Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne leads a meeting with business leaders at the Embassy of Canada to China on Thursday.Gilles Sabrié/The Globe and Mail
The chief executives of Canadian insurance and asset-management companies Manulife Financial Corp. and Sun Life Financial Inc. both say they see opportunities for growth in the Chinese market in areas such as health care and investment advice as part of Canada’s push to diversify its exports.
Sun Life CEO Kevin Strain and Manulife CEO Philip Witherington spoke with The Globe and Mail separately on the sidelines of meetings taking place this week in Beijing, where federal Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne is leading a delegation of more than a dozen Canadian business leaders as part of a push to boost trade with China.
China, with 1.4 billion people, is the world’s second-largest economy, after the United States.
“There’s a tremendous opportunity for Canadian businesses to grow here and to build new capabilities and to build new client bases,” Mr. Strain said.
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Mr. Champagne, Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem and some of the business leaders are scheduled to meet Friday with China’s Vice-Premier, He Lifeng, who is responsible for major economic files.
In addition to Mr. Strain and Mr. Witherington, Friday’s business delegation will include Brookfield Asset Management Inc. CEO Connor Teskey, Bank of Montreal vice-chair Scott Brison, National Bank Asia-Pacific chairman Vincent Joli-Coeur and Alex Tam, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce’s managing director and CEO of the bank’s Hong Kong branch.
Prior to entering politics, Mark Carney served as chairman of Brookfield, a major investment company. As Prime Minister, he has agreed to a conflict-of-interest screen related to potential decisions involving the company. Conservative MPs Thursday criticized the inclusion of Brookfield in this week’s meetings.
The delegation will also meet with other senior Chinese officials and financial regulators.
In advance, Mr. Champagne and the central bank Governor held a closed-door round table with Canadian business leaders on Thursday at the Canadian embassy in Beijing.
Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem (left), Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne, and Jennifer May, Ambassador of Canada to China, take part in Ottawa's trade mission to China on Thursday.Gilles Sabrié/The Globe and Mail
In his public opening remarks, Mr. Champagne said the trip is aimed at implementing the Prime Minister’s pledge to diversify and expand global trade in response to a wide range of tariffs on Canadian goods imposed by U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration.
During a January visit, Mr. Carney pledged to increase exports to China by 50 per cent by 2030.
“We’re really putting that in motion today,” Mr. Champagne said. “We know that on the service side, there’s a lot that Canada can offer with respect to the education field, health care, elderly care, insurance, wealth management, and in the banking sector as well. So, we’re going to have a busy next two days.”
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Mr. Macklem also offered his perspective at the start of the meeting.
“We talk about diversifying our trade. We need to do it,” he said. “It’s critical to our prosperity, our productivity, our resilience as a country. Our financial-services industry has a key role to play.”
Canada and China are re-engaging after about eight years of limited formal interactions after the 2018 house arrest of Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou in Canada on a U.S. extradition warrant. That was followed by China arresting and jailing two Canadians on trumped-up espionage charges. They were released in 2021 after Ms. Meng cut a deal with U.S. prosecutors.
The pandemic also contributed to the reduced formal exchanges between the two countries.
However, boosting trade with China risks further irritating Canada’s relationship with the United States, where administration officials have already criticized Mr. Carney’s plans.
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The U.S. is currently pursuing trade-related investigations of 60 countries, including Canada, that could lead to the U.S. imposing new tariffs if it finds Canada is failing to stop foreign goods made with forced labour from entering its market.
The investigations are widely viewed as an effort by the U.S. to urge other countries to take a harder line on imports from China.
Goldy Hyder, president and CEO of the Business Council of Canada, said in an e-mail that Mr. Trump is also pushing for expanded trade with China and recently rescheduled a trip to China for May that would have taken place this week at the same time as the Canadian delegation.
“Canada has strong foreign-investment guidelines in place, as does the United States. Both countries engage with China economically,” he said.
“The Canada-China relationship was strained for a number of years and there are still issues on which our two countries disagree. But these trips,” he said, “represent the Carney government’s desire to recalibrate the bilateral relationship with a determined and decisive effort to look forward.”
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Mr. Hyder recently wrapped up his first visit to China in seven years and is planning to return with a Canadian business delegation in the fall when China plays host to the 2026 Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Shenzhen.
As for the specific sectors that Canadian companies are looking at, Mr. Strain, the head of Sun Life, said China’s recent pension reforms – which include a greater focus on private savings for retirement – create openings for companies like his.
“There’s an opportunity for us to be a player on the pension side,” he said.
Mr. Champagne meets Manulife CEO Philip Witherington.Gilles Sabrié/The Globe and Mail
Manulife’s Mr. Witherington, who has spent a large part of his business career working in senior roles in Asia, said the shifting makeup of China’s consumer economy is also a factor.
While China’s population has stabilized and is now projected to decline, he said the fact that the average wealth of Chinese consumers is “growing dramatically” creates several business opportunities.
“China is a unique story,” he said. “It’s the per capita level of wealth combined with the aging demographics that creates long-term health care needs, insurance needs, wealth-management needs, retirement needs, and this is a sweet spot for financial-services groups such as Manulife.”
Mr. Witherington said Canadian experience in these areas is valuable to China, while benefiting Canada in terms of head-office jobs and generating returns for investors.
He has previously referred to the U.S., China and India as “mega-economies” that are all priorities for Manulife.
“We believe, and I believe, that it’s critical that we have a presence and a scale presence in each of those mega-economies of the future,” he said Thursday. “And that does include the U.S. It does include China. It does include India. And it also includes being the leader in our home market of Canada. Strategically, this is all important to us.”