Recently, MAPLE New York Executive Director, John Costanzo, interviewed Nigel Neale, Consul, Senior Trade Commissioner and Director Trade and Investment at the Consulate General of Canada in New York on the work of the Trade Commissioner team and some of the programs they orchestrate to connect Canadian markets and the Greater New York region.
Mr. Neale is Consul and Senior Trade Commissioner at the Consulate General of Canada in New York since 2018, managing Canada’s trade and investment agenda in NY, NJ, PA, CT, DE and Bermuda. He previously served at Canada’s missions to Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and Bogota. At headquarters, he worked in the NAFTA & Trade Agreements Secretariat leading on the development of trade and gender negotiations in addition to implementing Canada’s in-force FTAs, designed and delivered training programs for the Trade Commissioner Service, and served in the Offices of the Minister and Deputy Minister of International Trade. From 2017-18 he spent a year on interchange with the Office of International Relations & Protocol of the Government of Ontario. He studied at the Universities of Sydney (Master of International Studies), Ottawa (BComm).
Q1. As Head of the Canadian Trade Commissioner Service (TCS) in New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Connecticut and Delaware, can you provide an overview of the work that your TCS team provides?
Thank you for the invitation, John. As Consul and Senior Trade Commissioner, my mandate is to create economic prosperity for Canada by helping Canadian clients scale up, grow and access new international markets. We are a team of 16 operating out of NYC, Buffalo, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
Our work is focused along three vectors: helping innovative Canadian clients across the spectrum of sectors scale and grow via access to capital and sales channels, attracting and expanding investment to and in Canada, and supporting Canada’s creative industries – a sector that has been particularly hard-hit.
We do this by providing Canadian businesses with dedicated support to navigate the local market, unlock valuable business, innovation and investment opportunities by connecting local players to our Canadian clients, and resolving business problems. I want to reinforce the critical role that our partnerships with organizations such as MAPLE Business Council play in delivering value on both sides of the border.
We are part of Canada’s Trade Commissioner Service – 125 years old this year, a global network of over 1,000 trade professionals in 161 cities around the world located in Canadian Embassies or Consulates, with 16 offices across the USA alone - working seamlessly to grow bilateral business.
Q2. The tech industry is booming in NY and Canada. Some would say that the tech talent in the corridor between Waterloo and Quebec rivals that of the Silicon Valley. Why is this, and what are the benefits you can share with our NY-based membership about the tech sector in Canada?
Canada is a global tech leader. Last year, more tech jobs were created in the Toronto region than in Silicon Valley and NYC combined. Many NY tech companies have found great success in establishing operations in Canada. Some examples over the past year that illustrate our value proposition to tech companies:
NYC’s Collective[i] created 30 AI-driven jobs in Montreal to expand its predictive technology footprint for the sales sector.
Mastercard announced a $500 million cybersecurity and tech innovation center in Vancouver, creating over 250 jobs.
Corning, with its focus on tech and advanced optics, opened an R&D center in Montreal that will serve as Corning's global center of software innovation to support emerging technologies such as AI, augmented reality, cloud computing, and data analytics.
There are a number of factors that make Canada so compelling for tech companies:
Canada has an exceptional tech talent pool. Canada has the OECD’s most highly educated workforce, with more than 2.8 million STEM graduates. Tech companies operating in Canada can also access top talent from around the world through the Global Skills Strategy, and bring in highly international skilled workers in as little as two weeks. This program has been a huge advantage for American companies impacted by restrictions to the H-1B visa.
Canada has a supportive tech innovation ecosystem. For example, the Scientific Research and Experimental Development Program offers tech companies tax credits that may allow them to recoup more than 40% of their eligible R&D expenditure.
Canada makes sense for tech companies’ bottom lines. With universal health care, forex savings and lower labor costs, tech companies can grow their business for less – companies we have worked with have halved their operating costs by expanding into Canada. Canadian cities like Ottawa, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Calgary have the lowest tech costs among 50 North American cities.
