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One of the most common arguments in the motion’s favour is that it’s “mostly symbolic,” which is essentially to say pointless. “Relax, dude! It’s useless!” Councillor James Pasternak, one of the two nay voters, isn’t so sure about that. “We have a Mexican consulate in Toronto. We have a (Mexican) Trade Commission in Toronto,” he says. “I can see the relationship actually growing under the revised NAFTA agreement, and we want them to see Toronto as a good, friendly, supportive place to invest.”

You mightn’t think a few hundred cars here or there would disrupt more than $40 billion in annual bilateral trade between two nations. But Pasternak argues you can often trace trade disputes back to surprisingly “petty” squabbles. Councillor Stephen Holyday, the only other nay voter, shares Pasternak’s concerns about sending a negative message to business: If city council is willing to weigh in on big labour’s side against big business outside its jurisdiction, imagine what it might do within the 416. But he also subscribes to a simpler and more radical notion that “motions before council are supposed to be for the benefit of the citizens of Toronto.”

What sweet, strange music that is.

As far as the practical effects of this motion go, there probably aren’t many. It seems unlikely that GM will ever make a vehicle in Mexico that Toronto needs where no alternative exists. Mind you, if the alternative was also made in Mexico by another company, and Oshawa’s GM plant was closed anyway, and the GM vehicle is the superior option, it’s impossible to see how Torontonians come out ahead. Toronto should be miles beyond buying anything for reasons other than best product and best price, especially as its decades of loyalty to Bombardier — whose Thunder Bay plant is roughly as near Toronto as Nashville — were repaid with shoddy streetcars delivered months and years behind schedule.

More to the point, with tens of billions of unfunded capital projects on the books, a provincial government neutral-to-hostile to the city’s very existence and who knows what to come in next year’s federal election, it should be clearer than ever to Toronto that it is basically on its own out there in the big bad world, and ought to behave accordingly. This would include, at the very least, more than two councillors, and a nominally conservative mayor, voting against this kind of student union bullcrap.

• Email: cselley@nationalpost.com | Twitter: cselley