A recently launched federal office mandated with helping domestic companies secure international contracts is a good start in helping reach a goal to double exports to non-U.S. markets, but other important factors in that uphill battle will include expanding trade infrastructure to make Canada’s goods price-competitive, according to trade experts.
“The most straightforward [issue] is to be price competitive—reducing the cost of these exports—which is not just the export itself; it also has to do with transportation costs [and] has to do with infrastructure costs,” said Diya Jiang, a research manager specializing in international trade at the University of Calgary. “It is very costly to transfer something from the East Coast—from Quebec, from Ontario—all the way to B.C., and it makes it so cost inefficient that that creates this artificial barrier.”
Canada’s Strategic Exports Office (SEO), established at Global Affairs Canada, was announced on July 30 by International Trade Minister Maninder Sidhu (Brampton East, Ont.) as a way to enhance Canada’s ability to secure international commercial opportunities for strategic sectors. The new office will track and manage large-scale global commercial opportunities deemed critical to Canada’s economic interests and help align senior government engagement and ministerial support to help secure contracts. The new office factors into a larger trade diversification plan by Ottawa to double domestic exports to markets beyond the United States by 2035.
Jiang told The Hill Times that the SEO will help increase the efficiency of Canada’s trade by centralizing efforts, adding that the current global trade environment faces “a lot of uncertainties.” Sweeping global tariffs from U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has fuelled “a little bit of a protectionist trend” around the world, she said.
“We were seeing a little bit of an interesting paradox where there is rising protectionism … but at same time, there is a heightened demand for critical goods, including critical minerals,” she said. “A lot of Asian countries have always been relatively protectionist, but we’re also seeing that from our European allies. With that being said … there is also an increased demand on goods that are considered critical, particularly resources like energy, oil, and gas.”
Jiang said Canada is heading in the right direction when it comes to trade diversification, but that reaching the goal of doubling exports beyond the U.S. will require more than just the new SEO. Price competitiveness will be another important factor, and that will depend on improved trade infrastructure, according to Jiang.
The Port of Vancouver, Canada’s largest port and primary gateway to the Indo-Pacific, is already over capacity and can’t be rapidly expanded, she said.
Prime Minister Mark Carney (Nepean, Ont.) has backed a major expansion of the British Columbia-based port, and on July 30 pledged more than $10-billion to support the Vancouver Fraser Port Authority’s Roberts Bank Terminal 2 expansion project. The plan involves building a new three-berth terminal at Roberts Bank in Delta, B.C., to increase the port’s container capacity by 50 per cent.
On June 11, the Fraser Institute released a report arguing that meeting the goal of doubling exports to markets other than the U.S. will be very difficult given the size, strength, and close proximity of the American market.
Domestic trading infrastructure, such as highways, railways, and pipelines have been designed to facilitate trade south of the border due to Canada’s historic reliance on the U.S. as a market for its exports, and diversifying Canada’s trade away from the U.S. will require “substantial investments” to develop offshore markets and improve and expand rail and port infrastructure, according to a press release accompanying the report.
Patricia Goff, a professor of political science and North American studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, told The Hill Times that Ottawa’s goal of doubling Canada’s export markets beyond the U.S. may be achievable, but “it won’t be easy.”
In June, RBC released a report that said the U.S. share of total Canadian exports decreased from 76 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2024 to 68 per cent in the same period in 2025, and that fall in exports to the U.S. was offset by a $29-billion increase in exports to the rest of the world.
However, the report noted that this diversification was not a result of finding new buyers for tariffed products, but rather the increase was a result of a surge in gold prices, which rose more than 60 per cent in 2025. Gold exports to the United Kingdom alone spiked by $17-billion, or 76 per cent, in 2025, making gold Canada’s second-largest export after crude oil, which “significantly cushioned declines in other goods,” according to the report.
Goff said she thinks Canada can reach the prime minister’s exports goal but the question remains of how it will be done.
