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Women across male-dominated fields find it tough to rise through the ranks of their companies or to achieve parity in pay and influence with men. For Canadian Consul General Louise Blais, this universal challenge has turned out to be a hard-won advantage.
The veteran diplomat has been posted in places like Japan, where she didn’t have the luxury of waiting for interlocutors that shared her gender or interests. She had to make her own opportunities.
“It’s difficult to get the invitation to go play golf or go and have a beer with a Japanese man at the end of the day. But you have to know that this is where the work happens,” said Ms. Blais, who represents Canada’s interests in the Southeast U.S.
[pullquote]”We have your interest at heart as much as we have our interest at heart. We need you to be happy so we can be happy. It sounds corny, but it’s true.”[/pullquote]
Finding a constant balance between cultural adaptation and personal authenticity as a diplomat, wife and mother of two ended up making her more creative and persistent in her work.
A Quebec native who began her career as an art theft analyst at Interpol in Europe, Ms. Blais believes that sometimes getting things done requires an exceptional level of consideration and respect for the other party, mixed with a bit of panache.
“What I try to do is I try to be memorable. I try to make an impact by saying something that they might not expect,” she told Global Atlanta in a Consular Conversations interview at Miller & Martin PLLC’s offices Feb. 24. “Sometimes that might surprise because people don’t expect that from a diplomat. I learned through trial and error, and I’ve learned that that’s working quite well. When people feel that you’re authentic and that you appreciate them at the same time, I don’t think you can go wrong.”
Her own career experience dovetails well with some of the work she’s doing now to promote women’s entrepreneurship. Because they’re often responsible for their families, women don’t always take the same risks as their male counterparts, which can limit their companies’ growth, Ms. Blais said.
“It has been my experience that a lot of women-led companies tend to play for keeps and that scaling or exporting is that bridge too far because they’ve got families they need to protect,” she said.
Ms. Blais has organized a conference in Atlanta on women in business across the NAFTA region to help them think seriously about issues around growing their business and taking it global. To be held this summer, this year’s will be the second annual event.
“We are looking build linkages between Canadian and Mexican and American business leaders so that we can demystify that whole international piece to business ownership,” she said.
Women entrepreneurship has also been a natural bridge in an uncertain Canada-U.S. relationship early on in the administration of President Donald Trump, who aimed his ire at Mexico and vowed to renegotiate NAFTA without seeming to consider how that process would affect America’s neighbor to the north and top trading partner.
Ms. Blais was privy to some of the early conversations around Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s initial visit with Mr. Trump, which occurred a week before she sat down for the Global Atlanta interview.
Leading countries that work closely together, the two men seem diametrically opposed. Mr. Trudeau is young, friendly to refugees and immigrants and a self-proclaimed feminist who has appointed women for half of his cabinet positions. Mr. Trump, the oldest U.S. president at 70, has advocated closing off U.S. borders and has been under fire for his treatment of women.
For Canada, the stakes were high to find common ground.
“We’re 35 million; you’re 300 (million) plus. There’s really not much of what you do that doesn’t affect us, and with all this talk that’s going on that first meeting was enormously important,” Ms. Blais said. Canada’s goal was a position that the country has often taken: to demonstrate that it’s a partner — not a source of trouble.
That’s when the idea of a council for the advancement of women’s entrepreneurship was formed, with Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter, a White House staffer and a self-styled advocate for women in the workplace, at the center.
While the initiative may have been somewhat overshadowed by an exaggerated viral snapshot of Mr. Trudeau’s facial expression in the moment before he shook Mr. Trump’s hand at a press conference, it feeds into what both men want to achieve: job creation.
“If you want to grow middle-class jobs and you want to grow your economy, women are at the center of the equation,” Ms. Blais said.
NAFTA and Trade Issues
Those jobs, particularly in manufacturing, were a centerpiece Mr. Trump’s campaign. The president won votes across the Rust Belt by promising to bring back U.S. manufacturing jobs. If he had a nuanced understanding of how trade with Canada aids American competitiveness, he didn’t show it when bashing NAFTA, which he called “the worst deal ever made.” Advocates say the agreement lowers costs and helps North American companies compete on the world stage, mainly through the sharing of components across borders.
Ms. Blais said that while Canada was spared Trump’s harshest campaign rhetoric, what happens to Mexico on the deal happens to Canada. A turning point came during the inauguration, when Mr. Trump doubled down on his “America First” rhetoric, focusing on terms that make Canadians cringe: buy American, hire American, protectionism.
“It was unusual to have that kind of language, and at that point I think it was a real sense of, ‘Wait a second, I’m not sure that Canada is going to be immune from all of this if we don’t spend a lot of time talking about the negative impact,’” Ms. Blais said. “That’s what I’ve been doing.”
The consul general has spoken at state legislatures around the South, including in Georgia, finding a refreshing openness to her views in a region where for most states Canada is the largest trading partner.
But sometimes leaders fail to see the urgency in Mr. Trump’s language and the seeming contradictions in his proposed policies. Many favor corporate tax reform and deregulation, but the current proposals include a so-called “border-adjustment tax,” a 20 percent levy on goods coming into the U.S. Ms. Blais said that would hurt U.S. producers by raising the cost of components that Canada produces more efficiently.
“They’re surprised that we’re concerned because they don’t see a disconnect,” she said.
She went on to outline how NAFTA helps the U.S.
“We make you more competitive by selling you goods at good quality, and then guess what, we buy it back from you once you finish assembling it. How much better can it get?” she said. “That story with Canada is completely lost because we don’t have companies like Mercedes-Benz or Komatsu or Yokohama or those kinds of big names. When I talk about the relationship, people don’t really realize quite how integrated we’ve become.”
Canada, she said, agrees that the 22-year-old deal could stand to be tweaked, given that it doesn’t cover areas of the new digital economy or the movement of skilled workers. The Trump administration has seemed to soften its stance in recent days. A draft letter sent to Congress by the U.S. Trade Representative’s office showed proposed changes on labor, environmental standards and rules of origin that looked similar to those outlined in the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a deal Mr. Trump also lashed out against. Canada’s ambassador said this month that the country is looking at the proposed renegotiation as an opportunity, not a confrontation.
Other administration officials have suggested that the U.S. would like better access to Canadian and Mexican procurement projects. Ms. Blais said Canada would like to see movement on a longstanding pain point for Canada: “Buy American” provisions on federal infrastructure projects.
She admits that the sentiment sounds good but argues that these provisions lead to higher costs, reducing the number of projects that can be undertaken and the jobs they create.
“It’s slightly more complex than that, but it boils down to that,” she said.
All in all, Canada is interested in finding ways industries of the Southeast U.S. and the country can complement each other.
Ms. Blais believes she has discovered one in the film sector: A recent EY study commissioned by the consulate revealed that filmmakers already benefiting from Georgia’s production tax incentives could save millions of dollars through Canada’s tax savings on post-production work versus taking it back to Hollywood.
These measures are all about advancing an already positive and productive bilateral relationship, she said.
“We have your interest at heart as much as we have our interest at heart. We need you to be happy so we can be happy. It sounds corny, but it’s true.”
