February 2025
Dear friends, colleagues and supporters of the Centre for Trade and Trade Infrastructure (and those who remember when it was the Trade and Investment Centre):
I’ll be brief (that’s your first laugh in this otherwise mostly serious letter).
So, here we are. For the past decade we, collectively, have done good for the West and for Canada, and we have done it well. We have developed new ideas, research and articulations of Western interests that have been inserted into regional, national and hemispheric debates and policymaking. Recently, since Sharon Sun joined, we’ve even had some success on this front in Asia.
I have always thought of and attempted to do this work as a collaborative undertaking. Your input, willingness to answer the phone, provide data, arrange and host meetings and amplify our work has been critical for our collective success. That especially includes my colleagues at CWF, who, as opposed to the occasional phone call and meeting, have had to deal with me full-time day in, day out. (Sharing the credit is always good manners as well as good legal strategy for when the RCMP or FBI call…maybe too soon for that joke?)
So, individually and collectively, thank you.
Our body of work includes, in order of randomness not importance, conducting some of the deepest research on Canadian agricultural trade with China to better defend Western interests and to lay the foundation for a resetting of the relationship, data and advocacy for Western interests to be included in Canada’s generational shift to the Indo-Pacific, research and advocacy to realize a new plant protein industry in Western Canada which realizes the long-held dream of increasing value-added production on the Prairies, and we co-organized and ran the country’s only conference on the Indo-Pacific held in Ottawa – taking Western views and concerns into the centre of policymaking in the nation’s capital. Recently, we flooded the field with research, unique Western-based analysis and advocacy on relations with a changed U.S. Five years ago, we warned of the return of tariffs should Trump return to power, a message we reiterated, nuanced and deepened this fall and winter.
Successes have been big and small and sometimes both.
I think back on our work to provide the underlying research and advocacy in support of a private member’s bill, Bill C-294, An Act to Amend the Copyright Act (Interoperability). This act ensures the right of farmers, not large manufacturers in the U.S., to choose the type and brand of equipment they want to use. More than safeguarding choice, this bill helps ensure the survival of the ag equipment, or short line, industry – a small industry in the larger Canadian economy but one that blooms on the Prairies and provides thousands of good-paying, middle-class manufacturing jobs critical to the viability of rural communities. This issue came to us from, literally, the grassroots when a small company in a small prairie village decided that it was not going to roll over and face extinction as U.S. combine and tractor manufacturers threatened to lock them out of interoperating with their equipment. We joined with others to help and eventually we saw one of the rarer sites in Canada: a private member’s bill that received all party, unanimous passage and Royal Assent.
This is not the biggest issue we have undertaken, but, in some ways for the West, it may be one of the more symbolically important; collectively, we can achieve success within the Federation.
We’ve had other successes and failures on the national scale. Our work with a national coalition and partners in Ottawa to develop a national trade infrastructure plan and to bring the Council of the Federation to agree to move from Shovel Ready to Shovel Worthy infrastructure has altered the national conversation. On the Prairies, this work helped to bring the three provinces together to actively work on data sharing, unified planning and cooperation which has given the Prairies a leg up on the rest of the country in increasing the efficiency, effectiveness and ROI on trade infrastructure spending. Many contributed to this work but here, a singular mention is needed to thank CWF Sr. Fellow and former Saskatchewan Deputy Minister of Highways and Transportation, John Law. None of this trade infrastructure work and success would have been possible without his sacrifices of time and energy.
This is not the end of the road or the obligation to pick up the phone to answer my calls. I am moving across town to the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary as Director of International Policy, where I will continue to focus on North American and China/Indo-Pacific issues. I will continue to be part of CWF as a Sr. Fellow with a CWF email address, so no excuses for not being able to find me. I will also continue to donate to CWF, and I urge you to do the same.
Finally, an added thank you for not just your cooperation but your friendship. One of the real joys of this job was being able to work with people whose company I enjoyed (yes, even the Blue Bombers fans).
Best regards and in eternal hope for the Grey Cup to return to Saskatchewan (hey, my first green and white team just won a Super Bowl); I remain faithfully your humble servant,
C
Ok, you don’t laugh that long at the last line…