Former president Vicente Fox has urged Canada to join Mexico in the trade deal already reached with the United States so the two countries can work together to confront the “wild beast” in the White House.
In an interview on the Canadian radio show The Current punctuated by his trademark blunt language and provocative humor, Fox also described United States President Donald Trump as “the elephant in between” Mexico and Canada and said that Mexico City and Ottawa need to help each other when dealing with him.
“We must stick together, because the challenges are in the East, [they] are in other economies, and we have to remain strong, remain successful, remain competitive, remain productive,” he told host Anna Maria Tremonti.
“Now we know Trump much better than before and he’s not a good dealer,” added the former National Action Party (PAN) president, who held office from 2000 to 2006.
“It’s clear his game. He attacks first, he tries to reduce the capacities of the opponent, and then he takes all the marbles, and like a good kid, he runs away with the marbles.”
Trump announced last Monday that the United States and Mexican had reached a bilateral deal that could exclude Canada and after four days of negotiations failed to yield a trilateral pact, he reiterated that possibility via Twitter Saturday.
“There is no political necessity to keep Canada in the new NAFTA deal. If we don’t make a fair deal after decades of abuse, Canada will be out . . .” he wrote.
Like Trump, Fox also has a predilection for making provocative comments on social media, especially when aimed at the U.S. president.
“Mexico is not going to pay for that fucking wall” and “your mouth is the foulest shithole in the world” are among the goading Twitter posts he has directed at the 45th U.S. president.
But in his Canadian radio interview, Fox charged that “you cannot be provocative when you’re in the public arena, when you’re the president of a nation, when you represent 300 million Americans, when you have the power to destroy with atomic bombs or with an army.”
He added that the “presidency deserves a much better leader, a compassionate leader with a human attitude” and that he hoped that the Democratic Party would win control of the U.S. Congress in November midterm elections so that “this wild beast will be domesticated.”
Turning to the topic of drugs, Fox said that Mexico was caught in the middle in the illegal drug trade, sandwiched between drug producing countries such as Colombia and Bolivia to the south and large drug-consuming markets to the north.
The marijuana legalization advocate, who was in Toronto in his capacity as one of the newest members of the board of Canadian medical cannabis company Khiron Life Sciences Corp, said that Mexico itself is not a big drug-consuming nation.
“The big, the huge consumer markets of drugs are the United States, and secondarily Canada,” he said.
In a separate interview with Bloomberg last week, Fox said that marijuana trade should be included in an updated NAFTA deal.
“We can change criminals for businessmen, we can change underground, illegal non-taxpayers into an industry, a sector of the economy.”
Source: CBC (en)
