The Canadian government is going to help businesses owned by women, Indigenous peoples, and LGBTQI people (LGBTQI means lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and intersex people).
The government will create “trade missions” to support their businesses.
A trade mission is when one country — in this case Canada — travels to another country in order to talk about increasing the amount of business between the two countries.
Typically, business owners and government officials go to another country, and meet with business owners and government officials there. They discuss ways the countries can work together.
The idea is to help Canadian businesses sell their products (or services) to another country. That would help those Canadian businesses. If you have a product and want to sell it, it’s helpful to have new places to sell it — new “markets.” This would open up new markets for those businesses.
An announcement about the upcoming trade missions was made on Saturday in Halifax by Canada’s Minister of International Trade, Francois-Philippe Champagne, according to The Star newspaper.
He was speaking at a national convention (big meeting) for Liberals. (The Liberal Party of Canada is the party currently in power in the Canadian government; Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is the leader of the Liberals.)
Champagne said businesses owned by those three groups have “not fully shared in the benefits of trade,” according to The Star.
Champagne didn’t give any details about the upcoming trade missions.
Related Links
Read the Toronto Star article about the trade missions announcement:
https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2018/04/21/canadian-government-to-lead-first-ever-trade-missions-for-indigenous-and-lgbtq-businesses.html
CTV article on the Liberal national convention and the trade missions announcement: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/trade-missions-for-women-indigenous-and-lgbtq-interests-in-2018-minister-1.3896066
CURRICULUM CONNECTIONS
By Kathleen Tilly
Writing/Discussion Prompt
The article explains that a trade mission would allow Canadian businesses to sell their products in other countries. Why do you think this would be important or beneficial for Canadian businesses?
Reading Prompt: Metacognition
Metacognition is thinking about what and how we read before, during and after reading.
For example, before you started reading this article, you read the title. What did you think the title meant? What did you think the article was about?
While you were reading the article, what did you do when you came to a word or an idea that you didn’t understand?
After reading the article, what questions do you still need to answer in order to better understand the ideas in the article?
Junior and Intermediate
Identify a range of strategies they found helpful before, during, and after reading and explain, in conversation with the teacher and/or peers or in a reader’s notebook, how they can use these and other strategies to improve as readers (OME, Reading: 4.1).
Language Feature: Acronym
An acronym is a word or name that is created with the first letters or sounds in a word or phrase. For example, LGBTQI is an acronym for: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning and intersex people.
Think of at least 8 other acronyms that you know. Why do you think acronyms are used?
