Evaluating Canadian economic diplomacy: Canada's relations with emerging markets in the Americas

Abstract

Under the Canadian Strategy for the Americas, announced in Santiago, Chile, in 2007, the Harper government committed itself to making the Americas a top priority in Canadian foreign policy and to increasing Canada's presence in the region. The Americas Strategy can be seen as a precursor to later attempts by the Canadian government to develop stronger economic ties with the world's “emerging economies.” The 2013 announcement of the Global Markets Action Plan (GMAP) signaled an intensification of the commercial focus of the Americas Strategy (while extending the geographic focus to other emerging economies). This article examines Canadian policies toward Latin America, with particular emphasis on the two largest and most important regional markets, Mexico and Brazil. It argues that the Americas Strategy is best interpreted as a form of “global bricolage”, a haphazard attempt to cobble together a response to the rise of emerging markets in the Americas, rather than a consistent and coherent strategy. As a result, Canada's diplomatic relations with both countries have shifted between indifference and hostility, and the trade record has been lacklustre.

Résumé

Dans le cadre de la stratégie canadienne pour les Amériques annoncée à Santiago du Chili en 2007, le gouvernement Harper s'est engagé à faire des Amériques une priorité absolue pour la politique étrangère du Canada et à augmenter la présence du pays dans la région. Cette stratégie peut être considérée comme un précurseur des tentatives ultérieures du gouvernement canadien de développer des liens économiques plus importants avec les « économies émergentes » dans le monde. L'annonce de la création du Plan d'action sur les marchés mondiaux (PAMM) en 2013 a marqué une intensification du volet commercial de la stratégie pour les Amériques (parallèlement à une extension de son centre d'intérêt géographique à d'autres économies émergentes). Le PAMM définit le concept de la « diplomatie économique » comme la « force motrice des activités du gouvernement canadien à travers son réseau diplomatique international ».

Keywords:

• Latin America
• Mexico
• Brazil
• Americas strategy
• GMAP

Acknowledgements

I thank Julia Calvert for her research assistance, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for its financial support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Brazil, for example, is quite strategic in its foreign policy and can be viewed as having a clear long-term perspective on its foreign policy objectives and how to achieve them.

2. For example, remember that Canada's membership in the G7 (formerly the Group of Eight) occurred in 1976 not purely on the country's own merits as a powerful economy, but because Canada was invited by President Ford to join in order to dilute the European content of the group.

3. The Third Option was presented as a preferable alternative to continuing the status quo of existing policies or pursuing integration with the U.S. economy.

4. Not only were growth rates high until the last year or two, but poverty and inequality rates have improved in almost every country of the region.

5. For more on the history of commercial diplomacy in Canada, see Potter (2004), Head and Ries (2010) and Lee and Hudson (2004).

6. The GMAP is the successor to the Conservative government's 2007 Global Commerce Strategy (GCS). That strategy identified 13 priority markets throughout the world, including Brazil, Mexico and “Latin America and the Caribbean” as a whole.