The Fedtrade® podcast recently interviewed William (Bill) Kitay, Secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada for our SelectUSA Investment Summit spotlight series. With seven chapters located throughout Canada, AmCham Canada is a private, non-profit membership organization that promotes the two-way flow of trade, goods, services and investment between Canada and the United States. AmCham Canada will be attending the 2025 SelectUSA Investment Summit in National Harbor, Maryland, from May 11-14, 2025.
Learn more about AmCham Canada on their website amchamcanada.ca or follow them on LinkedIn. Connect with Bill on LinkedIn.
Key Takeaways:
- Understanding U.S. regulatory and legal requirements, including the impact on potential trade tariffs, is crucial for success.
- AmCham Canada membership includes a diverse range of businesses, from large corporations to small entrepreneurs.
- Assembling a team of experts to support U.S. market expansion is crucial for safeguarding against potential pitfalls.
[a copy of the written transcript is here]:
Hello and welcome to the Fedtrade® podcast. I’m James Hastings of Rothwell Figg. Joining us on the podcast today is Bill Kitay, Secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada. Bill will be speaking with us about tips for Canadian businesses looking to go to market in the United States, as well as the benefits of AmCham Canada membership. Bill, welcome to Fedtrade®.
[A copy of the written transcript is here:]
Jamie, thank you very much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be on this podcast. And happy to talk about the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada.
What is the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada?
We are a subsidiary of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business promotion organization in the world. There are approximately 180 AmCham’s located throughout the world. We concentrate on Canada. And our goal is to promote the two-way flow of trade, investment, people, ideas, and innovation between Canada and the U.S., the most successful trading relationship in the history of civilization.
AmCham Canada does this by two missions:
- For U.S. businesses who are here, we are the voice of the U.S. business. We do this mostly through our policy committees. We have national policy committees focused on particular issues such as trade, tech and innovation, tax, etc.
- We also help Canadian businesses enter into the U.S. by providing the resources they need, the guidance, the support, and the advisors to help them make the best decisions possible in order to maximize their success. The great thing about investing in the U.S. is that it’s the largest most dynamic economy in the world. The downside to investing in the U.S. is that it’s the largest most dynamic economy in the world. What that means is that the smallest decision could make the difference between a business’ success in the United States and a more difficult, more trying time. So what we try to do is help organize those resources to help ease the decision-making process.
That makes sense. It seems like you’re very busy throughout Canada with this association. As far as number of members, do you know approximately how many you have right now?
We have about 180 members throughout Canada. The Toronto GTA chapter, which is where I’m located and where I serve as executive director, is the largest. We have 60 members here in the Toronto GTA chapter. But we have chapters throughout the country, from Halifax, the Atlantic provinces, to Montreal, the Quebec chapter. We have the National Capital chapter in Ottawa. We have the Western chapter, which is based in Calgary, and the Pacific chapter based in Vancouver.
What is the typical profile of an AmCham Canada member?
There isn’t a typical profile because we have resources to help all sizes of organizations that are interested in being part of the cross-border community. As I mentioned earlier, we are the voice of U.S. business that tends to be larger businesses, large global companies whose names are very familiar, such as Amazon and UPS. So there we do a lot of our policy work. We have a strong mid-market focus, which is businesses between, let’s say, $5 million and $100 million. They get together and they meet business owner to business owner, talk about mitigating risks and different approaches to take when entering to the U.S. and managing the cross-border operations. We have a very strong mid-market committee. And then for some of our smaller entrepreneurial members, they want more basic information about how to expand, where to place their chips, how to make the right choices to maximize their chance of success. We provide that knowledge through informational webinars and discussions, but also through media, receptions and parties and things like that where they can just network and connect with others who may help them upstream, downstream or on peer-to-peer base.
With regard to your mid-market membership, you had mentioned that it is pretty robust in the services that you offer. Do you have certain member industries that are primarily focused in the mid-market, such as medtech or financial or consumer based goods?