“What do we want to see? I don’t think we want to see that we [just] amp up oil exports. We want to see a more broad-based shift in exports … in a variety of sectors,” said Goff. “Which are the sectors that are going to lead? Is it going to be left to chance? The answer now is that no, it isn’t. Now that we have the Strategic Exports Office, it’s not going to be left to chance. We’re going to really try to promote exports in certain sectors, and that’s good.”
When asked if Canada’s efforts to diversify trading partners could face difficulty because of a rise in global protectionism, Goff said, “Yes and no.”
She said protectionism is only part of the story, and that there are also opportunities.
“Are some of these protectionist moves problematic? Absolutely, they are. They’re going to get in the way of exports for certain sectors, but the larger picture suggests that there are also opportunities, and I think that’s what we see, for example, with the Carney government ramping up defence production. There’s an opportunity there. Likewise with critical minerals,” she said. “I don’t know if there’s a threat to trade per se as much as there is a sweeping change to how we conduct it—what the terms are under which we conduct it—and so we are adjusting again. That’s part of what the Strategic Exports Office is. That’s an adjustment to this new world.”
Dan Ciuriak, a senior fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation and a consulting economist specializing in international trade, told The Hill Times that when it comes to diversifying trade, the new SEO “can’t hurt.”
“Certainly, the research that I’ve done supports the fact that [government-to-government international trade] matters, and certainly at this particular time, when you’ve got an awful lot of countries scrambling to replace their sales to the United States, which are under the gun given the U.S. tariffs … this can’t hurt,” he said. “I don’t think that there’s anything really new here, but there’s certainly a new urgency in doing it and doing it better.”
Ciuriak described Canada’s goal of doubling exports beyond the U.S. as feasible, in part because new Canadian businesses are being formed with fewer expectations of reliable north-south trade.
“Since the first Trump administration, there’s not been any significant number of new Canadian companies formed that were expressly aimed at exporting to the United States because that secure access evaporated with Trump, and the Biden administration did not do anything to reassure potential Canadian entrepreneurs that access to the U.S. market would be secure,” he said. “Probably half of Canadian firms are new since the first election of the Trump administration, and to the extent that their business model goes to the United States, it is in an area where the Americans need what we sell and they’re not likely to put up barriers.”
Robert Wolfe, professor emeritus at the School of Policy Studies at Queen’s University and a member of the Global Affairs Canada Trade Advisory Council, said that he has some concerns about what “strategic” means with the SEO’s approach.
“It’s a word that can get thrown around quite a bit. In the press release, they talk about defence and security exports and civil exports like aerospace, digital ecosystems, mining, financial services,” he said. “There’s a kind of coherence there, and what’s interesting about them is that they do respond to the notion that the world has changed, that security is more important, that there’s an economic dimension to security; that we should be strengthening our capacity to produce in those sectors, not simply relying on the United States, and one of the ways you do that is by creating more competitive companies that have the ability to sell into bigger markets.”
Sui Sui, a professor and department chair of Global Management Studies at Toronto Metropolitan University, told The Hill Times that the SEO is a “good initiative,” depending on its implementation.
“I hope [the SEO] has sufficient representation; not just large companies, but really a formal mechanism for hearing from smart and diverse exporters, because those firms encounter different barriers and often possess cultural and market knowledge needed for diversification,” she said. “For women, Indigenous, [and] immigrant-owned businesses, they have different barriers and also have different strengths, and they should offer a genuinely differentiated international value proposition based on the capacity and barriers of those firms.”
The SEO is supported by an advisory council that will “provide a forum for strategic dialogue” between the federal government and private sector leaders on trade diversification and SEO operations. The 14-member advisory council includes Lisa Baiton, president and CEO of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers; Ayman Antoun, CEO of OpenText; Mike Greenley, CEO of MDA Space; and Candace Liang, president and CEO of the Canadian Chamber of Commerce.
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