every year, get a little smaller, another country will pass us on the scale and we’ll lose another hockey team.”
It’s a far cry from Sir Wilfrid Laurier’s bold pronouncement that the twentieth century belonged to Canada. From Laurier’s vantage point, overseeing a golden age of economic prosperity, an influx of immigrants eager to carve out a new life for themselves and the building of the country’s second transcontinental railway, Canada’s potential seemed to know no bounds. But like a locomotive that has run out of steam, Canada’s promising future has lost its momentum, sapped by decades of disastrous government policy and a complicit citizenry. Somewhere along the way, we lost the faith in ourselves and, with it, the opportunity that was ours for the taking. Now, left without the necessary tools— multinationals — for negotiating in a globalized world, we are in danger of becoming collateral damage.
A growing number of Canadians see the danger. Gary Comerford is one of them. Working as a branch manager for Canada Permanent Trust in Hamilton in the mid-1970s, Comerford concedes his most serious concern was whether a personal loan or mortgage went bad. “My world was the mountain in Hamilton,” he says. “It was a very limited, very parochial view of the world.” Thirty years later, as a vice-president with Sun Life Financial, spearheading the insurer’s entry into the Indian market as well as working on its entry into China, Comerford admits his perspective has been irrevocably altered. “It has become clear and unmistakable in my mind that you have to operate on a world platform. Speed to market and quality of execution: that’s what protects jobs, that’s just the reality,” he says from his Toronto office. “That micro world that you want to live in, the world of protecting what you had in the past, you realize is a fleeting thought. It’s like keeping a butterfly in a bottle; it’s beautiful and you want to keep it there forever, but if you keep it in the bottle, it will die.”
It’s time to set the butterfly free. To do that, Canadians will need to smash through a lot of myths that we have constructed about ourselves — myths about how the world operates and our place in it. We need to stop thinking of ourselves as victims and become “more than an expression of geography.” It’s time to boldly embrace who we are, and not just behind the comfort and security of our drawn curtains. Canada and Canadian companies need to learn how to brand themselves, and not only to their home audience but to the world. As one frequent traveller to China put it: “There is a Starbucks opening on every corner in China— they have a great brand. Canada doesn’t have a brand.”
Molson had a brand. But the company never really believed in it. If it had, its breakthrough “I am Canadian” ad campaign would have become a rallying cry for taking on the world instead of a tired rant predicated on, as one marketing expert observed, a “single-minded, almost simple-minded patriotism.”5 By opting to coast on a cheap appeal to Canadian pride while selling its beer in ugly old brown bottles, Molson chose easy profits at home over global conquest. It was a formula that was doomed to fail. “They had such a short-term emphasis on profit that they fucked their long-term prospects,” says Michael Palmer of Veritas. Molson, concluded one newspaper columnist, inevitably became “trapped in its own marketing impotence.”6 The question is, will the rest of Canada make the same mistake, or will it find a new anthem?
In 1998, while working as a reporter in South America, I took a trip to Patagonia. Having crossed over the border from Chile, I had made my way to the windswept coastal town of Rio Gallegos in Argentina. Walking into a souvenir shop on the town’s deserted main strip, I noticed there wasn’t much to buy and I soon found myself talking with the store’s disconsolate owner. As he observed his empty shop, a layer of dust covering the leather boots and crude silver knick-knacks, he bitterly lamented the dire situation his country was in, made all the more evident when compared with the boom in neighbouring Chile.
Argentina produces more than twice as much wine as Chile and is believed to have even richer mineral deposits. Yet it is Chile, a tiny sliver of a country that is almost completely consumed by mountainous terrain and uninhabitable desert, that has emerged as the economic dynamo, while Argentina, a vast expanse of unmined opportunity, remains a backwater. “You know what the Chileans have that we don’t?” said the shopkeeper. “They know who they are.”
It’s something Canadians might do well to think about. At the time, Molson’s “I am Canadian” seemed to sum up the country’s essence. But on reflection, do we know what it really means?
* Interbrew subsequently acquired Brazil’s Ambev and is now called InBev.
PART ONE WHY WE CAN’ T COMPETE ABROAD, OR WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR COJONES ?
“Canada is the most comfortable country in the world. You are nice people, but you are not a trading nation.”
BORIS ROUSSEFF, EUROPE AN TRADE EXPERT
IT’S 3 PM and the patio of El Coronito restaurant in downtown Mexico City is quickly filling up with businessmen in dark suits and open-necked dress shirts meeting for lunch. The smog that normally hangs over the Mexican capital like a dusty grey-brown shroud has temporarily lifted to reveal a cloudless, azure sky. A bright white sun beats down on tables cluttered with bottles of pale beer and tequila shots, its rays refracting in the mass of glass and crystalline liquid, creating a dazzling glare.
Bruno Perron orders his usual michelada, a Mexican beer doused with chili and a squirt of lime, before reaching for a tortilla and filling it with a mixture of melted cheese and chorizo. If it weren’t for the slight French inflection in his otherwise flawless Spanish and the Quebec licence plate on the suv he drives like a demon through the city’s crumbling streets, he could easily pass as Mexican.
Originally from the small Quebec town of Thetford Mines, Perron moved south more than a decade ago. He had just finished university and had a job offer from a large mutual fund company. But somehow, perhaps after watching his hometown, one of the world’s largest producers of asbestos, go from boom to bust, he figured he needed a competitive edge over the three thousand other students in his graduating class. The much-vaunted North American Free Trade Agreement, NAFTA, was just being signed. The twenty-something figured that if he learned Spanish and got a handle on the Mexican market, it would give him an advantage when he eventually moved back to Montreal.
“Looking ten years ahead, I thought Mexico was going to be important,” says Perron. “Unfortunately, it is not as important as I thought it would be.”
Far from it. More than a decade after NAFTA was signed, the road paved into the dense, jumbled market is largely deserted. While Americans, Europeans and Asians have piled in to sell product to Mexico’s young and underserved population or outsourced manufacturing to take advantage of lower labour costs, Canadians have eschewed Mexico’s arid northern industrial parks and rutted city streets for the silky-white sand beaches of Cancún.
Canadian business, either baffled by Mexico’s seemingly inscrutable business culture, leery of corruption or dismissive of its still developing market, has largely opted out. While bilateral trade has tripled since 1994, Canada sells a scant 0.7 per cent of its merchandise goods to Mexico. As of 2005, Canada had invested a measly $3.1 billion, equivalent to less than 1 per cent of its worldwide assets7 and a drop in the bucket compared with the more than $130 billion in foreign investment that has poured into Mexico since 1994.
It is not as if the Mexicans didn’t want Canadian investment. In fact, as they launched the largest sell-off of state-owned assets in Mexican history in the late 1980s and 1990s, they actively courted Canadians. Modest, manageable and politically neutral, the Canadians offered a middle road between powerful American interests still tainted by a history of war, annexation and economic imperialism and the powerful clutch of Mexican families