Unmatched quality of life. Canadians enjoy one of the highest standards of living in the G20. With its public funded healthcare, better work-life balance, high levels of safety, social connections, higher education opportunities and multiculturalism – diversity is our strength - Canada is a great place to live, work and prosper. This environment helps to attract and retain tech workers.
Q3. Does your team work with NY and local companies looking to make investments in Canada… for instance, in growth sectors like tech, AI and life sciences?
Absolutely. Bringing job-creating foreign direct investment to Canada is a fundamental pillar of our work. This spans F500s to AI-powered tech startups and everyone in between. If you are considering establishing operations in Canada, my team can help you every step of the way. Our Trade Commissioners work directly with local companies across a diverse range of sectors in tech and life sciences. We are your one-stop shop for your company for all things Canada and can provide you with a range of complimentary services including:
Helping you develop a business case for investing in Canada
Referring you to tax, legal, employment, and immigration experts
Working with you to access government incentives and tax credits
Introducing you to our Canadian provincial and municipal partners and the Canadian business community
Assist in finding a site for your company’s Canadian operations
Helping you build your Canadian workforce
Please reach out through our LinkedIn page or email via CNGNYTD@international.gc.ca to see how we can help you.
Q4. You’ve shared with me that you run the Canadian Technology Accelerator program out of the Consulate. Can you tell me more about this, and what are your plans for the future?
The Canadian Technology Accelerator program, or CTA, really is the Government of Canada’s most visible and high-touch service for companies in emerging tech verticals. It provides innovative, high-growth and high-potential early-stage Canadian companies access to industry-leading mentoring along with curated direct introductions to strategic partners, investors and customers. It’s this scaling and capital raising that grows our client base to tackle other international markets. Since the program started in 2009, we have collectively helped over 600 companies, raised over half a billion dollars in capital and created over 2200 jobs.
We just concluded three of these flagship programs that ran over the fall.
Our CTA cleantech program is in its ninth year and featured 13 new companies at the cutting edge of carbon-tech/CCUS (carbon capture, utilization and storage), energy efficiency, emissions reduction, solar and prop-tech.
In direct response to both the challenges and opportunities of digitalization brought about by COVID-19, this year we ran CTA programs dedicated to digital health (11 companies ranging from intelligent rehabilitation to digital surgical simulation technology to brain health), and to cybersecurity, privacy and compliance (7 companies in crypto, fraud detection, fintech security and data security). Our objective is to match next-generation solutions for global problems with the capital needed for growth. Check out our landing page here.
But it doesn’t stop there. We run a number of other market-immersion “bootcamps”. Our retail-tech cohort featured companies that develop 3D/AR e-commerce solutions, immersive digital content for empty storefronts and tools to help grocers reduce waste by selling surplus food.
Our cellular and gene therapy bootcamp, run out of Philadelphia given its status as “Cellicon Valley” and home to offices for 80% of the world’s leading pharmaceutical and biotech companies – it really is ground zero in the U.S. for development/commercialization of these therapies.
We have plans to run similar vehicles for seed-stage capital raising and women in cleantech in 2021. On top of that we continue to build relationships with the spectrum of investor entities that are the cornerstone of NYC, promote fintech and infrastructure capabilities, screen Canadian documentary films at DOCNYC, curate B2Bs for Canada’s music publishers in NYC and LA, help more SMEs enter the e-commerce marketplace…our work is varied.
Q5. The Toronto Stock Exchange (TMX Group) is a member of MAPLE Business Council, and recently presented an excellent overview of their mission and market approach here in the US. I understand that you just held a joint event in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia with the TMX Group… what was the focus of this event, and what can you share with us about the type of businesses that participated?
The Toronto Stock Exchange is the third largest national exchange after China/Hong Kong and the US, and represents a valuable set of services for small firms to raise capital, specifically from the associated TSX Venture Exchange which has a lower threshold for listing. In 2019 alone, companies on the TSX and TSXV raised $39 billion, for a total of $263 billion since 2015.
