You have been in Mongolia for almost a year. How well have you adapted to the conditions in Mongolia?
Well, it was very easy from the beginning to adapt to Mongolia. Because there are a lot of similarities with Canada in terms of the weather and nature, but also because Mongolians are so friendly, it makes it very easy for anyone to adjust and feel welcome. So it was quite easy right from the beginning when I first arrived to really settle and enjoy this beautiful country.

By the way, how did you celebrate the Mongolian Lunar New Year last year?
Last year, it was my first Lunar New Year. So of course, as it is a tradition, I gave a greeting to the Mongolian people wearing Mongolian traditional clothing. But I also attended the official events, the official opening of Tsagaan sar at the wrestling palace, going to official events that I was invited to and celebrated with my embassy team as well.

How do you spend your free time here?
When I'm not working and ideally when it's not that cold I do go out and hike with the my dogs. Whenever I have a chance, whether it's on the mountains, on the hills around UB. In the summer, I went camping a couple of times.

I love being outdoors. It's really nice. I haven't had a chance yet, but it's coming. I do want to go ski because I do ski. I do want to go try the Sky Resort before the winter ends. So I'd love to do that.

It has been nearly half a century since our two countries established diplomatic relations. What have been our achievements during this time?
Historically Canada has been quite a partner in the mining sector. We are behind the discovery of the Oyu Tolgoi mine.

And I think this is probably Canada's biggest legacy in this country. The investments that we put into developing is the biggest project in Mongolia because it has since then employed so many people and generated so much income for the country. It helped Mongolia's development. So by far, this is our biggest legacy.

But of course, since then, we've had a lot of collaboration in various other areas, including democracy, human rights, gender equality. We've had, we're trying to diversify our trade, looking beyond the mining sector as well, including the agriculture sector. So we have expanded our partnership, our relationship beyond just the mining sector. We've had high-level visits throughout the years, whether it's our speaker, George J. Furey who came to visit a couple of years ago.

We had the Governor General also almost 10 years ago who came to visit. Recently, we've had Minister Batsetseg go to Canada to celebrate the 50th anniversary. And we've had our special envoy for the Indo-Pacific who came just last year in 2024. So we've had some multiple exchanges throughout the years.

What is the current state of trade and economic relations between our two countries?
The distance between our countries, the trade relations have not been necessarily big. So we export about $30.7 million to Mongolia. Basically mining machinery, precious stones and metals, and specific instruments and electricity and electronics.

And we import about $3.1 million dollars of goods from Mongolia, mostly cashmere and clothing goods. So that's the extent of the bilateral trade relations.

But of course, we're always looking for new opportunities, and new ways to do business. We want to expand that. We're looking at selling, for example, helicopters from Bell helicopter to Mongolia. We're looking at potentially selling Blackberry technology which is cyber security technology to Mongolia. We're looking at hopefully some other opportunities for the future.

We have great a relationship. We're great friends. We have shared values on various things like gender equality, the promotion of human rights, and so we've got a lot to work on together. So I can only see good things in the future between the two countries.  I think we're just focusing on expanding that relationship even further.

As the ambassador, what are your plans for 2025?
So for 2025 plan is to continue expanding that relationship with Mongolia. We've had already started quite an active beginning of the year actually, because we've just last week, we organized the Women, Peace and Security Workshop,  which helps Mongolia develop a roadmap to the drafting the National Action Plan for Women, Peace and Security. This week we're organizing a workshop on nuclear energy to help Mongolia also determine if nuclear energy is an option that the country could consider. We have multiple Canada Fund for Local Initiatives projects that we are currently closing, but we're also going to be soon launching a new wave of projects to fund.

We've just recently had approval to start implementing a series of development projects with Mongolia that will be starting this year in 2025. We're trying to get a follow-up visit for our Canadian international trade representative potentially.

And also trying to see whether we can have any follow up on the mining sector. We signed a memorandum of understanding for the implementation of the Towards Sustainable Mining initiative back in October. We're going to be implementing that this year hopefully. Аnd our colleagues from the from Natural Resource Canada will be providing technical support to the Mongolian National Geological Survey to develop their capacity in analyzing geological survey data. So there's a lot happening throughout the year.

Could you provide more details about the "Technical Assistance Partnership" program?
The Technical Assistance Partnership Programme, it's basically meant to facilitate the transfer of Canadian expertise to the recipient. Over the last two years we've had technical assistance in the judicial sector to help build a more impartial and independent judiciary. That's what we've been focusing on for the last two years. We've facilitated, through that support the partnership between Canadian judges and Mongolian judges, and particularly the Judges Association of Mongolia. We also facilitated study to Canada to help them to understand our independence of large judiciary.

