No Financial Cachet

Business books are a sorry lot of flavour-of-the-month ideas and bromides, but this sermon on trade stands out for its freshness, familiarity with relevant facts and passion. In Why Mexicans Don’t Drink Molson: Rescuing Canadian Business from the Suds of Global Obscurity, Andrea Mandel-Campbell, a former business reporter in Latin America, blends economics and evangelism to produce what should be a blockbuster on Canada’s role in global trade.

Deservedly so, for she focuses on serious issues. On the risk of Canada’s being marginalized in world trade, she writes, “the threat is all the more dangerous because it won’t be a calamitous collapse, like that of Argentina, but a slow, stealthy slide that will sneak up on us while we snooze, our bellies still uncomfortably full after gorging on a feast of oil sands and high copper prices.”

Even when Canadians’ bellies are empty, protectionism flourishes. Ms. Mandel-Campbell notes that...