MONTREAL—The Quebec government picked up the tabs for film screenings in Los Angeles, beer tastings in Washington, historical re-enactments of life in 18th-century Boston and celebrations of Quebec’s national holiday, June 24, in the unlikely locales of San Francisco and Atlanta.

In between, mandatory filings submitted to the U.S. Justice Department show, Quebec’s very own diplomatic staff in the United States have squeezed in trade shows on cheese, fashion and airplanes, promoted the province as a place to visit or live, doled out money for French schools and professors and even arranged the odd tête-à-tête with American lawmakers.

While other Canadian provinces largely shuttered their international outposts in a bid to balance budgets in the mid-1990s, Quebec has built up a formidable force of trade officers, immigration advisers and quasi-ambassadors around the world.

The U.S. is the region of greatest concentration, with 50 employees working out of six offices, at a total cost of $8.5 million a year. Rent and salaries accounted for 85 per cent of that, according to twice-yearly reports made under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. And there are plans to open a new office in Houston, Texas, in the coming months.

“You can’t judge diplomacy from a pure dollars-and-cents perspective, but it’s clear that the general feeling in Quebec, no matter who is in office — and it’s not ideological — is that it’s a win-win proposition,” said John Parisella, who served as Quebec’s delegate-general in New York from 2009 to 2011.

Quebec followed the wave of Canadian provinces, including Ontario, Alberta, Manitoba, Saskatchewan and British Columbia, who opted to shutter their American offices in the mid-to-late 1990s. In a bid to balance the province’s budget in 1996, Parti Québécois premier Lucien Bouchard shut down trade offices in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles (as well as Columbia, Venezuela, Haiti, Germany, Italy, South Korea and Egypt). All that remained in the U.S. was the New York bureau, which has been the jewel of the province’s foreign postings since 1940.

The network was re-established after Jean Charest came to power in 2003 and now counts 23 offices of varying scales and responsibilities from Mumbai to Milan, Chicago to Sao Paolo, London to Los Angeles.

As newly elected Liberal Premier Philippe Couillard struggles to rein in Quebec’s budget and cut spending there will be some scaling back in the near future, but an aide to International Relations Minister Christine St-Pierre said that, with the new office opening in Texas, the government isn’t turning its tail.

“Certainly in the context of the budgetary cutbacks that we’re doing the missions will be reduced, but they will continue to maintain their focus on economic issues,” said Florent Tanlet, the minister’s aide.

Since the Quebec cabinet was named in late April, St-Pierre has already travelled to Chicago to promote the province’s new shipping strategy and plans to boost mineral exploration in the north, as well as France, where she talked up the candidacy of former Gov. Gen. Michaëlle Jean as the next secretary general of the Francophonie and planned the upcoming visit in October of French President François Hollande.

The political cracks that have appeared between Canada and Quebec through the referendum wars of the 1980s and 1990s have sometimes turned the province’s foreign posts into a repository for journalists seeking information on the independence movement.

Ahead of the losing May 20, 1980 referendum, Quebec’s New York office arranged visits from American media, set up a meeting between intergovernmental affairs minister Claude Morin and the New York Times editorial board and hosted a “referendum night” that drew 250 guests including Canadian consulate staff, media, business types and Quebecers living in the city, that year’s report to the U.S. Justice Department noted.

In the run up to the 1995 referendum, which was defeated by the narrowest of margins, Quebec’s representatives in the U.S. delivered speeches to American audiences, trade partners and potential investors who were reportedly “nervous” about the fallout of a secession vote, according a filing at the end of 1995.

With no looming referendums, the job of Quebec’s diplomats is largely non-partisan. This despite the fact that the bureaus are frequently led by partisan appointees.

“Over the years, under PQ and Liberal governments, we have taken the approach that our particular export needs differ from the rest,” said Parisella, himself a former director general of the Quebec Liberal Party.

Other provinces used to think that same way. British Columbia shut its Los Angeles trade office on iconic Sunset Boulevard in 1993 and, in 1997, contracted out the work of boosting its economic profile in Seattle for $22,000. Saskatchewan’s economic diversification and trade office in New York only lasted seven years before shutting down in 1997. Nova Scotia operated a tourism kiosk in Portland, Maine that distributed travel literature but that appears to have wound down operations in 2009 and is now deregistered.

Not so long ago, Ontario was operating on the same scale as the province of Quebec today. In the 1990s, Ontario had delegations stationed in New York, Boston, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas and Los Angeles that promoted the province’s industries. In 1992, the province’s American representatives flew in author Michael Ondaatje for a reading of his bestselling book, The English Patient, and participated in Toronto tenor Ben Heppner’s debut performance of Mozart’s Idomeneo at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City.

Though two Ontario marketing offices remain, in New York and L.A., the last lobbying recorded by the province to the American government was in 1993. Monique Smith, a former Ontario Liberal minister and a political ally of Premier Kathleen Wynne, is now the province’s point person south of the border, working out of the Canadian embassy in Washington along with her counterparts for Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

The federal government spent $83 million last year to operate its embassy, 12 consulates and three trade missions in the U.S., according to the Foreign Affairs Department. The Washington embassy accounted for $24.5 million of that sum.

But when an issue of particular provincial interest crops up in the U.S., most provinces usually turn to paid Washington lobbyists to bend the ears of lawmakers in Congress. Alberta and Saskatchewan have retained the firm run by David Wilkins, the prominent South Carolina Republican who served as the American ambassador to Canada, to push for approvals of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline from Alberta to refineries on the U.S. Gulf Coast. Yukon tapped Wilkins to push for funding to complete an all-weather highway between the northern territory and Alaska.

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Even while Quebec maintains separate residences in America, there is a great deal of collaboration with Canadian diplomats on cross-border issues.

“We see ourselves as a complement, not as adversaries,” Parisella said.

“Don’t get the impression that we have a parallel embassy and counsellors. We have much smaller offices, much smaller resources . . . I had an extraordinary relationship with (Canadian Ambassador) Gary Doer and I think that the only way it becomes profitable is if we combine all our resources.”

But for every joint Canada-Quebec stance on border security or free trade, there are fundamental disagreements over issues such as climate change.

There is also the particular francophone sensitivities that might fly under Canada’s diplomatic radar. Promoting Quebec culture — Cirque du Soleil, Montreal-based media and production company Moment Factory or the various filmmakers and movies from the province who have been shortlisted for Oscars in recent years — is obvious. But who else would sponsor that 2013 conference on the Quebec roots of beat writer Jack Kerouac, or fund the historical re-enactment of the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1763, the document in which France ceded Canada to the British?

To provincial number crunchers tasked with budget cutting, they may seem to be frivolous events and expenses fit for the cutting. But who is better placed in North America than a Quebecer to drop in on the French American School of Rhode Island to show support for learning a language the province’s francophones fear will one day die off?

“Diplomacy, when you’re not in an area of conflict where there’s a war or diplomatic interventions to help people leave the country, is really hard to measure,” Parisella said. “But I would say that the short answer is that it pays for itself.”

By the numbers

23: Number of Quebec diplomatic offices around the world

6: Number of Quebec offices in the U.S.

$8.5 million: Annual cost of running Quebec’s U.S. offices

2: Number of Ontario offices in the U.S.

$24.5 million: Cost of operating the federal government’s Washington embassy last year

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