So that's what the TAP was focused on in the last two years. We were exploring the idea of providing technical support for English education teaching. Unfortunately, it hasn't materialize yet, but we're going to keep that idea for the future. There may be some other opportunities where we can support English teaching, but currently, we don't have anything yet that is supporting that.

You mentioned the judicial system, and I believe this is a very important issue for us. Many of our people either don’t trust or have little faith in the system, as it is not always applied equally. Is there any report on this, or what are the results of that program?
So the judicial sector is the second sector that people have least confidence in. The first one is parliament. So as you mentioned, it is absolutely essential that the judiciary becomes more independent and becomes more trustworthy. It is highly corrupt right now and it's not necessarily serving the people. We fully understand that and the judicial sector knows that as well. So they are quite committed and willing to improve that confidence in them. So that technical assistance project which lasted about two years is now actually going to become a full development project.

And it's going to last for almost four years. So the Canadian Commissioner of Federal Judicial Affairs will be supporting Mongolian judges and Mongolian judicial institutions in building that independence and impartiality. And I think they're going to do it in different ways they're going to try to help them become more modernized as an institution, more transparent and more communicating with the public. They want to become also more accessible and also hope that all the judgments that will be taken will be published. By becoming more public, then you're becoming more accountable because you're inviting more scrutiny into your decisions. So this project will start this year in 2025 and will go to 2029.

And so we'll be able to bring some Canadian expertise and some help to achieve that goal. I think this is gonna be an important project.

The Canada-Mongolia Foreign Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement (FIPA) entered into force in 2017. Have Canadian companies increased their investments since the agreement was implemented?
So despite the fact that we have a FIPA between Mongolia and Canada, unfortunately the Canadian investment into Mongolia has not increased. And it's not due to the FIPA. It's due unfortunately to two things. One is Mongolia is a small market for it to attract foreign investment. It has to be interesting and inviting. But unfortunately, because of Mongolia's foreign investment policies and regulations and climate, it's not very interesting for foreign investment to come here.

What is interesting for them?
Interesting means you're giving a reason to a foreign investor to come and invest money in your country. That means they will come here knowing that they will make money. That's what investors do. And that their investment is protected. That it's not going to be taken away within a day's decision. That if there is a conflict, that there's good mechanism for resolution of these conflicts, that they are transparent and independent, that they can rely on a judicial sector that can defend its interest if its interest is violated. This is not the case here. The case here is we've had cases where payments were not paid. We had cases where permits were just taken away unilaterally by the government. And there is no incentives, tax incentives, for these investors to come invest here.

And so they would rather go somewhere else where those countries have understood how to attract foreign investment and they put in place the environment necessary that attracts those foreign investments. That's the issue that we have here in Mongolia that we're hoping that the government will address. We have conveyed those message to the government multiple times and I think the government understands that but it's actually taking the right steps to move forward to be able to attract this investment.

As I mentioned regularly to any of my interlocutors, we have more than 748 Canadian mining companies that are investing abroad, outside of Canada. There may be five here. That's striking that there are only five in Mongolia which is a mining country. So Mongolia has to be more inviting there has to be more interesting for investors.

Where are they more interested in?
In South America. So Mongolia is competing against South America, Africa and Southeast Asia. You have mining countries in all of these different continents. Some of these countries have been more interesting and they figured out that if you adopt the right policies and make the climate more conducive, foreign investors will come. And that's who Mongolia is competing with.

Could you share some insights about Canada’s "Feminist International Assistance Policy"?
Sure. The Canadian Feminist International Policy was adopted back in 2017. It aims basically to integrate feminist policies and gender equality initiatives in everything that we do from an international assistance point of view. So all the funding that we provide to developing countries needs to integrate a feminist lens.

So this means whether it's education, whether it's health, whether it's eliminating poverty, whether it's looking at human rights or governance, they all need to look into what they're doing, but from a feminist angle. That's what the Feminist International Assistance is because we at the time had announced quite clearly that women need to be center of everything that we do or else we would be not able to achieve our development goals. And we made that clear in the Feminist International Assistance Policy. We’ve been implementing that since 2017 including here, everything that we do here in the different funding that we provide has to have a feminist lens and a gender equality element.

