A Curmudgeonly Grump or Two About the North American Leaders' Summit

I really wish I could get excited about North American Leaders' Summits, but they've become a big, disappointing bag of snores.

I've complained on this blog about the lack of ambition for North America before. In fact, my second post to this blog in 2014 was a bit of an obituary to Robert Pastor, a long time proponent of closer North American cooperation. Sadly, there are several other posts, here, here and here, wherein I complain about this.

Slate magazine described the Three Amigos Summit as "North America's hottest leaders getting together for a steamy three-way." Indeed, photo ops were about as substantive as it got. Trudeau jogging with Nieto? Obama and Trudeau snapping selfies from the PM's Office? Phuleeeze.... Is the best we can do here?

Others have articulated the laundry list of important issues the three leaders could be talking about; Colin Robertson writing for the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, had a great scene setter a few days before the summit.

What really troubles me about the North American Leaders' Summits is their lack of ambition for a genuinely trilateral vision of what North America could be; a unifying idea. It does not have to be Europe. Given the uniqueness of North America, we probably shouldn't be thinking along European lines. However, something grander than what we got last week would have been nice, not least because of what appears to be the slow disintegration of the European Project.

You'd think three progressive leaders (at least in terms of the "steamy three-way noted by Slate magazine) would have more to offer in defense of liberalism in politics and economics than photo ops, a speech to parliament, a presser and a really awkward effort at a handshake? Let's have a look at what passes for "deliverables."

Deliverables?

1. Obama, once again, didn't stay very long. According to the White House, Obama landed in Ottawa just after 10am. He was back in the air again around 7:30pm. I know Washington isn't far away. A U.S. President also has a lot of things on their plate and cannot necessarily play tourist in Ottawa. However, the amount of time a president devotes to something is also an indicator of how important the substance is.

In this case, the substance had been teed-up long before the President even left Washington. By all accounts, had it not been for the stunning Brexit vote the week prior, North America's leaders would not have even mentioned trade. I find the unwillingness on the part of our elected leadership to defend the liberalization they pursue intellectually dishonest and cowardly. The outcome of the Brexit vote should have been irrelevant to that discussion.


2. Anything that trilateralizes climate change policy and coordination is a good thing in my view. In fact, I have argued for a long time that if Canada and the United States wanted to show real climate change leadership, they ought to work with Mexico to put together a serious climate change proposal; something such as a trilateral cap and trade system, or a North American carbon tax. I know, I know. Pie in the sky. However, the demonstration effect of such a proposal at the COP 21 talks in Paris last November would have been fantastic since one of the major cleavages in the multilateral process is between rich, legacy polluters like the United States and Canada, and developing countries, like Mexico, who argue they ought to be able to develop along the same lines.

One idea would be to build institutionally on what already exists; the North American Commission for Environmental Cooperation. Last week's Communique promises to work with existing CEC initiatives, but pledged no new money transformation of the CEC into a focal point of trilateral climate change activity.

Instead, what strikes me about last week's North American Leaders' announcement is the way in which it distills a bunch of small, ongoing processes into something that looks bigger than it is. An ambitious trilateral climate change proposal would move beyond the kind of administrative maneuvers that can be done under existing legislation (why aren't those things being done already?) and involve each of the national legislatures in crafting something new? I know the reasons this is impossible: election year in the U.S., the Congress would never go for it, the next president and Congress might reverse course..... Heard it all before. But why not take the opportunity to lay down a bold new vision, especially since it was Obama's last visit to Ottawa as president? Again, missed opportunity.

3. One bright spot in all of this was the apparent effort by Canada to patch things up with Mexico. I thought the photo-op cum jogging outing by Trudeau and Nieto was contrived, but I applaud the effort to hit the reset button here. Indeed, President Nieto came Ottawa on a state-visit a few days before the North American Leaders' Summit.

All is good, right? Not really.

