If you're not with us, you're with CMP

When George W. Bush uttered his well-known war mantra, if you're not with us, you're against us, he started taking names of the countries not offering up military personnel to march behind the American flag, albeit 10 paces. Canada became a target and was penalized economically. Originally and still, the purpose for international trade is to force friendly relations between neighbouring countries from mutual vested interest: economic growth. Prior to Bush "teaching us a lesson" over here, no one saw that a trade relationship ratio of 1:14.2, wherein every 1% of US export market share equalled 14.2% of Canada's, didn't count as mutual vested interest. Until then, Canada had been so happy to nibble on the peanuts its principal trading partner dropped, our government snubbed its other NAFTA cohort, Mexico. When Bush's kill-them-all attitude shaped itself into economic policy, sandbagging our agri-business flow at the border, pesos suddenly moved from monopoly money to actual currency for Canadian trade interests. Indeed, the Canada-Mexico Partnership was created in October 2004, under one a few failed PMs. This accord, which is basically a howdy (distant) neighbour, but BFF, wanna play with my toys, attested to the missing super elephant that could still determine the two mice's fate, as even together they couldn't even get an invitation to a middle-power party. Objective 4 of the CMP seems to support this, "To identify obstacles that are detrimental to trade and investment flow and make recommendations for their removals." Ask? Geesh. My research on Canada-Mexico Partnership agreement shows it to consist of an annual meeting--one year here somewhere and the other year in Mexico, generally in Mexico City D.F. The annual check-in doesn't seem to go further than roll call for which groups are still active or which emerging groups can replace them. The most recent annual report I could find is 2018. Whatever economic progress has been made has not been written in figures...not that year nor the years prior. From my read through, coordinating issues seems to be an issue, as well as the reason why CMP exists went away with the Obama Administration and administration 45 has not hold up any Canadian exports. Nevertheless, what really made me question the impact of this wealth and societal development initiative started over 15 years ago is the edc.ca article Canada-Mexico: Trade, Investment and Integration (06/19) discusses how Canada and Mexico should and could be in business together. Huh? M-Anastasia.