The struggle over Panama is not a trade dispute. It is a pre-kinetic tug-of-war between Beijing and Washington — and Canada should be watching.
OTTAWA — The Panama Canal is one of the great arteries of the world economy, a narrow thread of water through which roughly five percent of global maritime trade passes each year. For three decades, the ports at each end of it — Balboa on the Pacific, Cristobal on the Atlantic — were operated by a subsidiary of CK Hutchison, the Hong Kong conglomerate controlled by the family of billionaire Li Ka-shing. That arrangement ended this year when Panama’s Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional, the government physically seized the terminals, and Beijing erupted in fury, threatening that Panama would “pay a heavy price.”