Sadly, Canada and Mexico have been the spokes in a hub-and-spoke North America that have never really gotten to know one another. Indeed, much of what Canadians really know about Mexico doesn't extent very far from the beaches of Cancun or Puerto Vallarta. The two countries could do so much more.

Back in 1990 when Mexican President Carlos Salinas proposed free trade to President George H.W. Bush, Canada was mainly interested in joining what became the NAFTA negotiations as a defensive measure hoping it wouldn't lose the hard-won preferences it had negotiated with Washington just a few years earlier. Things limped along between Mexico City and Ottawa, the two more or less tolerating each others presence at the table with Washington. 9/11 briefly altered that calculus as border security began to trump everything else and Mexico City and Ottawa felt themselves been treated similarly in terms of becoming security price-takers.

By the time the Harper government came to power in Ottawa in February 2006, Canada and Mexico had become frustrated with each other; Canada in particular came to view re-bilateralizing North America as a means of more readily getting its way with the Americans. In July 2009, Ottawa imposed a visa requirement on all Mexican travellers to Canada citing a flood of bogus refugee claims by Mexican nationals. The requirement was imposed almost overnight, and without bilateral consultation with Mexico City. Ottawa's move was widely perceived in Mexico as an arbitrary stick in the eye.

During the 2015 Canadian federal election campaign, Justin Trudeau promised to remove the visa restrictions on Mexico if elected. Yet, through the balance of 2015 and well into 2016, nothing happened. As the North American Leaders Summit approached, President Nieto threatened to boycott the meeting if the visa issue was not dealt with.

Well, the visa issue was dealt with last week..... sort of. Sort of, because Nieto left Ottawa with a promise to have the visa requirement lifted by December 1 of this year (6 months from now), and somehow left the impression that the visa issue got linked to a longer standing dispute over Canadian beef in the Mexican market. In other words, it looks like Mexico agreed to admit Canadian beef in October on the promise of visa free travel in December. Surely a visa restriction that was imposed overnight could also be removed overnight? Restrictions on beef imports seem inherently more problematic work through, particularly in Mexico's labyrinth bureaucratic system. Yet, here we are.

We Need a Big Idea

This all sounds pretty grumpy and pessimistic. Don't get me wrong. There is a lot of cooperation going on. To read the official communique is to be impressed with exactly how much coordination and cooperation is happening on a variety of issues. Moreover, apologists for this process argue that this laundry list of initiatives is animated within the bureaucracies by the fact that the leaders give any air-time to it all. Without a periodic endorsement of all this work from the leaders themselves, there would be very little cooperation at all.

The reason a lack of vision is problematic, however, is that whether the leaders want this work done or not, it's all happening below the public and legislative radar. In a poisonous political environment where "trade" and "NAFTA" scare the bejeezus out of elected leaders, this approach is understandable. Progress on a hodge-podge of low-profile initiatives under existing grants of legislative authority is safe. None of it will draw the ire or scrutiny of national legislatures or voters. Yet, that's also a cowardly double-edged sword because that same approach runs the risk of fuelling conspiracies about executive authority run amok.

I also worry that the North American Leaders' Summits will soon disappear for want of any kind of agenda at all. There were no meetings in 2010 or 2015. The three bureaucracies work very hard in the run-up to these summits to make it look like things had been accomplished since the last meeting and that there's a robust enough agenda for the future to justify each leaders' time. How much longer will the Three Amigos be willing to meet over what is essentially oversight on implementation under existing authority? What is there that's new? Couldn't a lot of this been taken care of over the phone? Why not just delegate everything to the ministerial level? What will give each leader, and especially an American President, reason to devote time to North America?

We need a vision, a kind of "North Star" to guide the complex mix of things on the North American agenda. Such a vision, even a distant one, will require public and legislative buy-in to make happen and a leader brave enough to put it on the table. Without such a vision, Homeland Security, not exactly a visionary outfit, will offer more gadgets, programs, and measures at borders. In many ways, the absence of an "idea" at the heart of North America has meant security has become the default vision. That's a far cry from what we were contemplating when the NAFTA was implemented in 1994.