Canada's Foreign Trade Service

the Dominion the search for foreign markets has been a significant function of government in Canada. Appropriate representation abroad for the purpose of trade promotion was initiated soon after Confederation. This first phase of Canada's commercial representation abroad was, however, haphazard and unsystematic and consisted mainly of the use of existing agencies, British and Canadian, designed for other purposes than the encouragement of the Canadian export trade. Moreover the representatives were primarily located in the British Isles. The second phase of development, marked at first by the establishment of commercial agencies and trade commissioners' offices, and leading eventually into the Commercial Intelligence Service, was characterized by a more systematic and comprehensive organization. Although this phase began before 1900, its most distinctive evolution coincided with the period of rapid growth of Canada's external commerce during the quarter of a century after 1914. This era, as a former Deputy Minister of Trade and Commerce once put it, involved a vast and abrupt spreading-out of Canadian trading interests into every quarter of the globe and converted Canada a minor exporting country into one of the four or five largest exporters of the world.1 This swift expansion and diffusion of Canadian trade necessitated the establishment of an organization radiating from headquarters in Ottawa and eventually covering most of the markets of immediate interest to Canada in Europe, the Orient, Latin America, and elsewhere. Now a third phase of commercial representation has been ushered in, like the second, by the consequences of a world war. The second war raised Canada's external trade quantitatively

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