LINKS July 30, 2012

DIPLOMACY

Protesters greet premiers meeting with US governors [CBC]

Canadians love Democrats, but Republicans friendlier [CP]

BORDER

NY border to be focus of congressional hearing Monday [AP]

US man gets 3 years for gun smuggling [CBC]

US study of Canadian ports both applauded and panned [CP]

US agency questions Canadian port security [CP]

US official slams port report [CP]

Last unmanned border crossing closes between QC and VT [The Gazette]

TRADE/ECONOMY

 Alberta’s economy shows no sign of slowing down [inews880]

S&P cuts ratings on seven Canadian banks [CP]

US securities regulator alleges insider trading ahead of China’s Nexen bid [Reuters]

DEFENSE

Syria expanded chemical weapons supply with Iran’s aid [Washington Post]

Romney on Iran: ‘Any and all measures’ [Washington Post]

Panetta says Assad hastening own demise [AP]

ENERGY

BC premier’s standoff with Alberta derails chance for national energy strategy [Postmedia News]

Leave Alberta out of BC’s pipeline demands: Redford [Globe and Mail]

 Enbridge to replace leaky Wisconsin oil pipeline Monday [Reuters]

 TransCanada gets key go-ahead for southern leg [Washington Post]

Canada’s oil, the world’s carbon [NY Times]

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Twitter/luizachsavage

LINKS July 26, 2012

BORDER

American agency poised to criticize Canada for luring cargo from US ports [CP]

Costly Canadian border bottlenecks frustrate Minnesota businesses [Star Tribune]

Immigration crackdown in upstate New York [nacla.org]

Top Ten customs-related issues facing Canadian importers [Financial Post]

NEXUS program lifts residency requirement [Delta Optimist]

New NEXUS lane open in BC [Marketwire]

TRADE/ECONOMY

Latest Canadian export to Main Street USA: Joe Fresh [Wall Street Journal]

Drought to drive up food prices next year, US says [NY Times]

Fed sees benefits and risks in new moves [NY Times]

US Senate passes bill to keep tax cuts for middle class [Washington Post]

DEFENSE

 Canada open to boosting Syrian humanitarian aid [CBC]

Baird rejects military intervention in Syria [Globe and Mail]

Al Qaeda taking deadly new role in Syria’s conflict [NY Times]

Ignatius: The “day after” in Syria [Washington Post]

ENERGY

Keystone XL foes protest on anniversary [Omaha World-Herald]

Montana congressmen push Obama on Keystone XL [Missoulian]

US Senate GOP plan new push to approve Keystone XL, expand offshore drilling [The Hill]

TransCanada urged to “Go East” [Financial Post]

Republicans, Nexen, and Keystone XL [Macleans.ca]

BC calls on Alberta, Ottawa to join pipeline talks [Globe and Mail]

 More weather extremes leave parts of US grid buckling [NY Times]

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Twitter/luizachsavage

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Luiza’s Blog Archives

Trilateralism dead: The Economist

February 24, 2011
By

The Economist magazine has noticed the demise of the “Three Amigos” approach to North America in an article posted today, “The push for deeper ties peters out”:

” …Since then the drive for integration has ground to a halt. The “three amigos”, as their leaders were once dubbed, could not find time to meet last year, and the session scheduled for February 26th has been cancelled. When Barack Obama and Stephen Harper, Canada’s prime minister, announced on February 4th that they were exploring ways to harmonise regulations and co-ordinate security—plans that had previously been discussed trilaterally—they did not mention Mexico.”

I wrote about this development in more detail back in June in Maclean’s magazine, in an article entitled, “The end of North American trilateralism”:

On a sunny August morning in 2007, while protesters were cordoned off by a security perimeter and reporters corralled into a side room, a high-powered meeting took place inside Quebec’s woodsy Château Montebello. On one side of a square meeting table sat Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his aides. On another sat then-U.S. president George W. Bush and his entourage, and on a third, the delegation of Mexican President Felipe Calderón. On the fourth side, in a rare position to hold the simultaneous attention of all three leaders of North America, sat the CEOs of corporate titans like Wal-Mart, Lockheed Martin, the Campbell Soup Co. and Procter & Gamble—each armed with a wish list of ways to change economic and trade regulations to increase profit and efficiency.

The occasion was the annual “three amigos” summit, a ritual that had begun in 2005 when Bush invited his counterparts to meet and address concerns that security had trumped trade in the years since 9/11. The three leaders created 20 working groups of bureaucrats, hammering away on issues from harmonizing regulations to developing pandemic preparedness plans. The effort, called the Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP), was meant to continue North American economic integration where NAFTA had left off.

But after the reports were written and communiqués issued, a funny thing happened: that is to say, not much. Or, rather, something big happened: the election of Barack Obama. The SPP had withstood the transition from Paul Martin to Stephen Harper and from Vicente Fox to Felipe Calderón. But at the first trilateral summit attended by Obama last summer in Guadalajara, Mexico, the leaders shut it down.

Although the leaders identified 10 priority areas, the results of the ad hoc process, if it can be called a process at all, have been negligible, according to Chris Sands, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, a Washington think tank, and Greg Anderson, a political scientist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who have concluded that little headway has been made on any of the 10 agenda items.

This year would have marked Harper’s turn to host another trilateral summit, but no date has been announced. Washington wasn’t interested and absent a senior White House point person on the issue, there is no momentum. “The thing that is really damaging if we don’t have a summit is the signalling to the bureaucracy that North America can wait,” said Anderson, “that there are other fish to be fried.”

What killed the SPP?…

Read the entire article here.

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