In the Trump era, Canada must expand its trade horizons. Enter EDC’s Alison Nankivell

You may recall that a few months ago in this space, as we talked about the challenges faced by Canada’s exporting companies, Saskatchewan’s Murad Al-Katib, head of AGT Foods, singled out one of the country’s Crown corporations for praise. He called Export Development Canada “the most competitive export credit agency in the world.” We decided to follow up on that tribute by checking in with EDC itself.

That meant talking to its new boss. Last year, Alison Nankivell had begun a big turnaround at innovation incubator MaRS Discovery District in Toronto when she abruptly announced she was leaving to return to EDC, where she’d once worked for 15 years.

Since February, the newly installed CEO has been steering the agency mandated to help Canadian companies reach and succeed in foreign markets.

Every year, some 28,000 Canadian companies benefit in some way from EDC’s financial and knowledge support. In 2024 alone, the Crown corporation helped enable $123 billion in exports, foreign investment and trade development.

At a time when global trade has been disrupted by an unstable U.S. administration and many Canadian exporters have questions about their future, it’s EDC’s job, and Nankivell’s, to provide some answers.

You were at MaRS for less than a year. Why did you make the sudden jump to EDC?

My whole background had been international trade. I had been working in the venture market and in the innovation economy for the past decade, mostly through BDC and then my time at MaRS. This was an opportunity to come back to a place where I started my career, at a really interesting moment for Canada. My view is that there’s a lot to do to make us much more of a global trader than a continental one. And the privilege of being part of that exercise just felt too good to pass up.

At MaRS, you quickly restructured the organization and chopped staff. After a few months here, what’s your assessment of what EDC needs as an organization?

MaRS was a different situation because there was a financial crunch. At EDC we’re self-sustaining, so the challenge for us is to get ready to be part of a nation-building exercise for our aspirations on trade. Where can we build efficiencies to get more volume, more throughput faster with the resources we have? Given we have one of the largest project finance teams in Canada, how do we reorganize ourselves to have more capacity to work on some of these very significant and complex projects to enable more east-west trade? Also, there’s a process of digitization we’re going through to automate some of our core products and services. We’re trying to accelerate that so people can spend more time on the more bespoke types of problem solving. A lot of companies now need much more differentiated types of financial support.

I gather there was a surge in inquiries about trade diversification at EDC in the initial stages after Trump’s tariffs. How did you handle that?

That was actually a huge effort, and it was exhausting. When the tariffs first hit, we had a pulse-check on every aspect of our customer engagement. Across the country in our 16 offices, we had our ear to the ground. We also developed a very strong dialogue with the Canadian banks, which we work quite closely with. Because we provide a lot of guarantees to them to increase their support of working capital to their own clients. It’s been challenging because there’s been so much confusion, it’s hard for businesses to act. It’s hard for them to know what they need from us, because they don’t know exactly yet the ripple effect of these changes, to understand where the pain points are going to be in their business.

Especially when a tweet from the president can change everything.

Exactly. What we learned is, the key thing you need to do is reassure. And this is what we were trying to do with the banks. Reassure clients that we will support you with working capital. Because it becomes a liquidity crunch if you’re not sure whether people are gonna reject your exports—because suddenly if it’s a tariff X high, they might say, “I don’t want that contract anymore.” Or it might be that your imports are suddenly more expensive, and that’s having an impact on your working capital. There’s so many parts in the dynamics of global trade that affect a business. People now are trying to think through their supply chains, and they’re trying to build resiliency into their operations. All we can really do, as a financial partner, is say, “In this turmoil, we’ll be there for you. Keep talking to us, tell us what you need, and we will support you.”

At the beginning of the year, about 77% of Canada’s exports went to the U.S. Where do you see that number being in a few years?

The United States is always going to be a core part of Canadian trade. But I think success, maybe, is getting it down to 65% or 60%. But the other thing you have to think about is, there’s always the next generation of businesses emerging. For example, clean tech. Under the Biden administration and the Inflation Reduction Act, you had a huge pull of Canadian companies setting up clean-tech operations in the United States. That’s no longer the case. Now they’re focusing more on Europe. Emerging industries are going where they see greater alignment in the priorities of a country. In Europe right now, energy security is important as they try to find greener baseload energy technologies that will allow them to rely less on Russian gas. That will have an impact on the future direction of our exports. The United States is still key. But Asia is growing at a much faster pace. Europe has certain areas that are very simpatico to Canada’s offerings. There are many good, positive trends happening toward diversifying our trade. It’s a question of whether we seize on them.

Mark Carney will lead a Liberal government for perhaps the next few years. How will that affect EDC?

Our mandate’s the same regardless of which government is in power. But we expect to see more nation-building projects, because it’s become evident that our trade-enabling infrastructure is not sufficient. We are lacking the infrastructure to move commodities—the scale of ports, the spur lines needed for that, the logistics and storage facilities. If you suddenly want to have agricultural trade with a significant number of new countries, you can’t do that until you increase the ability to move product. So we sense that, working with other sister Crown corporations, we will be very much part of that solution.

Last spring, the government directed EDC to increase its appetite for risk, to get more money flowing to Canadian companies. Does that directive still apply?

