was approached by a Mexican cabinet minister looking to unload a vast copper mine in northern Mexico. The government was anxious to keep the mine out of the hands of Jorge Larrea, a hard-nosed tycoon who already controlled a number of privatized mines and railroads. Canada seemed like an obvious candidate. “The minister told me price was no object,” said the banker, who set up meetings with Canadian mining companies Noranda and Falconbridge. “The Canadians didn’t even want to look at it,” he said. In 1991 Larrea acquired the mine — Cananea — turning it into a springboard for his company, Grupo México, which went on to buy mines in the United States and Peru and is now the world’s fifth-largest copper producer. As for Noranda and Falconbridge, they no longer exist, having been acquired in a $20 billion hostile takeover by Xstrata and subsumed into its sprawling empire.
In 2001, President Vicente Fox took the unusual step of inviting twenty Canadian energy companies to his private ranch in a bid to coax them into investing in the creaking Mexican energy sector. His country was ramping up its industrial production and was in dire need of new energy capacity. The Canadians, mid-sized and without the political baggage of the Americans, seemed like the perfect fit. “There were twenty guys at the ranch— and only three went in,” said Michael Stewart, former president of B.C.-based Westcoast Energy International and one of the guests.
Of the three, including Westcoast, only the Alberta energy utility TransAlta is left. “People view Mexico as a wild, unsophisticated country, but parts of it are much more sophisticated than Canada, and some parts are much better to do business in than some parts of Canada,” said Stewart from his Calgary office. “You would think people in this town should look there. You can fly to Mexico City in the same time it would take you to get to Halifax — and the food’s better. But it’s tough to get people interested— they’re put off by the bureaucracy, the language and the built-in biases of what they think they can and cannot do.”
It’s the same story in banking. Canada’s Scotiabank and Bank of Montreal (BMO) were among the first foreigners to make careful inroads into Mexico’s tumultuous financial sector. Mexico’s banks had been nationalized in the 1980s and then reprivatized in the early 1990s before a currency crisis in 1994 prompted the collapse of the entire financial sector. In a cautiously astute manoeuvre, BMO swapped Mexican sovereign debt in 1996 for a minority equity stake in Bancomer, the country’s number two bank. The move was expected to position BMO, which already owned Harris Bank in Chicago, as the pre-eminent NAFTA bank. Instead, at the height of a foreign feeding frenzy in the sector, including the massive us$12.5 billion purchase by Citigroup of Mexico’s largest bank in 2001, BMO pulled out of Mexico.
David Winfield, Canada’s former ambassador to Mexico, was on the board of Bancomer at the time. He tried to persuade BMO to buy the bank. “They could have done so much better, and so much better throughout the Americas. BMO was well positioned with Harris Bank in the United States, and Bancomer was exceptionally well positioned to do Hispanic banking.”
Instead, Tony Comper, BMO’s president and chief executive, “was persuaded it was too big a risk and too expensive,” says Winfield. “I think it was the wrong decision. But it required a visionary to see there was a business opportunity there.” Comper, who was tapped for the “Don Knotts Award for Meekest Ambition” by National Post Business magazine, sold out to the Spanish, who along with the Americans and the HSBC Group dominate the amazingly profitable sector, which boasts returns of over 20 per cent.
It is not as if there are no Canadian companies in Mexico. Scotiabank survived the currency crisis to see its wildly profitable Inverlat subsidiary, which represents just 6 per cent of the Mexican market, contribute 11 per cent to the bank’s bottom line. A number of Quebec companies, like Bombardier, Quebecor and Transcontinental, have also made the trek. In many cases, however, companies such as auto parts maker Magna “were dragged down” by their clients. Others tried, but were unable to penetrate the market. “When I compare the number of Canadian companies going through my office and the rate of success, it was very, very low,” says longtime Mexico hand and former Scotiabank executive Pierre Alarie. “We missed the boat everywhere.”
Troy Wright, former president of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce in Mexico and the managing director of Inverlat’s capital markets division, admits Canada’s track record has been patchy. “The Europeans— Spain, France, Italy — have been aggressive. It’s an attitude you don’t see in Canada. The U.S., when they see an opportunity, they attack,” says Wright. “Canadian companies take the cautious route or no route at all.”
To be sure, there are plenty of risks in doing business in Mexico, and Canadian companies are justified in being cautious. Although conditions have improved significantly, Mexico remains rife with corruption and its democratic institutions are still a work in progress. Yet, it is not the tenuous rule of law or language barriers that seem to most flummox Canadians. As Ambassador Winfield recalls a businessman telling him: “Why should I go to Mexico if I can’t even drink the water?” One Canadian government bureaucrat explained the dilemma this way: “How do we get Canadian companies more engaged in Mexico and not get diarrhea?”
ARMCHAIR TR AVELLERS
At first blush, the delicate constitution of Canadian companies seems incongruous with the country’s claim to be one of the world’s great trading nations. Despite representing 2.5 per cent of the world’s economy and just 0.5 per cent of its population, Canada is the world’s eighth-largest trader, a feat that has secured its place in the elite group of eight most-industrialized countries, the G8. Over the past two decades Canadian trade has expanded exponentially, from 44 per cent of gdp to 72 per cent, making it the most trade-reliant country of the G8.
But while some $1 million in merchandise trade criss-crosses the Canada–U.S. border every minute, cementing the world’s largest single trading relationship,* Canadian “trade” rarely ventures beyond the cozy confines of the northern United States. When it comes to the rest of the world, Canadians are armchair travellers, rarely roused from the familiar contours of the “intramestic” American market to seek their fortune in foreign lands.
Canadians may be trading with, and investing in, the rest of the world more than ever before, but the record to date reveals, if anything, that they are the antithesis of true traders. In every major market from Brazil to China, Canada is facing ever-widening trade deficits as its market share continues to erode under the strain of increased global competition. In 2005, Canada racked up a record $44 billion trade deficit with the rest of the world, and with the odd exception of countries like Lebanon and Sri Lanka, its only trade surplus was generated from just a single country: the United States. As Pierre Alarie, a Canadian veteran of international markets, observed: “If Canada were beside Bosnia instead of the United States, we’d all be bankrupt.”
When it comes to foreign direct investment (FDI), Canada musters the lowest level of outward-bound fdi in the G8 and remains largely absent from the current global push into developing markets. While it’s true that Canada is now a net exporter of fdi for the first time in its history, it’s also true that the third-largest recipient of Canadian foreign investment is Barbados, an offshore tax haven and post office box for dozens of Canadian banks and insurance companies.* According to Statistics Canada, an estimated $88 billion, close to a quarter of Canada’s overseas investment, is parked in similar tax havens in Ireland, Bahrain and the Caribbean.8
“Canada’s trade and investment market share has been falling, falling, falling, year after year, with few exceptions, since the end of the 1970s,” says Glen Hodgson, chief economist at the Conference Board of Canada. The dismal showing comes as little surprise to the rest of the world, which by now has become resigned to Canada’s cursory attempts at international business and seeming unwillingness to wade in and take the time and energy to actually cultivate trade. “You are nice people,” says Boris Rousseff, a European businessman who has worked closely with Canadian companies, “but you are not a trading nation.”
A quick tour of world markets reveals Canada’s declining and increasingly peripheral position. In Europe, long considered a second home for Canadian goods and investment, “Canada’s turn seems to have passed,” says one European diplomat who has worked