Canadian Consul General Rosaline Kwan arrived in Atlanta last fall, just as a wave of celebration was just starting to crest.
For nearly a year leading up to her appointment, America’s neighbor to the north had been celebrating a half-century of outreach in the South.
The Consulate General of Canada opened in Atlanta 50 years ago, through the decades building a solid political network and foundation in economic diplomacy that Ms. Kwan says she is fortunate to inherit.
“I’ve got very good base to build on, and I’m really appreciative of the work that my predecessors have done so well,” she told Global Atlanta in a December interview.
Ms. Kwan is the first “permanent” Canadian diplomat to be posted here in more than two years, coming on the back of those who were technically interim consuls general.
Still, former Consul General James Hill, who was here for about two years, led a series of celebrations in 2023 that included party on the Ponce City Market rooftop highlighting the continuity of one of the city’s oldest diplomatic missions.
Over coffee in her office at Colony Square in Midtown, Ms. Kwan said the sense of U.S.-Canada partnership is stronger than ever in an age of shifting supply chains, as governments enact policies to encourage local manufacturing and companies see producing near their customers as key to their own resiliency.
Canada and the U.S. are prolific in making things together — particularly cars — but they also harbor some long-simmering trade disputes, and some worry that ascendant U.S. industrial policy could test the cohesion of the North American market.
“Buy American” provisions have long rankled Canada, forcing firms bidding for U.S. government contracts to duplicate their manufacturing infrastructure on both sides of the border, adding to their costs and raising prices.
Ms. Kwan, a Chinese speaker (native Cantonese and trained in Mandarin) who has held…
Read the full article here