Yes, I think so. That’s really a challenge to us to use our capital wisely to do even bolder and bigger things to help our clients, because when you’re trying to diversify, or you’re doing things that are really new for a company, it’s generally beyond the kind of risk that a Canadian chartered bank would take. Say you’re a Canadian company and you’re thinking of setting up a facility somewhere in central Europe. Your Canadian bank won’t cover that. It’s up to us to do that. And we have to make sure we’re comfortable with the risk and the security, and that’s a harder challenge. One of the things I’m very focused on in my early months here is to make sure that we are doing things that are not just complementary to the banks, but net additive. Canadians who want to undertake M&A to have more capacity to operate in multiple jurisdictions or maybe just scale up their own operations in Canada so they can produce for a number of different markets—that generally takes a more junior form of debt, which is higher risk. That’s the piece that we are being called upon to do more of.

What do you need to see to feel comfortable giving companies the money you’re talking about?

You have to understand the business plan. You have to understand what they’re trying to do and where they’re trying to go. How do we partner with you, and how do we bring our insights? Remember, we have 25 offices abroad. We have a lot of international lending relations. We know quite a lot about what’s going on in the world and where there are partnerships that can be good for a company.

When you’re giving a company a loan, what conditions do you attach?

Our ability to work with a company is premised on the fact that they’re either already involved in international trade, or they have a plan to grow into a market, and they need some help of a type that they can’t get from their bank. Or they need help working with their bank. Then we get involved. That’s the first hurdle.

I’m asking about conditions because EDC was involved in a very complex deal recently to provide equity financing for Sheertex. There were a lot of conditions attached to that money, including that the CEO had to promise to comply with a specific social media policy.

That was in our venture program, where we were part of a syndicate. This was the consensus of the majority of the investors. If you’re an investor with five or six others in a company, you have to, as a group, decide what those conditions are going to be.

But that’s not typical.

No, because that’s the one piece of our business, on the equity side, that operates more in a purely domestic way. We went into that to support an early-stage company that was growing. Sheertex does have exports, but our equity program is much earlier than our lending. Our lending is working much more with companies that are already cashflow positive. They’re growing. Our equity and our venture is moving much more into the earlier stage. And much of that work we started to get involved in during COVID-19, where we did matching programs with BDC to keep the venture capital ecosystem going.

Last December, before you arrived, the auditor general took EDC to task for its $50-billion COVID loan program, saying that $3.5 billion in loans went to ineligible companies, and EDC’s poor management compromised the value of money for CEBA. You weren’t there then, but what are you doing to address those concerns?

Well, first of all, as you say, I wasn’t there. But I think that was a very important program. I think at one point it probably touched about 76% of the business community. So it was very impactful, and the results now—we’re at about 84% of all of those loans being repaid. All of the things that were in the auditor general’s report we have followed up with, and we’re well on our way to resolving any concerns the auditor had.

One of the concerns was that EDC relied too heavily on the international consultancy Accenture. What did Accenture do for you?

Again, I don’t have all the details. Accenture helped in setting up and administrating some aspects of it, because it was such a significant growth of loan activity, and doing that on top of our core work, and then on top of the additional equity work we were doing, helping with BDC on the venture capital ecosystem—there was a capacity constraint.

Are you still relying on Accenture?

No. I mean, our CEBA program activity that we’re doing is winding down, and they’re not involved with us on that anymore, to my knowledge.

Before we go, I want to ask you about your time in Mumbai during the 2008 terrorist attacks. You were actually one of the hostages in the Oberoi Trident Hotel. Can you talk a bit about that experience?

It was surreal. My colleague and I were eating in the lobby and, like a lot of foreigners, we were eating a little earlier than most of the people. And so we left and went up to our hotel rooms, and about 20 minutes after we left, the terrorists came in and started machine-gunning everybody in the lobby.

Oh, my.

So we were very lucky. But I actually got locked out of my room, because the security system came down, and they locked all of the doors. And I actually had been on my way to my colleague to say, “What’s going on? There seems to be all this noise.” And so she had to let me into her room. We spent the next 36 hours together while there were grenades and bombs and all this stuff going on. Fortunately, I had brought a local phone as well as an international phone, so I was texting with the consulate. There were people checking on us and keeping us briefed on what was going on. We couldn’t have had better support. Moments like that, they burn in your memory a sense of the goodness of people. I don’t think I ever saw such extraordinary grace in such a difficult moment as I saw from the people of India.

Lastly, this is an anxious time for a lot of Canadian businesses. If you could put your hand on the shoulder of those who are trying to manage this new environment, what would you tell them?

I’d say, “I think we have this.” I know there’s a lot of anxiety about Canada, but the more time I’ve spent talking to companies, the more I realize we’re much better than we think. And most of the time, you just need a coach, somebody to tell you that. And to tell you that whatever you’re trying to aspire to do, you can do it. And we’ll be there to help you. I’m very confident that difficult periods move you to a new period of growth. That’s what this can be. We can really change. The orientation to be much more global in our thinking, and much more confident in our ability to compete anywhere in the world, will probably give a sense of renewed energy, especially to the next generation of businesses, by seeing that happen now.