Two seemingly disparate events this week expose a stark truth about what the world wants from Canada.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi was in Ottawa to buy some uranium to fuel the country's nuclear plants.
And in Winnipeg, a Saudi-U.S. group bought what's left of the Canadian Wheat Board, the government's former grain marketing monopoly.
To much of the world, Canadians are what they always have been – hewers of wood and drawers of water.
Ottawa has a strategy of diversifying our trade relations into distant and fast-growing markets, including Asia and the Middle East, while demanding better access for investors and knowledge-based exporters.
But in the end, what many of these countries really covet is our wheat, uranium, oil, iron ore, nickel and potash.
Mr. Modi, for example, wants to transform India into a manufacturing powerhouse. He talked this week about wanting Canada to become a "key partner" in every facet of its economic development. But when he was asked by a reporter what India wanted from Canada in ongoing bilateral trade talks, he seemed to have mainly our natural resources on his mind.
"India … can only become a manufacturing hub when we can get the raw materials required," Mr. Modi said through a translator, with Prime Minister Stephen Harper at his side. "The raw materials that are required in India are present in Canada in huge quantities. And therefore, our relations are such that your skills, your raw materials and our requirements actually coincide."
India no longer wants our technology. It needs our resources, our investment pools and our open markets.
And that is one of the chronic challenges that Canada faces as it tries to expand trade with rapidly growing emerging economies, such as India, China or Brazil. Canada's markets are already mostly open to these countries. Because tariffs and other investment barriers are relatively low, the Indias of the world can already sell freely here, as well to buy direct stakes in our resource production.
Canadian exporters typically face greater trade obstacles going the other way, including high tariffs, foreign investment barriers and stifling bureaucracies. Mr. Modi's reform-minded government has begun to dismantle many of those barriers, but progress is slow and politically sensitive.
India, for example, limits foreign investors to 49-per-cent ownership of local joint ventures. Restrictions are particularly high in sectors such as financial services and mining, two industries where Canada has competitive advantages.
The lack of balance is reflected in two-way investment. In 2013, Indian investment in Canada totalled $3.8-billion, while outbound Canadian investment stood at $613-million.
A similar investment imbalance exists with Saudi Arabia, although the magnitude is unknown because the federal government does not disclose what the Saudis own in Canada because the information is deemed "commercially sensitive."
Canadian investment in Saudi Arabia, a designated "priority" market for Canada, totalled just $4-million in 2013. This week's $250-million deal by G3 Global grains – a joint venture between Saudi Agricultural and Livestock Investment Co. and U.S.-based Bunge Ltd. – to buy the old Canadian Wheat Board would dwarf all Canadian investment in Saudi Arabia.
But investment isn't the only challenge Canada faces breaking into larger developing markets. Our companies are often scaled to a country of 34 million people, not to ones of a billion or more people.
Less than 1 per cent of Canadian goods exports go to India now. Goods exports reached $3.1-billion in 2014, dominated by bulk commodities such as peas, lentils, fertilizer, canola oil and iron ore.
Indeed, Canada sells relatively little of what it produces outside the United States, which sucked up 76 per cent of our exports in 2013. Add in Britain and Japan, and these three highly developed countries accounted for 81 per cent of total Canadian goods exports.
It's one thing for the government to target large and promising economies such as China and India as a way to diversify export markets.
But diversification is proving to be far more difficult to achieve.
We often aren't sure what we want, or how to get it. And many of the doors to investment and trade remain locked.