In addition, 40% of trading originates outside of Canada and 25% of member firms are headquartered outside of Canada. This means that out of a total of 221 non-Canadian firms,107 have their HQ in the US. The TSX certainly offers an alternative funding vehicle worthy of consideration.
For our event in Pittsburgh, we partnered with the Pittsburgh Tech Council to recruit the best tech companies in order to present the TMX as a viable financing option for local companies looking to raise capital and grow internationally. We set up a program featuring TMX’s George Khalife, including a presentation and B2Bs.
In Philadelphia, we partnered with Life Sciences PA to leverage the Life Sciences Future – Biopharm conference to pull together a targeted group of young companies developing new and emerging therapies that might not be aware of the opportunity to raise capital through a venture exchange.
This is an effective model and one that I’m already in conversation with you on to explore a session for the MAPLE NY tech community.
Q6. What has your experience been over the course of 2020 – as we all know, it has been a year like no other – and what are your projections for 2021?
It’s been a tough year for our clients but nine months into the pandemic as we close out 2020 I can honestly say that we have quickly and nimbly adapted our services to help our Canadian businesses with even more intent to navigate and succeed in the virtual environment.
What we are obviously paying close attention to are the disruptive and lasting tech trends for the future coming out of the pandemic. From e-commerce and digital payments, to telehealth, to remote work and virtual networking, to logistics and supply-chain, these speak to the notion of “building back better”. NYC and region, known as Silicon Alley and coupled with such deep access to capital, is where we make valuable introductions to Canadian companies looking to grow.
The pandemic response has mobilized our business communities and our government’s top priority is to support Canadians while building back a more resilient economy: strengthening our supply chain for vaccines, pharmaceuticals, PPE and cold-chain logistics; securing additional foreign direct investment from leading Fortune 500s and manufacturers to build hemispheric supply chains; and building critical partnerships for vaccine production (we have signed significant agreements with Pfizer and J&J, both in our territory).
For Canada, the US is “the market of markets” and will always be our most important partner across the board. I always like to point out that Canada exports more to our 5-state territory than to the entire EU. With USMCA in force since July 1, we have promoted the business certainty, stability and predictability that flowed from the renegotiated NAFTA to key binational audiences in Buffalo, Plattsburgh, Rochester, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. This is a “gold standard” free trade agreement that brings important benefits for our exporters on all three sides of the border between Canada, the US and Mexico. Heading into 2021, understanding the agreement as a means to increase trade will be all the more important.
I want to speak to the importance of diverse and inclusive trade as a fundamental element of the work of the Trade Commissioner Service. One of the many unfortunate realities of the pandemic is that it has created even greater inequality and we are committed to doing as much as possible to support our under-represented businesses – those owned and run by Black, Indigenous and People of Colour, women, LGBTQ2+, the disabled and youth. Looking forward to 2021, we are going to be even more intentional and deliberate in our recruitment efforts to bring these companies to market, and we’ll be looking to engage meaningfully with VCs that are focused on investing in these companies.
If there’s one thing I’ve witnessed is that over the course of the pandemic, the shift to virtual engagement has resulted in increased client demand and the ability for us to do more. Cost as a barrier to entry has been virtually eliminated and we are maximizing our reach and efficiency with this model.
I do want to mention that another key to the success of these programs is the deep collaboration we have with our colleagues in other missions. The Cleantech program is a cross-country undertaking with programming in San Francisco, Denver and Boston. Our Digital Health CTA is run jointly with San Francisco. We’re always looking at how to create more value and opportunity for our Canadian clients and that invariably means bringing them – virtually – to other tech hubs in the US.
Thank you Nigel for taking the time to provide our readers with a window on the work of the Canadian Trade Commissioner team at the Consulate General of Canada in New York. We look forward to future collaborations together as we work to bring economic growth and innovation to Canada and the New York Region.
John Costanzo
Executive Director
MAPLE New York Chapter