Mexico’s rise is good for Canada. Really

In late August, Enrique Peña Nieto, Mexico’s hard-driving reformist president, gathered with beaming executives from South Korea’s Kia Motors to announce the carmaker will spend US$1 billion on a new assembly plant near the northern city of Monterrey—one more new North American car factory Ontario didn’t get. The deal, Peña Nieto boasted, is part of “the success story that we Mexicans are writing.” Just two weeks earlier he’d wrapped up an even more important chapter in that tale, when Mexico’s Congress passed a historic bill to liberalize the country’s state-controlled energy sector—a move that could dramatically boost oil exports to the U.S. in the coming years.

So there you have it. In the course of one month Mexico delivered another dent to the rusted husk of central Canada’s auto sector, this country’s old economic engine, and created a huge question mark over its new one, the oil patch. But as hard as it may be to see right now, the changes under way in Mexico offer huge opportunities for Canada.

via Mexico’s rise is good for Canada. Really.