Minister Champagne concludes successful trade mission to Paris

April 18, 2018 - Ottawa, Ontario - Global Affairs Canada

Foreign investment creates jobs in Canada, expands trade, boosts productivity, provides access to new technologies, encourages innovation and links Canadian firms to global supply chains to grow trade in key sectors, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and clean technologies (cleantech).

The Honourable François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of International Trade, today concluded a successful trade mission to Paris, France, from April 15 to 18, 2018, with a focus on Canada’s strengths and capabilities in AI and cleantech, as well as on promoting its progressive trade agenda.  

During the trade mission, Minister Champagne announced three projects.

The first, jointly announced with the Silingen Group, a German metallurgy company, was the $7-million construction in Hamilton, Ontario, of Silingen’s first zero-waste Canadian factory. The facility, which will begin construction at the end of 2018, will manufacture industrial products from recycled metal waste. New products will be developed and manufactured in Canada in accordance with circular economy rules (keeping resources in use for as long as possible, extracting the maximum value from them while they are in use, then recovering and regenerating products and materials at the end of their service lives) in cooperation with Canadian institutes of technology and universities.

The second announcement was for a $4-million investment fund to be launched in September 2018. The fund was conceived by a law firm and group of industrialists based in Brittany, a region in France, and will be managed and financed by Conseil Québec Investissement Croissance Inc (CQIC), a Canadian subsidiary of France’s FB Croissance. The fund will enable companies in France to finance business projects in Canada, including in Quebec.

The third project announced was the creation of an applied industrial research chair position in human nutrition to be shared between Diana Food, the Institute of Nutrition and Functional Foods at Laval University and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Diana Food and NSERC will each invest about $1 million in this project.