Canadian Legislative Issues
Three Amigo Summit
The much-hyped Three Amigo Summit – the recent meeting in Ottawa between Prime Minister Trudeau and his Mexican and American counterparts – was equal parts theater and concrete policy making in action. While much of the coverage focused on the red carpet-bonhomie on display between the three broadly like-minded leaders, their meeting signaled an important yet fragile theme that still holds (for now) on this side of the ocean: that of deeper international cooperation on policy issues that know no borders. This stands in stark contrast to what’s going on in Europe, for example, where a vote in the UK just sent a sharp rebuke to the notion that we’re better off working together on challenging issues than erecting walls between us in the hopes that our mutual problems will go away on their own.
The leaders of the three North American countries discussed many issues, but in policy terms, the most concrete announcement was a plan to achieve 50 per cent clean power generation across the continent by 2025. For Canada, this will not be a tall mountain to climb, as most of our electricity already comes from Hydro and other clean renewables. But the announcement did signal that in North America, at least, international cooperation on policy matters is still in vogue. In today’s climate, this is no small thing.
Individual countries will continue to implement their own policies, of course, but the climate is an issue that ignores human-made borders between countries, and so demands a level of international cooperation not currently in fashion on many issues. And for the many industries impacted by these decisions, regulatory harmony across the continent is to be applauded, as differing sets of rules for emissions or power generation from one jurisdiction to the next would make operating in Canada, the U.S. and Mexico an expensive headache, and for many, not worth the effort.
Ignore the theater of the latest Three Amigos meeting, which will end when the U.S. and Mexican delegations take off from the Ottawa airport. Much more lasting will be the impacts from the policies on which these three leaders agreed between photo ops and handshakes.
NAFA Fleet Management Association
http://www.nafa.org/
