Steven Chase, writing in The Globe and Mail:
“Between Japan and Canada, there is no choke point,” Masashi Nakagome said in an interview, citing narrow passages including Asia’s Strait of Malacca, the main shipping route between the Indian Ocean and the Pacific.
The ambassador signalled, like his predecessor, that Japanese businesses are watching Canada-U.S. trade negotiations in hopes that the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement is renewed because investments including in this country’s auto sector are premised on preferential access to the U.S. market.
“For any companies, not just Japanese companies, predictability is very important, and so we are hoping that we could see more predictability in the future,” he said of Canadian trade relations with the United States.