We’re industry agnostic in that we don’t chase anybody out based on industry. So our industry profile is smart manufacturing, food production, wholesale and retail. There’s tech and communications and also mobility, transportation, and others. So it’s within those industries and that’s just where our community has ended up. If we have health tech concerns, they tend to be part of our larger national profile. That’s because those are the ones who have made the decision to join our membership. If a mid-market health tech company comes and brings peers, we have programming that can accommodate.
For any company doing business in the United States, there are regulatory and legal requirements for doing so. What is your experience on your members seeking those types of services?
My experience is that the wise ones will take the time to assess the opportunities, the risks, and the variables they need to consider, and assemble what I call the team. Find the right source of financing. Find the right legal advice. Find the right tax advice because tax is very complicated in the United States. In some respect, it’s simpler in Canada because it’s done on the provincial and federal level. In the U.S., where you have municipal levels of taxation considered, it’s a lot more things to weigh, a lot more things to take into account. It’s great to be dynamic but there’s a lot more decisions you have to do, such as employee benefits, the nature of labor relations, and labor in the large sense of the word. Businesses that come into the United States from Canada are used to Employment Standards Act, where it’s very expensive to terminate somebody without cause, just because economic conditions aren’t favorable. Companies here may be on the hook for up to two years of salary in Canada. So when they hear that in the U.S. its employment-at-will it sounds great, but then there’s also little wrinkles to it depending on the type of employment you organize. And so really in one respect the U.S. is sort of like this large, shiny, gold object that’s just sort of dangling in front of the business owner in Canada. And there’s that sense of “I just want to grab it and take advantage of that opportunity” because when you’re an entrepreneur, you got to where you are because you make decisions quickly. You don’t overthink things. And so there’s that tendency to say, “I got this order from a company based in Macon, Georgia, that’s going to be half my revenue. We’re going to expand it and we’re going to open the plant there and move on.” And we encourage businesses to take advantage of that, but make sure you have people who can look out for those little tripwires that can make U.S. expansion challenging.
Do you see your members in the high-tech sector have concerns about obtaining intellectual property clearance and protection in the United States?
They know that they need to be able to protect their intellectual property, all that stuff they worked at, all those intangibles, right? If you want to trademark, if you want to get a service mark, if a patent makes sense and to protect your innovations in some other ways. I think that they understand the need to do it, but I think they may be a little bit timid because they don’t know how to get it done. If there’s someone who can help them with that, provide that sort of turnkey, it’s a benefit. There are more patents and trademarks and service marks and IP protection in United States than anywhere else, but that means that it’s a difficult mountain path to go through without expert advice.
Now, regardless of the company and their profile, it seems like they’re also concerned with U.S. customs and regulatory requirements depending on their products.
Yes, they are. And the good news is that we have a number of businesses who can help companies move goods to and from the United States. From global logistics providers like UPS to small regional players who do LTL transport, who can do a lot of the forms and customs clearance type of paperwork that can seem like a minefield to go through, but they can do it and they can shepherd the products that are built here into the United States with as minimal fuss as possible. As you know, I mean, there is a certain randomness at the border because the leeway that’s given to the CPB and others who do work in terms of moving goods and people into the United States, they have a lot of leeway. But fortunately, this is not their first rodeo and it’s probably not their 2000th rodeo. And so they know how to maximize the chance of success.
What benefits of AmCham membership are there that your members feel are most valuable?
I think the connectivity. Because to take the last example, someone can come to me and say, “I’ve got this great product that we’ve made in Kitchener, and we want to be able to take it downstream either to another one of our factories or to the retail market. And we had a bad experience last time. What do you recommend?”
What we can do is we can call from our list of members and say, you know, here are three options, ABC. Here are the people to talk to. Go out and see what makes sense. And the feedback we get from that is some of the most positive we’ve ever gotten. What I call the organic connections is one of the things we do well. We also do well with our connectivity with policymakers throughout North America. Our most critical is with Mission Canada. We are the only organization to have a memorandum of agreement with the U.S. Commerce Department. And we work with the team at the Foreign Commercial Service at all the missions in Canada, Montreal, Toronto, the embassy in Ottawa, Calgary, and elsewhere.
