OTTAWA — Last month, Ramee Mossa had a very important visit from representatives of a Taiwanese industrial conglomerate. FTEX, his four-year-old Montreal startup, develops smaller, more efficient motor drives for battery-powered scooters, bikes and mopeds. Taiwan is a manufacturing hub for such light vehicles, and the sector there is “electrifying very quickly,” said Mossa. “It’s a very large market for us.”

The visitors could be a partner for FTEX in new overseas opportunities, and the relationship was forged with the help of a team of federal government trade fixers. Ottawa needs firms like Mossa’s to win business in places like Taiwan if Canada is to diversify exports and reduce our reliance on the U.S. Now, the Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) is expanding services for companies in the innovation economy and helping legacy firms adapt to the increasing digitization of commerce.

In its November 2018 fall economic statement, the Liberal government set a target of increasing Canada’s overseas exports by 50 per cent by 2025 and pledged $1.1 billion over six years for infrastructure and programs to help achieve it. More than $275 million of that went to expanding the workforce and operations of the TCS at Global Affairs Canada (GAC).

“We’re about taking what Canada has that’s really amazing and selling it to the world,” said Sara Wilshaw, chief trade commissioner, in an interview with The Logic late last year. The unit’s 1,400 staff in 160 outposts around the world advise Canadian businesses on opportunities, business conduct and regulatory requirements in international markets. The TCS also conducts research on clients’ target countries and sectors, introduces them to useful local contacts, and troubleshoots.

In the first months of the pandemic, “the demand for the problem-solving services went up 150 per cent,” recalled Wilshaw, with companies calling for assistance getting home from already-underway business trips or to find someone to stand in for them in meetings for cancelled ones. The TCS also helped Public Service and Procurement Canada source and move shipments of personal protective equipment, ventilators and later vaccines.

But COVID-19 also disrupted global trade, and progress toward Ottawa’s diversification goal. To stay on track the target of $292 billion in non-U.S. exports by 2025, the government calculated such overseas sales needed to total $231 billion in 2020 and $243 billion in 2021. But in a presentation delivered to a deputy ministers’ committee in March 2021, GAC forecast the real figures would fall significantly short, at $197 billion and $217 billion, respectively.

“Exports dropped precipitously for a little bit,” Wilsha acknowledged. “But it’s really bounced back.” As of November 2021, Canada’s seasonally adjusted international merchandise exports were 22.7 per cent higher than February 2020, but non-U.S. ones were up only about 9.9 per cent, according to Statistics Canada data; services exports were still marginally below pre-pandemic levels.

Wilshaw said she’s confident the diversification target is achievable, and that since the March 2021 presentation, the department has produced “pretty strong projections”; GAC declined to provide them to The Logic, citing the impact of the Omicron variant. The TCS is adapting its services for the post-pandemic economy, focusing on digital business, IP and growth sectors like cleantech, biotech and agtech.

“The folks in the more traditional sectors tend to be larger and a little more concentrated—there are only so many Canfors out there [or] Bombardiers,” said Wilshaw. “The tech and digital companies are small, fast [and] agile, and they’re just popping up everywhere.” Of the unit’s 17,000 clients, over 3,200 are in ICT, with 1,400 in life sciences and 1,325 in cleantech.

The CanExport program, which previously subsidized executives’ travel to explore new markets or attend trade shows, has been expanded to fund firms’ e-commerce expansions, search-engine optimization and digital marketing. The troupe of businesses that typically accompanied a minister on a trade mission has grown from 30 to as many as 300 as the trips have gone virtual, including smaller firms that would earlier have been put off by the travel costs and time.

The TCS is also offering more IP services, including giving clients funding to pay for expertise and filing costs for patents, trademarks and other protections in international markets. The organization has enlisted the Canadian Intellectual Property Office and federally funded Innovation Asset Collective to train its own staff, and now has dedicated IP experts in the EU, U.S. and China.

The organization has staff focused on cleantech around the world, and Wilshaw said it facilitated $175 million in business agreements in the 2020–21 fiscal year. For example, on-the-ground commissioners in Berlin or Munich might connect Canadian EV-component firms with German automakers.

The TCS’ Canadian Technology Accelerator (CTA) program has also gone virtual during the pandemic. The 13 cohort-based CTAs are run out of nine different countries, including a deep-technology stream in India and digital-energy one in the U.K. added in November 2021.

Taiwan was always in Mossa’s sights, but he didn’t expect to get there so soon. “We’re still small, as a company,” he said; FTEX has 15 staff. “Taiwanese companies tend to be much, much larger.” And the pandemic created practical challenges. “Doing business development in a foreign country without being able to travel is very difficult.”

With the world in lockdown, Mossa decided to enroll FTEX in the summer 2020 cohort of the Taipei autotech CTA. He’d first met staff from the Taiwanese industrial conglomerate whose staff recently visited at a European trade show. CTA staff vouched for FTEX and helped bridge differences in business culture.

The program also connected Mossa and his team to potential investors, manufacturers, distributors and clients. “They were in touch with the direct decision-makers in huge public companies,” he said. FTEX plans to lean on the TCS again when it eventually opens an office in Taiwan.

Alexandre Bernier, vice-president of finance at Montreal-based Plotly, participated in the Japan-based digital-technology CTA last spring. “We’ve been introduced to a lot of relevant people, who provided honest feedback on how we’re positioned in our offering versus what the [local] market offers,” he said.

The 67-person firm makes developer tools for computational science and AI, primarily for corporate giants in the life-sciences, financial-services, utilities and energy and technology and telecommunications sectors. Most of its clientele is headquartered in North America.

Internationally, Bernier said Plotly was looking for a country with a concentration of potential customers, a rich technical-talent base and a timezone that would complement its current offices and allow it to maintain 24/7 support for its highly regulated clients. It considered South Korea and Singapore, and was invited to CTAs in Germany and Taiwan before picking the Japanese program.

The eight, three-hour sessions included introductions to potential partners, sales-pitch feedback from local investors and information about the state of Japan’s innovation and digital landscape. VCs that Bernier met through the CTA have helped Plotly identify the right kinds of potential clients. In January, the company had a major meeting with one such firm.

The Liberal government may have set its overseas export target in light of strained economic relations with the Trump administration, but many of the same tensions around autos, lumber and digital taxes persist today with the Biden administration in office. The success of Ottawa’s trade-diversification strategy depends on programs like the CTA paying off for firms like FTEX and Plotly.

While politicians decide which sectors to support domestically and deals to sign internationally, Wilshaw and her team of trade fixers will keep making connections and solving problems. “This is a trading nation,” she said. “It’s always been a trading nation.”