Thank you to David Atkinson, Managing Director, FX Sales Manager at City National Bank in Los Angeles for the opportunity to discuss the importance of Canada-U.S. economic ties in Southern California and across the country with MAPLE co-founders, Robert Kelle and Stephen Armstrong, on this week's FX Compass podcast.
Canada Day
As it says in our logo, City National Bank is “an RBC company.” The Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) is the largest bank in Canada, founded in 1864. City National® became part of the RBC enterprise in 2015. RBC has repeatedly referred to the U.S. as its “second home market.” On the podcast this week, I speak with Stephen Armstrong and Robert Kelle, both of whom are Canadians living in Southern California (SoCal). In 2014, at the prompting of the Consulate General of Canada in Los Angeles, Stephen and Rob co-founded an organization to help foster economic ties between Canada and SoCal. The result was the MAPLE Business Council®, which formed in 2015 with a mission to provide networking in the furtherance of bilateral trade, investment and entrepreneurship between Canada and SoCal.
The focus of the discussion — as you can imagine — is the unique relationship between Canada and SoCal, as well as the rest of California and the U.S. The stats are impressive. Canada is the second-largest trading partner with the U.S. Three-quarters of Canada’s exports go to the U.S., and Canada buys more from the U.S. than the U.K., Japan and Germany combined.
If you think about it, the reason these stats may be surprising to many people is that you just don’t hear about trade ties with Canada all that often in the U.S., and that’s a good thing. It’s a great relationship and working well, as opposed to many of the trade tensions we continue to have with other areas of the world. We discuss this and a lot more in the podcast. Hope you enjoy.
David Atkinson
David Atkinson, Managing Director, FX Sales Manager, City National Bank, Los Angeles, California