Carney goes to Mexico in search of an ally – and opportunities
Prime Minister Mark Carney went to Mexico Thursday with two distinct but linked objectives.
The first is to find ways to work with Mexico to preserve free trade on the scale of North America, or at least as much as it can be saved from the most protectionist American administration in a century.
The second consists in developing a bilateral commercial relationship with Mexico which operates independently of the whims of the White House, and can survive everything that is in reserve for the Canada-American-Mexican (CUSMA) agreement when its renegotiation finally occurs.
The trip should produce a new complete Canada-Mexico partnership and security dialogue focused on issues such as transnational crime and drug fight.
“We focus on the elevation of our partnerships in trade, trade, security and energy,” said Carney in a written declaration before his departure for Mexico City. “Together, we will build stronger supply chains, create new opportunities for workers and offer greater prosperity and greater certainty for Canadians and Mexicans.”
But there have also been turbulence in the relationship, as there were during the first term of US President Donald Trump, and the trip is an effort to establish confidence between the two partners who will not throw the other under the bus.
Repair fences with Mexico
Mexicans are perhaps those who have a better reason to be wary of the Canadian embrace.
“There have been concerns in Mexico concerning the statements made by ministers Doug Ford and Danielle Smith,” said Laura Macdonald of the Carleton University Institute of Political Economy, and that members of the Trudeau government had also suggested “we would be better without Mexico” “shortly after Trump’s re -election.
But Canadian, federal and provincial leaders seem to have abandoned the idea that Canada can escape Trump’s views by pushing Mexico in front.
The Prime Minister of Alberta, Danielle Smith, says that Canada cannot “sacrifice” her relationship with the United States if Mexico is a “commercial irritant”. She says that she and the first Ontario are “synchronized” on her argument to conclude a bilateral agreement with the United States
In August, Smith visited Mexico and seemed to be closing. The Minister of Finance François-Philippe, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Anita Anand, visited Mexico the same month and met Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, based on the bilateral talks of Carney at the G7 summit.
“I think now, after about eight months of Trump, it has become clear that Canada is not better without Mexico,” said Macdonald.
“We really have to work with our partners and allies, the Mexicans,” she said, given the unpredictability of Trump prices and other movements. “Going to her separately from Mexicans would weaken us.”
Increasing bilateral trade
Commercial relations with Mexico have increased in recent years, although most of the growth has been in Mexican imports in Canada.
Canadian direct investment in Mexico, still large in the mining sector, diversified as it has widened.
For the first time this summer, more new cars have entered Canada in Mexico than from the United States, largely depending on car manufacturers such as GM and Volkswagen which are supplied by Mexican cars to avoid Canadian counter-tariffs that apply to American, but not Mexican vehicles.
Flavio Volpe of the Association of Automobile Parts manufacturers said that Canadian politicians who denied the relationship were bad: “Donald Trump tried to span us. We took the bait.”
He said that “friends in the automotive industry” quickly said they didn’t need Mexico to try to defend Canada’s economy.
“Well, the truth is that we need Mexico to be as prosperous as we have been,” he said, pointing to the automotive parts belonging to Canada based in Mexico.
“When we speak to the Mexican government and Mexican interests, we speak as Mexican investors and Mexican employers.”
Different approaches, similar results
At the start of the Trump administration, Sheinbaum was announced by some international observers as a leader who seemed to have cracked the code to treat a earthy American president.
Trump has always talked respectfully about Sheinbaum, just as he has Carney, in bright contrast with his degrading tone towards former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Mexico’s strategic decision not to fight back on American prices allows a direct comparison. Before Canada drops many of its counter-tariffs, the White House distinguished Canada and China as the only countries to retaliate.
But it is difficult to see how Mexico has gained real advantage with this approach, says Volpe.
“I think we are both in the same boat,” he said.
‘Benign negligence’
The two parties have often talked about the expansion of free trade outside of CUSMA, but neither did a lot to promote the idea, explains Carlo Dade of the Canada West Foundation, member of the Mexican Council on Foreign Relations (Comexi).
“There is a benign neglect reference,” he said. “We do not capitalize on opportunities, but we do not cause problems. I would characterize it as this is where we returned, after the first passers -by of Alberta and Ontario, let’s be frank here, thrown Mexico under the bus.”
Dade said that even in CUSMA, neither Mexico nor Canada have “fully benefited from the entire agreement”.
Talking about a new commercial corridor from Canada-Mexico has not yet exceeded the inspiring phase. A Mexican official who spoke to CBC News in the background said that Mexico had doubts about the capacity of Canadian infrastructure to manage the trade which, by definition, should above all be marinated in the United States.
Mexico has several ports on each coast, including Manzanillo and Lazaro Cardenas on the Pacific and Veracruz and Altamira on the Gulf. Manzanillo undergoes a major expansion which will allow him to manage the equivalent of five million containers per year by 2030 – twice the volume which moves in the ports of Montreal and Vancouver combined.
The Port of Montreal plan to build a new counter -core terminal in Quebec is one of the five major projects that Prime Minister Mark Carney plans to have been accelerated. At the end of its construction in 2030, the terminal in the Montéragie region will take care of more than a million containers per year.
Mexican officials are impatient to discuss the extensions of these two Canadian ports (one of which is on the list of main projects in Carney), and the possible construction of dedicated installations to support the Canada-Mexical trade in goods such as minerals and parts used in the construction of electric vehicles.
Dade says that there are opportunities for countries to meet to produce goods for the growth of Asian and South American markets-and they have a competitive advantage over the United States, which did it as members of the full and progressive agreement for the transpacific partnership.
“It has nothing to do with Donald Trump, has nothing to do with the United States that we could really work together in the Pacific, but we haven’t done it,” he said.
But Dade warned that they had to be discreet by doing so; There is no need to spit in the eye of the Trump administration.
“What we don’t want to see is working together or declarations on how we are going to connect to the United States together,” he said.
“We have to work quietly together, but we cannot praise it publicly.”
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