Mexican president Claudia Sheinbaum will be attending the G7 summit in Alberta next week.Marco Ugarte/The Associated Press
On Monday, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum finally agreed to attend the G7 summit next week in Kananaskis, Alta., almost six weeks after Prime Minister Mark Carney invited her, and after she’d brusquely declared she was only “thinking about” attending. She accepted, she declared, because it was a chance to meet President Donald Trump.
That deliberately cold shoulder – as it was viewed in both Mexico City and Ottawa – is a public manifestation of something that officials in both countries have known for more than a year: High-level relations between Canada and Mexico are poisoned. They can hardly even be called relations.
At a moment when Ottawa is scrambling to build closer political, trade and defence ties to other functioning democracies to compensate for the loss of U.S. partnership under Mr. Trump’s destructive leadership, Mexico is mostly absent from the conversation. Beyond pro forma gestures such as Mr. Carney’s customary invitation and a lone post-election phone call, there has been little in the way of new co-operation between the two governments, despite both sharing a broadly centre-left perspective, sovereignty and tariff threats from Mr. Trump, and of course a three-country free-trade agreement that will soon be up for renegotiation.
In fact, it wasn’t trade or politics that shattered this relationship. Well, those played a role, but diplomats agree that the straw that broke the chupacabra’s back was the early 2024 decision by Ottawa to reimpose a visa requirement on Mexicans visiting Canada, after eight years of visa-free travel.
“Naturally, it hurt,” said Juan José Gómez Camacho, a former Mexican ambassador to Canada. “Because visas are not just administrative travel documents. Visas, whether intentionally or otherwise, always carry an unavoidable political message, especially when you are talking about two countries that have a very close relationship as trading partners.”
I contacted Mr. Gómez after witnessing an unusually heated panel discussion between Mexican and Canadian diplomats organized recently by the Canadian Council for the Americas. It revealed mutual fixation on the visa issue: The Canadians said they had been trying to tell Mexico about thousands of their citizens who were boarding tourist flights to Canada and then filing refugee claims upon landing (few Mexicans are eligible for asylum in Canada). Ottawa had been asking Mexico’s government to do something about it at their end. But Ms. Sheinbaum’s predecessor had refused even to take a call from then-prime minister Justin Trudeau.
The Mexicans, for their part, said the problem was partly Canada’s: Our booming construction industry is chronically short of skilled trades and labourers, and in the absence of accessible legal immigration routes, contractors were actively recruiting undocumented tradespeople, who only knew how to enter Canada by coming as tourists and overstaying. Canada, the Mexicans felt, needed to solve its problem first.
The visas only confirmed a growing distrust. When Mr. Trump angrily cancelled the North American free-trade agreement in his first term, he had first tried to negotiate a new deal alone with Mexico. They refused, insisting Canada be included. But after Mr. Trump’s second election in November, a number of Canadians, including Ontario Premier Doug Ford, vocally proposed a Mexico-excluding bilateral deal, which looked to Mexicans like a betrayal of their generosity. And Ottawa has been (rightly) publicly critical of Ms. Sheinbaum’s move this month to have hundreds of judges “elected,” effectively turning the country’s justice system into a political arm of her party. It may contradict Canada’s democratic values, but it looked to some Mexicans like we were interfering with the internal affairs of an ally against the much larger democratic threat from Washington.
The root problem, Mr. Gómez notes, is that for both Canada and Mexico, our economic and political relations with each other come a very distant second – if that – to our very different relationships with the United States. We’re both in bed with the elephant, as the saying goes, though one of us has to sleep underneath. In the presence of that huge problem, our mutual distrust can be left to fester.
If it was a seemingly minor migration issue that triggered this impasse, Mr. Gómez suggests, then migration issues may be the best way out of it.
Mr. Carney’s “nation-building” agenda – the accelerated construction of millions of homes and transportation and energy infrastructure projects – will require unprecedented numbers of skilled-trades and construction workers, many from abroad. It’s an opportunity to forge a migration co-operation agreement with Mexico that could provide the incentives and processes needed to restore visa-free travel.
The G7, given the elephant in the room, is probably not the place to start mending this rift. But the two heads of government should meet soon, and in person, to restore both human mobility and political cooperation between two countries that have more in common with each other than with the untamed animal lying between them.