Canada’s banking and commercial interests are looking anxiously to the south, beyond traditional trading partners in the United States, to Mexico and the burgeoning Latin American market. What they see makes sense: a free trade agreement that binds together the three major trading partners of the Western Hemisphere.

The three countries are expected to begin discussions this summer on a three-way agreement, but there are serious political obstacles to an agreement, and most of them are in Canada.

Speaking in Caribou this week, an official with the Royal Bank of Canada emphasized the importance of hemispheric unity for successful head-on competition with the European Community, which next year will become a unified economic force. He also identified the liability to Canada if it allows the United States to make a bilateral deal with Mexico. Such an agreement would diminish the significance of the U.S.-Canadian FTA, divert trade and investment from Canada, and make the U.S. the only one of the three countries with free-trade pacts covering the entire hemisphere.

This is not a desirable situation for Canada.

But the pressure for a multilateral agreement comes at an awkward time for Canada. Three years into the FTA with the United States, Canadian public opinion is running against the agreement. A recent Gallup Poll revealed that 52 percent of Canadians oppose the pact, just 31 percent like it, and a not surprising 75 percent believe the FTA has not delivered on the promise that it would bolster employment.

Canadian unemployment hit 9.3 percent in December, the highest rate in more than three years. Economists argue that factors other than free trade are responsible for joblessness, but the highly controversial FTA is a convenient target for public unhappiness.

Tom D’Aquino, president of Canada’s Business Council on National Issues, calls this FTA-bashing “nonsense,” but he is a political pragmatist and he worries that “now that we have a recession and (the popular belief) that somehow this is due to free trade, the rub-off from that could apply to Mexico as well.”

The attitudes of Canadians should be of concern to people in the United States, who would benefit from an open, hemispheric marketplace that would allow free trade in the ideas, raw materials, expertise and manpower of an enormous geographic region with 360 million consumers and $7 trillion in trade.

From a purely parochial perspective, Maine, because of its strategic geographic location, would have a tremendous opportunity to capitalize on trade within this hemisphere, and on the commerce of Mexico, Canada, and the United States with the European Community.