Canada Launches New Global Trade Plan

The Honourable Ed Fast, Minister of International Trade, today released a new trade plan that reflects the changing global landscape, focuses on core Canadian strengths, aligns Canada's trade, development and foreign policy tools to advance commercial interests around the world, and sets concrete targets to grow the presence of Canada's small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in emerging markets. The comprehensive report, entitled the Global Markets Action Plan: The Blueprint for Creating Jobs and Opportunities for Canadians Through Trade, was announced during a keynote speech Minister Fast delivered to the Economic Club of Canada in Ottawa.


"Under the Global Markets Action Plan, our government will concentrate its efforts on markets that hold the greatest promise for Canadian business-and focus on core commercial objectives within those markets," said Minister Fast. "We will do this through vigorous and continual trade promotion, supported by ambitious trade policy. In short, this new plan will play to our strengths and ensure that all of Canada's diplomatic assets are harnessed to support the pursuit of commercial success by Canadian companies and investors. We fully understand that when our businesses succeed abroad, all Canadians benefit from the jobs and opportunities that are created at home."
The plan will target three distinct types of markets:

• emerging markets with broad Canadian interests;
• emerging markets with specific opportunities for Canadian businesses; and
• established markets with broad Canadian interests.

Key elements of the Global Markets Action Plan include:

• a new trade promotion plan that entrenches the concept of "economic diplomacy" by focusing government resources and services in order to maximize the success of Canada's commercial interests in key foreign markets;
• ensuring that Canada's trade policy tools are prioritized toward initiatives that will yield the maximum economic benefits to Canadian workers and businesses;
• sustained efforts to leverage Canada's position as the only G-8 nation to have preferential access to the world's two largest markets-the European Union and the United States-comprising more than 800 million customers, and providing Canada with free trade access to over half of the entire global marketplace; and
• renewed stakeholder linkages to ensure that government priorities are in sync with the needs of businesses, and that the plan adapts to changes in the global economy.