“Everyone wants to be best friends with Canada,” he said. EU commissioner for the internal market Thierry Breton made an official visit partly to take up Champagne’s invitation to go ice fishing. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier toured with a business delegation that stopped in Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories. Trudeau welcomed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz on his first official trip with a dinner at Toronto’s Royal Ontario Museum. “But I would have thought for a guy like that, the sky’s the limit.” Selling America’s alter-egoĪ cavalcade of high-profile European leaders has passed through Canada in the past year, “totally” a shift from how the continent has previously viewed the country, Champagne says.Įuropean Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed Parliament on her visit to Ottawa. “I don’t want to curse him with any political prediction,” says Dominic Raab, the former deputy prime minister of the United Kingdom, who befriended Champagne when they were both foreign ministers. Champagne carved a win Moderna signed a deal to build its first mRNA manufacturing plant outside the U.S. His fixation on scoring new investments overrode any flags from grumpy bureaucrats, reluctant to join the chase for pharmaceutical companies with whom they had prickly relations. When the pandemic hit, Champagne led a rush to rebuild bio manufacturing in Canada. And they are landing Champagne, 53, on the short list of potential successors to Justin Trudeau. His successes in the cut-throat competition for investments are raising his status in the Canadian business class, circles that are otherwise cool to the Liberal government’s progressive politics. Weeks later, he announced a C$2.8 billion deal with Stellantis to boost EV production in Canada. He convinced Cambridge, Mass.-based Moderna to spend hundreds of millions of its own money to build a vaccine facility in Montreal with undisclosed funding from the Canadian government. “None of that happens by magic.”Ĭhampagne’s big wins have landed in close succession - all in the past year. Champagne says it started with a cold call after he read that VW was looking for a new industrial site.
to lure Volkswagen’s first gigafactory outside of Europe - a C$7 billion project announced in March. Champagne’s biggest win to date was beating the U.S. “One CEO told me recently that their board spends 40 percent of their time now on geopolitics,” Champagne said in an interview.
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