As Prime Minister Carney crisscrosses the globe in an effort to diversify our trade and investment, he would be well advised to consider a page from Jean Chretien’s playbook. Namely, the Team Canada Trade missions (TC) that he led during his decade in office.

These delegations consisted of the PM, the premiers, the federal trade minister, and several hundred senior business leaders. In later years, he also included representatives from Canadian universities and colleges, and our cultural industries.

Every year, the PM’s delegation would visit a different region of the world for ten days. This would typically allow tours in three or four countries, or two or three cities in a single, large nation. The destinations included China, India, Europe, Japan, Latin America, and South Korea, to name a few.

The trips were highly successful, leading to new trade and investment deals, creating strong international partnerships, and resulting in an impressive media play for Canadian interests in those foreign markets. I saw this firsthand while I was Minister of International Trade.

However, I remain surprised and disappointed, given the model’s effectiveness, that successive government’s have not continued with them. Some prime  ministers, I am told, refused to embrace the TC logo because they viewed it as a ‘Chretien invention’. That was silly thinking, to say the least.

Now that creating new international partnerships has become an urgent and national imperative for PM Carney, thanks to the misguided and damaging actions of Donald Trump, I would urge him to consider re-establishing these TC Missions.

The TC initiative would offer him and Canada many advantages.

First, it would open many important doors for Canadian firms around the globe.

Having the country’s most senior political leaders, all together, made a huge difference in terms of procuring numerous ‘quality’ meetings with counterpart leaders, their senior officials, and their leading companies. The access they created for Canadian businesses was unprecedented. On their own, or even accompanied by a Minister, they could never have enjoyed this level of engagement. As a result, our businesspeople inked numerous trade and........

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