Wow, that's a tall order. Thank you.
I'm going to speak now not from my position as the director of the Canada Institute, but from 15 years as a consultant on trade in the Americas. I've watched the Americas strategy evolve and I've watched the Government of Canada have some successes but also some challenges with it.
I think one of the first problems with anyone who has an Americas strategy is that the Americas is not a monolith. It's not a unity. The Americas consist of a number of diverse economies and countries that need to be addressed as individuals. Our relationship with Honduras is much different from what our relationship with Chile, Colombia, and Peru should be. Their economies have taken different tracks. They have different leaderships, cultural styles, etc. We need to be prepared to deal with our Latin American partners as individual states. That's the first thing.
Secondly, when I was working as a contractor for the Canadian International Development Agency in Latin America, we were straddling between building stronger economic partnerships and doing technical assistance and development. I think we've struggled to understand whether our role in Latin America is as development partners or trading partners, and how that works together.
Now I think the government's approach to closer integration of trade and development, in my opinion, is a very strong way to go with respect to our relationships in Latin America, but it's a tall order. Remembering back to when we tried to do the Free Trade Area of the Americas, we bit off a lot in that engagement.
I would support sustained engagement in Latin America and investment in diplomatic resources, but let's approach things in an incremental and institutional fashion. We have a very strong Latin American partner sitting right across the room from you. Let's work with Mexico. Let's understand the Latin American trade economy's language and culture better from our beachheads in the region, and then move on from there.
I would love to come back and talk to you about Canada-Latin American relations. It's very important to me, but I'm not sure I can do it justice in just a few minutes.