Nationalist Gobbledegook: The Free Trade Papers
It has now been four years since Brian Mulroney and Ronald Reagan signed the free-trade pact and the mythmakers are out in full force trying to craft revisionist accounts of how we got there. Three books with free trade as their main…
The Trade Commissioner Service: A Different Second Century
1994 will mark the centenary of the Trade Commissioner Service (TCS). Our contribution to the Canadian exporting community and to the Canadian economy is cause for celebration. It is also cause for reflection: do we serve the changing needs of Canadian business,…
The State, Business and Industrial Change in Canada
Except for the discussion a year or two ago about a Federal Business Development Bank loan program for strip clubs, we have not heard much about industrial policy lately. It was different back in the 1970s, when a great deal of political…
Canada and the Commonwealth Caribbean
The Commonwealth Caribbean has had ties with Canada stretching back into the eighteenth century colonial system. Yet it, like Latin America, to which it is now more bureaucratically linked, has remained less attractive to the aspiring Foreign Service Officer than have other…
Stanley Vincent Allen
After joining the Trade Commissioner Service in 1932, he served in a wide range of posts; Hamburg, London, Washington (twice), Cape Town, Johannesburg, New York, Sydney, Detroit, and Wellington, and was also Consul General in Chicago. After 41 years of service, he…
The Great Totem Pole Caper
Was it Murphy who said that anything that can go wrong will go wrong? If so, when he formulated his law, he must have had in mind what I will call the great “totem pole caper.” We, in the foreign service, are…
Governments and Corporations in a Shrinking World
(With apologies to Sylvia, to poets everywhere, and to my four small children with whom I spend summers reading vastly superior doggerel. If the above extraordinary work of art does not tell you much about the book, all the better — this…
International Business
Is Canada preparing itself adequately to compete internationally by developing needed expertise in international business? This question was examined at the Corporate Higher Education Forum held in the Autumn of 1988. The following quotations were made by various CEO’s who attended the…
The Honours List: Sylvia Ostry and Genji Okubo
Members of the Canadian foreign service have, over the years, received many honours national and international. In the following articles, we look at two persons recently honoured in two different ways. Mark Schacter prepared a piece on Sylvia Ostry on the occasion…
Commerce sans frontières; Leap of Faith: Free Trade and the Future of Canada; Taking the Initiative: Canada’s Trade Options in a Turbulent World; The United States and Canada: The Quest for Free Trade
Reviewed by Michael Hart