Canada and Mongolia share similar weather conditions. What Canadian experiences or practices could we learn from and adapt to our local context?
There are a lot of things that we can share among each other on how to adapt to a cold weather whether it's from an economic point of view whether it's new technologies whether it's how do you manage snow. Although for us Mongolia doesn't have a lot of snow. I don't know if you follow but the eastern Canada in the last three days have received more than 50-60 centimeters of snow, which Mongolia never sees. So it's, I think there's different ways, but I think what is more important that we can share with Mongolia is how to be a successful economy regardless of your weather. In Canada we adapt to the weather, we do not let the weather dictate how strong our economy or not is. We don't we have to find ways where we continue to develop and prosper economically regardless of how the weather is and I always give an example of our agricultural production. For example Canada is one of the top exporters of agricultural products, despite being a very cold country. So we have been able to develop our agriculture regardless of the weather that we have. So these are things that Mongolia could look into, practices that Mongolia could gain from.

My next question is about the Trump decision. Trump made a statement about doubling the tax. But I hope he froze that decision, right? Please share your opinion about this?
In our case right now the only tariff that has been imposed is on steel and aluminium. The US has imposed a 10% tariff on steel and aluminum. And of course, any tariff in the trade relationship between the US and Canada, we believe is not the right way to develop our economies. I think both our economies would be hurt by any tariffs that are being imposed. So we strongly we had strongly encouraged the US not to put any tariffs into Canada. But in any case I believe my government is ready to retaliate if necessary. The government is looking at multiple strategies on what to adopt in case there are more tariffs to Canada. We have a great relationship with our U.S. partners. There are trade relations between the two countries that have lasted more than decades and historical ties that go beyond what we're talking about in recent weeks or months. So we truly believe that this historical tie between the two countries will prevail, and that we can find ways that we can overcome whatever issues we have between the two nations. So that we can avoid getting into a trade war or getting into adopting any tariffs. But should there be any tariffs, the government has came out quite clear that there will be retaliation. We will also adopt tariffs to respond to any threats to our economy. But for now, we're waiting to see if there will be any other changes in that decision. You are saying they haven't been effectively implemented.

I think you are an animal lover. Although Mongolia has enacted animal rights protection laws, they have not been effectively implemented. How are animal rights protected and enforced in Canada?
We have in our criminal code a reference to not violating the rights of animals and there's one that says you can't get into animal torture but also that you have an obligation for caring for your animals. And that is not just pets. it's also livestock. So if you have cattle, sheep or horses, you have an obligation to care for them. And the definition of caring for them, I think, is where it's different between Mongolia and Canada. In our case, for example, caring means you have to ensure that your livestock is fed.

For example, if a zhud happens in Canada, and you as a farmer lose your cattle because you did not feed them, you are criminally responsible, which is not the case here. So our farmers have an obligation to ensure that their animals are well fed and well taken care of. This means food, providing enough food and transportation. If you're transporting your cattle, you have to transport them by appropriate transportation means, there's a limit of how many cows, for example, you can put in a truck, and how many hours they can go without being fed and watered. So there's a lot of regulations that protect the livestock that you don't have here in Mongolia. I think Mongolia lost nearly 7 million livestock last year. There are no consequences for the farmer, except that they lose their livelihoods.

But there's no responsibility and no accountability. And I think this is where it's different with Canada. Canada criminalizes the lack of caring for your own livestock, if I would say.

So here you have great natural grazing so the cows are dependent on what is available in the soil even in winter which is not the case in Canada. In Canada all the livestock on in farms and they have to be fed by the farmer. So it's a different kind of agriculture but one that is it's protected by legislation.

Last year, I met someone who works at a shelter, and he mentioned you. He told me that you visited their shelter and provided significant help, showing genuine care and concern. Do you often spend your free time volunteering for communities?
I have two dogs. Whenever I have a chance I go. Unfortunately my time schedule it doesn't allow me to go more often than I would like. But those shelters need help because they're not necessarily well funded. They don't receive necessarily funding from the government. They're funded by private donations like mine, for example. And so, and they have a lot of dogs and there's still a lot of dogs in the streets in UB or outside UB that need to be cared for. And they are over capacity, these shelters, and so any help that we can give them would be welcomed, whether it's donations, money, whether it's providing them with food for the dogs, or sometimes because of my two dogs, I have a lot of things that I can give them that I don't need anymore, like beds, collars, and things like that. And so I'm always happy whenever I can. if I can't go myself at least I can provide them with with few items that they can use for to help all the dogs that are on the streets in UB.

Thank you for your time.