The "Three Amigos" are back....Yeah, thanks Horhay.
" ... old irritants remain".
President Obama will meet Monday with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the sixth North American Leaders Summit since George W. Bush inaugurated them in Waco in 2005 amid great hoopla and high hopes, but the first in three years as U.S. relations with its neighbors have declined in priority.
Known as the “Three Amigos” summits in the Bush years, the summits once featured so much talk of continental coordination and so many dreams of a trading behemoth that conspiracy theorists on the far right had a field day warning of lost sovereignty and erased borders. But the conspiracists have breathed easier since Obama’s inauguration, celebrating the loudest in 2009 when the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), which was created at the first summit, quietly announced it was “no longer an active initiative.”
Anybody buying that?
But, while the SPP is no more, the trading and regulatory issues that spawned it, remain. The U.S. ambassador to Canada complains frequently about the Cheerios he eats every morning for breakfast, citing them as an example of the many trade irritants between the United States and its northern neighbor. When he goes south of the border, his Cheerios are fortified with vitamins and minerals. But when he is at the embassy in Ottawa, he has to eat Canadian Cheerios without those vitamins and minerals. “I feel neither healthier nor cheerier in one country or the other,” he complained last month to the Financial Post. Similarly, Jacobson cannot buy the same can of Campbells soup in Canada. Americans like 16-ounce soup cans; Canadians require the cans to hold 19 ounces. The result is the makers of Campbells and Cheerios must spend the money to build duplicative plants and assembly lines.
"Canadians require"? Or the Canadian government requires? And I've got news for this guy; Campbell's soup comes in 10 3/4 oz, not 16 oz.
The SPP was supposed to address such issues in a trilateral way, harmonizing regulations across the continent. But since Obama’s election, the three countries have reverted to talks involving only two countries at a time leading the Woodrow Wilson Center and the Mexico Institute recently to spend a day examining “whether trilateralism is dead” and assessing the negative economic impact on the United States.
Hopes are not high for Monday’s summit to recapture some of the excitement that surrounded that first Three Amigos gathering in Waco. “The administration has been extremely effective in lowering our expectations,” joked Robert A. Pastor, director of the Center for North American Studies at American University, and the leading expert on continental issues. Pastor praises Obama for hosting the summit after there were none in 2010 and 2011, even while acknowledging that some of the recent sessions were “largely empty summits.”
Robert Pastor, Robert Pastor .... the name is ringing a bell ....
Meet Robert Pastor: Father of the North American UnionAaahh. THAT Robert Pastor. The Robert Pastor who convinced Carter to give Panama the Canal.
H/T Hot Air
