Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a press conference on the roof of the Canadian embassy in Washington, in June, 2019.Kevin Yin is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail and an economics doctoral student at the University of California, Berkeley.
Today’s Global Affairs Canada has an even smaller portion of its staff abroad than its predecessor did under Mr. Trudeau. Employee mistreatment has arguably. The staff is mired in bureaucratic barriers at every turn and lacks even rudimentary regional expertise.
Literacy in local languages, policies and customs is also crucial for export development and wooing investors because it’s essential for building rapport and understanding the needs of our partners. It’s entirely reasonable to demand that a diplomat speak Wolof when she’s trying to find a Senegalese buyer for Canadian wheat, or that she grasp the intricacies of Indian capital controls when trying to attract a Gujarati investor. But not only do we lack this expertise, we actively discourage it.