And we help them make those connections to ease their entry into the U.S. through our SelectUSA program. The keystone of that is the SelectUSA Summit, which takes place in May or June of the calendar year in National Harbor, just outside of DC. The next one is May 11th to the 14th. That is the largest association of investments focused on investing into the U.S. We bring a delegation of about 80 Canadian businesses to get to meet the people at the Commerce Department and others and help them with their decisions. So we’ve got that relationship at the federal level and we also have the relationship at the state level. Most people may not realize, and I didn’t realize till coming here, is there are approximately a dozen states that have trade offices in Toronto. So a physical place with local staff that promote that state, whether it’s Florida, Illinois, Missouri, etc. And obviously those messages are targeted, but they can open their eyes and their horizons to what is possible within their territories. So we have that relationship at the diplomatic level, at the U.S. federal and state levels, and then also at the Canadian level too. One of our members is the City of Toronto. And so they obviously promote investment inside their city and they also want to help their businesses expand to the U.S. when the business case makes sense. What is not intuitive is that if you expand into the U.S., people see us like a zero sum game, like you’re losing jobs here in Canada. But for every job that you bring into Dallas or bring into Las Vegas, multiple numbers of jobs come back home. So places like the City of Toronto, the Mississauga Board of Trade, the Province of Ontario, work with us to help promote those connections and help their home businesses bring revenue back into Ontario, into Canada, through expansion into the U.S.
That’s great. I was reading a recent article by TD Bank, which reveals that over 75% of Canadian exports are to the United States. And as we know, the incoming U.S. administration has indicated its intention to apply significant tariffs to Canadian goods. What impact do you think this may have on bilateral trade between Canada and the United States?
I can’t speak for the incoming administration, but it does fit within its overall goal of promoting investment in the United States, which is bipartisan. The Obama administration, the Biden administration, they also want to promote investment into the United States. Mr. Trump just seems to want to do it more overtly. So that is one way around it. And the core is that 34 states have Canada as their number one trading partner. And it’s usually by large margins compared to other countries. And it’s also important to stress they are red states and they’re blue states. One of the things that we have been blessed with is there’s been a number of state trade delegations who come to Toronto and visit us and visit certain of our members and they’re led by governors. So we had Governor Lombardo of Nevada, we’ve had Governor Holcomb of Indiana, and we’ve also had blue state governors. Governor Pritzker of Illinois, Governor Murphy of New Jersey. And they want to promote investment into the U.S. and they obviously talk about their state but they open up the eyes of the people who are here who are like, oh, I didn’t know this is possible. Or I didn’t know that you’ve got the third largest rail network in North America, whatever they promote. And also a lot of times they want to bring their own businesses up to Toronto and help promote economic expansion and trade and investment into Canada. The saving grace of this is that both Canada and the U.S. are federal governments. So you have sub-national units and the national units. And the relationship sub-nationally, state to province, province to state, is rock solid.
Bill, if a company would like to become a member of AmCham Canada, how can they get started?
I think a good source is to go to our website, www.amchamcanada.ca.
The .ca is important because in Canada that has to be the suffix. And you go to our website and then there is a menu option about becoming a member. And then you choose the right option for you. So like for example, if you go to my chapter, Toronto, you go to membership and it lays out the various options like gold national member, which gets you involved in the national policy discussion. You have the option of having a say on something that matters to your business. And whenever there is a governor visit, whenever we have to meet with the ambassador – and we expect there’s going to be a lot of meetings with the ambassador this year as we get to know Mr. Hoekstra and get to deal with the ways he does business – there’ll be lots of opportunities for our gold members to take advantage of that. And we have silver members and then we have local members. If you’ve got a $5 million organization doing well in a suburb of Toronto, local may be the way to go. So we’ve got membership plans that can fit everybody. So you can go to that page, you hit join, you send the application, and we’ll review it and then we take it from there.
Bill Kitay, Secretary of the American Chamber of Commerce in Canada. Thanks so much for joining us today.
Jamie, thank you very much. This is my first podcast and always good to expand my horizons. Thank you.
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