country, if all your companies are selling all their widgets to Buffalo, then Buffalo can hold you to ransom.”

       A NEW MAGNE TIC NORTH

      For many observers Canada, inadvertently or by omission, has already decided its fate. Without the disposition, appetite, marketing skills or, in many cases, the companies to go global, Canada is simply not cut out to be a global trader. “Canadians are not equipped to work on the world stage,” says Edy Wong, director of the Centre for International Business Studies at the University of Alberta’s School of Business. Fred Lazar, professor of strategy at York University’s Schulich School of Business, concurs: “We are able to survive because the market has been given to us. The U.S. is easy and close. We haven’t developed the links elsewhere, and we don’t know how.”

      Others fervently believe that Canada can and should have a place at the global table. Some are battle-hardened trade veterans who, despite years of disappointment, stubbornly refuse to give up hope. Some are Canadian professionals, entrepreneurs and chief executives who have gone abroad and flourished. Some are new Canadians, who, grateful for the country’s stable business climate and still hungry, see opportunities instead of obstacles. “The world should be our oyster,” says Ian Mallory, a Calgary-based venture capitalist. “Until now it’s just been easier to do nothing, live off the taxes from our natural resources, work 9 to 5 and go to the cottage.”

      Canada has been chewing on this particularly gristly tidbit of truth for decades. Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s infamous “Third Option” of the 1970s was the outgrowth of half-hearted efforts to wean ourselves off the United States and expand our trade ties with the rest of the world. For the most part, however, our global coming of age has yet to be realized — paralyzed, it seems, in a kind of arrested development. But, as I will argue in this book, the Third Option, if it’s done right, is not the chimera it has come to represent.

      Given what Canadians have been able to achieve at home, in such a harsh and unforgiving climate, going abroad is eminently doable. If we can build ice roads across hundreds of kilometres of barren, treeless tundra that are able to withstand the merciless pounding of thousands of transport trucks as they make their way from Yellowknife to the diamond mines just south of the Arctic Circle, then we can do anything. It’s a matter of first wanting to, and then familiarizing ourselves with the new topography.

      But if we are to get our proper bearings, we will need a new compass, one that is more accurately attuned to the global marketplace. This new compass must be able to adjust for distortions in the domestic economy that often throw off our readings of global competition. It must also include a recalibrated Third Option, one in which trade with the rest of the world is not meant to temper Canada’s reliance on the United States but exists on its own merit and for its own sake. By this measure, international trade and investment is the new magnetic north.

      Practically speaking, that means not only significantly increasing the number of companies involved in international business, but also enhancing the quality and quantity of that business. It’s a problem that goes beyond small and medium-sized enterprises. According to Canadian Business magazine, the country’s top 500 listed companies generate a minuscule 1.91 per cent of their revenue from foreign markets.²⁷ “We just don’t think in a worldly way,” says СКАЧАТЬ