Branding Canada: The Renaissance of Canada's Commercial Diplomacy

Abstract

Diplomacy has always been concerned with trade. Ambassadors have traditionally been their country’s chief trade promotion officers. Today, with the forces of globalization ensuring greater and greater economic integration, government’s role in responding to and managing this process bears greater scrutiny. While there is extensive literature on economic and trade diplomacy, encompassing international negotiations on market access, far less attention has been devoted to commercial diplomacy, defined as the application of the tools of diplomacy to help bring about specific commercial gains through promoting exports, attracting inward investment and preserving outward investment opportunities, and encouraging the benefits of technological transfer. This is not to suggest that commercial and economic diplomacy are separate activities; they are irrevocably intertwined: commercial diplomacy aims to exploit comparative advantages and capitalize on the international opportunities created by economic diplomacy and the evolution of markets. It is now referred to as part of the “new diplomacy” (including greater “public diplomacy”) because of the increased time being devoted by the governments of both developing and industrial countries to advocacy and nation-branding in their foreign policy making. This paper will examine how the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT) and, specifically, its Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) have responded to the pace of economic globalization over the last decade. The case is instructive for three reasons. First, the foreign ministry’s role as coordinator, moderator, and facilitator is more important than ever because of the accelerating consequences of international negotiations and regimes for national policy making. For a highly open economy such as Canada in which the exports of goods and services as a share of GDP climbed from 26 percent in 1990 to 41 percent in 2002, economic and commercial diplomacy have been accorded a much higher priority in foreign policymaking. Second, globalization has come to extend …