A Case for the Three Amigos (CANADA)

A crisis often presents governments with an opportunity that can be either seized or missed. One lost chance came shortly after 9/11, when Mexico asked Canada to jointly negotiate a smart border agreement with the United States, as a way of ensuring that our respective land borders be kept as open as possible under Homeland Security concerns to trade in goods and services. Canada rejected the idea of working together in favour of a separate bilateral negotiation with Washington, mainly because it felt its own relationship with the United States was so special that including Mexico would only contaminate the process with issues extraneous to Ottawa's agenda. The result: two nearly identical agreements, signed six months apart, that could have been one of the first trilateral successes of the post-NAFTA era but that, instead, emphasized our differences.

Today, we face another such opportunity. We can only hope that, this time, Canada seizes the moment rather than following the misguided idea that excluding Mexico from the common North American agenda is in its best interest. The swine flu pandemic is an ideal issue on which we should be working together, not only to halt the spread of the virus within our own region and to third countries but to ensure that solidarity among us avoids the adoption of damaging defensive measures by others that will negatively affect trade, tourism and communications to and from all of North America.

FULL ARTICLE