To say that federal Agriculture and Agri-Food Minister Lawrence MacAulay received a warm welcome when he visited the World Pork Expo and the Midwest would be an understatement.
At the giant pig farming show and in the Iowa capital of Des Moines, he was able to meet with heads of America’s main hog farming and pork industry organizations, hob-nob with Iowa business leaders, have discussions with Iowa government and agriculture department officials, and generally reinforce the free-trading relationship that helps both the Canadian and American hog industries to be world-competitive.
He hosted a fancy reception at the ornate World Food Prize Foundation centre that was attended by an impressive array of Iowa business bigwigs.
None of this happened without a lot of planning. MacAulay was on friendly ground due to the quiet and consistent efforts of Canada’s diplomatic service, which operates in the upper Midwest out of the Minneapolis consulate.
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From there, Consul General Beth Richardson and her staff fan out across the Dakotas, Iowa, Nebraska and Minnesota to promote Canadian business, build Canada-U.S. relationships, work on joint interests and basically keep the relationship as friendly and constructive as possible.
Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Mike Naig was effusive in his praise of the consulate, joking that it should be moved south to Des Moines from Minneapolis, “or at least give Evan (Burt) a condo (here.) We’ll call it Consulate-Lite.”
Burt works out of the Minneapolis consulate but frequently visits Des Moines to work on Canada-Iowa issues, hence Naig’s joke. Within Des Moines is Canada’s honorary consul, Mary Lawyer, who is a prominent Iowan and a person able to get meetings with important people in the state, a number of people at the reception told me.
After the reception, Naig told me the consulate’s work is valued.
“We appreciate they take a keen interest in what’s happening in Iowa. They check in on us regularly.”
It’s about more than just flogging two-way trade and hammering through tricky cross-border issues. It’s also about human relationships that flow up and down the highway from, particularly, southern Manitoba to central Iowa.
In late May, five people in the town of Greenfield, Iowa, were killed by a savage storm. MacAulay mentioned the tragedy in his address to the reception, no doubt prepped on it by consulate staff.
“They reach out and offer condolences,” Naig said to me. “That’s meaningful to people, to know that others do care and pay attention to what happens in a state like ours.”
The Canadian-U.S. cooperation at D-Day was also invoked at the reception, which occurred on the 80th anniversary of the historic triumph.
A warm Canada-U.S. feeling lingered in the Midwest air after the visit, the tour of the Expo, and the reception, which is probably the exact impact the consulate hoped for.
With dozens of Canadian companies exhibiting their products at the Expo, hundreds of Canadian hog producers building relationships with American partners and customers, hundreds of trucks driving up and down the international highway every day, millions of piglets travelling south to the Midwest and thousands of tonnes of U.S. pork and corn coming north into Canada, keeping that relationship warm and friendly is vital.
It’s good we have people working on that every day, even if we seldom realize they exist.
