MONTREAL — The Obama administration is looking to Canada to help realize its goal of doubling U.S. exports by 2015, but Canadian business leaders say that won’t happen unless a number of trade irritants are dealt with first.
President Barack Obama set the ambitious target in his most recent State of the Union address.
It was was initially met with skepticism by a number of trade experts who pointed to a shrinking market for U.S. goods.
Now the administration is indicating that Canada is the natural place to gauge whether the plan has a chance of success.
“If the National Export Initiative is going to work, it has to start here in Canada,” U.S. Ambassador David Jacobson said Thursday in Montreal.
Jacobson was taking part in a series of annual meetings aimed at introducing U.S. companies to the Canadian market.
He was accompanied by Suresh Kumar, the assistant secretary of commerce, who pointed out that fewer than one per cent of U.S. companies export.
Canada is among the easiest markets for Americans to access and will therefore have a big role to play in the initiative, Kumar said.
“When we look back and say, ’Which are the markets we understand? Where do we have laws and regulatory reforms which are similar to ours?’, these are the shared economies we need to first approach,” he said following a luncheon speech.
“We (want) to look at who are the exporters in the U.S. who are not exporting to Canada, and why not, and introduce them to the right parties.”
But such talk risks sounding hollow to Canada’s business community, which fought bitterly against protectionist Buy America legislation and complained for years about border flows.
“It’s not necessarily in any way detrimental for us to be able to increase the amount we buy from the U.S., but the U.S. has to understand this is a two-way process,” said Perrin Beatty, president and CEO of the Canadian Chambre of Commerce.
“You can’t be following policies like that and expect to be successful in terms of boosting your exports to other countries.”
Even though Ottawa was able to extract concessions on Buy America, Beatty called it a “virus in the system” that continues to pose problems for several Canadian businesses.
“It’s creating serious problems at the state and local level where Canadian suppliers are being shut of contracts even after the agreement,” he said.
There are signs, however, of some willingness from American politicians to address these issues.
In a recent speech to the Canadian-American Business Council in Washington, Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), a member of the influential Senate Foreign Relations Committee, warned against letting trade with Canada slip as a priority.
She noted that Mexico overtook Canada last year as New Hampshire’s largest market for exports, which she called a “worrying trend.”
“If we are to maintain competitiveness and keep our economies moving forward, we need to find ways to curb this downturn and once again grow our relationship,” Shaheen said in her speech.
On recent trips to Washington, Beatty has also detected a newfound openness to at least discussing such long-time sticking points as border delays stemming from the post 9-11 security regime.
“We had seen a border that had continued to thicken and be more expensive to cross,” he said.
“Yet lately there has been an attempt, or at least a signal sent by the U.S., of a willingness to take a fresh approach.”
Beatty, a former cabinet minister in 1980s, urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to impress upon Obama at the upcoming G8 and G20 meetings of the need to make the countries’ bilateral relationship more productive.
Figures released earlier this month indicated Canadian imports from the U.S. grew 0.9 per cent in April.
Canada’s trade surplus with the United States remained unchanged from March at $3.8 billion.