DON’T TRY THE CARNEY ASADA

Cosying up with Mexico will backfire – again

When NAFTA was being renegotiated in 2017, Canada took a bold step and tried to forge a united front with Mexico against the United States. It failed miserably and Canada was frozen out of trade talks, resulting in the U.S. working out a deal with Mexico while Canada sat on the sidelines.

I bring this up in the context of Prime Minister Mark Carney heading to Mexico in what looks like a replay of the 2017-18 plan to try to form a united front against the Trump administration.

Carney was welcomed with pomp and circumstance in Mexico City by President Claudia Sheinbaum. The two were expected to discuss trade, security arrangements, work visas and combating organized crime in areas such as drug and gun smuggling.

There was even talk of a strategic partnership agreement being signed. Well, lo and behold, a deal was signed.

Don’t think for a moment that this isn’t  being noticed in Washington. They are taking all of this into account and not in a good way.

According to several reports, Canadian and American negotiators haven’t had serious talks since the end of August. That’s four weeks ago on a file that is vitally important to the Canadian economy.

This week, Carney made it seem like he was on good terms with Trump.

“At this moment, we have the best agreement in the world with the Americans, as well as the lowest imposed tariff rate in the world,” Carney boasted under questioning from Bloc Quebecois Leader Yves-Francois Blanchet. “The president of the United States is a modern man: He has a cellphone. I speak with him regularly and we exchange text messages.

That’s a far cry from his message during the election campaign even though the American tariff threat has not changed since then.

“President Trump  is trying to break us so that America can own us,” Carney sad on April 28^th, election night.

Carney used anti-American rhetoric to win the election. It was politically popular for him to do so. That said, the Americans took note of this. They paid attention when we said the relationship is over, when we said we wouldn’t buy their products or vacation in the United States anymore.

As much as Canadians were bothered by Trump’s 51^st state bluster, Americans are bothered by what we have been saying about them. There was a window to find a broader deal, but that window appears to have closed,

Speaking at an event in Ottawa last week, Trump’s ambassador to Canada, Pete Hoekstra said the time for a bigger deal has passed.

“Whether it’s on trade, whether it’s energy, whether it’s automotive, whether it’s nuclear defence and all those types of things, we were hoping that we would not just renegotiate CUSMA but that we could take it into being something much bigger,” Hoekstra said, “It’s obvious, at least at this point in time, that that’s not going to happen.”