Canada's prime minister is like a modern day Willy Loman, lugging his battered suitcase from capital to capital

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It’s probably unfair, but as Mark Carney winds up his latest international sales trip, I can’t shake the image of the prime minister as a modern day Willy Loman, lugging his battered suitcase from capital to capital, hawking Canada’s canola crop and energy assets like they’re a snazzy new set of brogues.

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Carney, unlike Loman, is neither old nor worn out and Canada isn’t a hopeless case. But the impression persists of a country raised with a dream and a drive to succeed, yet which finds itself in middle age, still out on the road peddling itself as a place with more to offer than softwood lumber and maple syrup.

After almost a year of slogging through foreign markets in efforts to sell Canada, Carney can justifiably claim to have left few doors unknocked-on. He checked in with all the usual customers — France, Britain, Mexico, all those European countries huddled together in Brussels — but also pitched a bevy of other prospects not usually topping the trade list: Egypt, Latvia, Malaysia, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates … Not all were formal business junkets but you can never tell when you’ll make a sale.

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The second stop on this latest trek was the first by any Canadian prime minister to Qatar, which has spent decades building itself into a tiny powerhouse of big money........

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