The Hair and hairdresser are heading for Mexico next. It will be a meeting of the three heads of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Prime Minister Stephen Harper will hardly feel the love that he did in Israel. President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico has every reason to be angry with Harper. And American President Obama also has good reason to be leery of him. There are no more three amigos at this meeting.
Someone was explaining yesterday the idiom that “Pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.” It simply means that it is okay to be a little bit greedy but if you go too far there are consequences. The Hair is going to get some of his consequences.
Mexican politicians and diplomats are particularly displeased with Canada demanding a visa requirement on their citizens visiting Canada. If you want to slap down a country, visas are one of the measures you can use. You hardly want to impose visa restrictions on a major trading partner. And to make matters worse, Canada put the restriction on the Czech Republic at the same time. Canada later lifted the restriction from the Czech Republic but not Mexico.
President Obama has his own beefs with Canada and not the least among them is the steady yapping about the Keystone XL pipeline. Harper has as much as said, he will out wait Obama’s term of office and then get Keystone approved. Somebody has probably mentioned to Obama that Canada gets to vote on Harper and his Conservatives in 2015 and Obama is safe until his replacement is chosen in 2016. If Obama had a vote in the Canadian election, it would sure not be for Stephen!
The Hair’s major problem in Mexico—other than the picture with the obligatory sombrero—is that he will get no quarter from the other two participants. The Americans and the Mexicans are going to be all buddy-buddy and leave Canada out in the cold. That can have an effect of billions in trade between the three countries. Even in just the auto sector, there is more than $3 billion in investment from two companies that can end up in Mexico with American support.
And that is our cautionary tale about the Hair and the hog. Harper’s foreign relations are erratic and unorganized because it has more to do with votes at home than Canada’s traditional honest broker and peacekeeper approach. The Hair needs to pay closer attention to what happens to the hog.
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Copyright 2014 © Peter Lowry
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