FOCAL POINT

Note from the Editor - Looking Ahead for 2008
Rachel Schmidt
As we launch our first FOCALPoint issue of 2008, the team at FOCAL is looking forward to the many challenges and discussions that will stem from the government’s “Americas Strategy” announced last year. Re-engagement with the Americas is critical for Canada to establish an influential role in the Western Hemisphere, and it is time to bring the rest of Canada into the debate. This means moving beyond Ottawa’s political circles and opening the discussion to all Canadians. Engaging the private sector, for example, is essential to creating effective policies for corporate social responsibility, capacity-building and positive foreign direct investment. Canada has many important reciprocal ties with Latin American and Caribbean countries, but how many Canadians are actually aware of them?
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The Challenges of Female Entrepreneurship
FOCAL Q&A with the Honourable Helena Guergis, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and International Trade
Q. Why did the government establish a ‘Businesswomen in Trade’ portfolio?
A. Over the last 20 years, Canada has seen a 200 per cent increase in the number of women-owned firms. Today, there are over 800,000 women-owned businesses in Canada, contributing billions to our economy.
At the same time, international trade and investment are more important than ever. Thanks to technology, falling trade barriers and an increasingly liberalized global economy, businesses have more opportunities than ever before to succeed in the export market.
While women entrepreneurs face many of the same challenges that men do, they’re contending with other, gender-specific challenges, too.
As a former small-business owner myself, this issue is close to my own heart. My job is to be an advocate for these entrepreneurs, and to carry their concerns back to the government to ensure that our policies and programs meet their needs and help them participate and compete effectively in the global marketplace.
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Canada’s Role in a Regional Crime Spree
Rachel Schmidt and Carlo Dade
Tourists might not hear the gunfire from any seaside resorts, but Mexico is starting to look suspiciously like a war zone. As drug traffickers and hit men stockpile hand grenades, assault rifles, and grenade launchers, the country’s military has been called in to help overwhelmed police forces, a practice becoming more common throughout Latin America. Colombia’s military has been fighting a drug war for decades, and Central America is struggling to control the myriad gangs that channel drugs between South and North America. In El Salvador, the murder rate is now higher than it was during the civil wars. Although Canada does not have such extreme levels of violence, the recent escalation of urban gang activity — including this week’s shooting of a well-known drug trafficker in Vancouver — reminds us that we are not immune to organized crime.
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Cuba: Waiting for Change
Cristina Warren
Since Fidel Castro “temporarily” turned over power in 2006 to his younger brother, Raúl, due to illness, the aging Cuban leader has essentially disappeared from public view, making only occasional appearances on edited videos and photos. Yet, despite his absence from the public realm, Fidel has taken pains to show that he remains active and alert, publishing articles regularly and holding private meetings with foreign dignitaries.
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Alternative Development Approaches:
A Conversation with Brazil’s Gilberto Gil
Racquel Smith
Gilberto Gil has been the Brazilian Minister of Culture since 2003. His iconic status, however, mostly comes from being a Grammy-award winning musician, friend of fellow legendary singer Catetano Veloso and a cohort of Bob Marley in the social consciousness movement of the 1960s and 1970s. The political content of his musical lyrics offended Brazil’s military dictatorship, and he was jailed in 1968 and exiled to London in 1969. His political career began in the early 1990’s in his native Bahia in Salvador, a northeastern province of Brazil with a predominantly afro-descendent population. As Minister of Culture, Mr. Gilberto is the ideal figurehead for Brazil’s promotion of alternative development approaches, such as cultural industries and public-private partnerships. Alternative models are only just penetrating the mainstream of development policy and practice, and many say that this is largely because of Brazil. In this interview, Minister Gil talks about some of these models with Racquel Smith, FOCAL’s project manager for governance, civil society and afro-latino programming.
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Defining Canada’s Role in the World
Jason Diceman
A nation’s global activities are carried out by far more actors than just the government. Individuals, private companies and not-for-profit organizations all travel, trade, collaborate, and in many ways interact with one another, representing their home country through their words and deeds around the world. Clearly, these actions go beyond national policy and regulation, and a new project called Canada’s World now aims to redefine Canada’s international role with bottom-up citizen dialogue rather than top-down government policy.
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Protecting Land Rights:
The Effects of Private Investment in Indigenous Territories
Omaira Mindiola
Given that the indigenous view of development is linked to an intimate relationship with the earth and self-knowledge, the adoption of free market schemes for economic enhancement often has a negative impact on native populations. The perception that indigenous people gain equitable benefits from private investment in their land, for example, has weak positive connotations within the hegemonic models of development. This is especially true of mining expansion in indigenous territories, where competition for rights to the land and its resources places indigenous peoples in a starkly disadvantaged position.
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Protegiendo los derechos a la tierra:
Los resultados de la inversión privada en los territorios de los pueblos indígenas
Omaira Mindiola
Dado que la visión indígena del desarrollo está ligada a la íntima relación con la tierra y el conocimiento propio, la adopción de esquemas de libre mercado para un mejoramiento económico les resulta a los indígenas impactante en forma negativa. La percepción de la equidad en los beneficios a pueblos indígenas provenientes de las inversiones en sus territorios, por ejemplo, tiene una débil connotación positiva en el modelo de desarrollo hegemónico. Es el caso de la expansión minera en territorios indígenas, donde la competencia por el derecho a la tierra y sus recursos colocan a los pueblos indígenas en franca desventaja al perder la tierra.
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News Briefs

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