Norad, Haiti, migration, critical minerals to top agenda for PM Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden
Norad, Haiti, migration, critical minerals to top agenda for PM Trudeau and U.S. President Joe Biden
WASHINGTON -
U.S. President Joe Biden is embarking on a 27-hour whirwind visit to Ottawa, where he will meet Friday with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and speak to a joint session of Parliament -- his first bilateral sojourn north as commander-in-chief.
Here are some of the issues the two leaders are likely to discuss:
MIGRATION BREAKTHROUGH
The two countries are already close to an agreement to expand the 2004 migration treaty known as the Safe Third County Agreement, which is designed to limit asylum claims in both countries but currently only applies to official entry points.
As a result, critics say it encourages asylum seekers to enter Canada at unofficial border crossings, which allows them to make a claim. Sources familiar with the details say the two sides have been working on extending the agreement to cover the length of the Canada-U.S. border since the Summit of the Americas in Los Angeles last June. Such an agreement would help resolve a major political headache for Trudeau, while giving Biden the political cover he would need to devote more spending to northern border security.
MODERNIZING NORAD
Until last month, the binational early-warning system known as the North American Aerospace Defence Command might have been best known for tracking Santa Claus on Christmas Eve.
But a February flurry of unidentified flying objects drifting through North American airspace, most notably what U.S. officials insist was a Chinese surveillance balloon, exposed what Norad commander Gen. Glen VanHerck described as a "domain awareness gap": the archaic, Cold War-era system's ability to track small, high-flying, slow-moving objects.
Coupled with the brazen ambitions of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the ongoing but largely opaque joint effort to upgrade Norad -- rarely mentioned in past Trudeau-Biden readouts -- is suddenly front and centre for both governments. Media reports suggest Canada could agree to an accelerated timeline.
HELPING HAITI
The list of foreign-policy hotspots around the world that instantly bring Canada to mind is a short one, but Haiti is surely near the top.
And as Haiti has descended ever deeper into lawlessness in the wake of the 2021 assassination of president Jovenel Moise, the need for military intervention has been growing -- and some senior U.S. officials have expressly name-checked Canada as the perfect country to lead the effort. Trudeau's response has been diplomatic but firm: the crisis is best addressed from a distance.
"Canada is elbows deep in terms of trying to help," he said last month. "But we know from difficult experience that the best thing we can do to help is enable the Haitian leadership ... to be driving their pathway out of this crisis."
Military experts in Canada say the Canadian Armed Forces are in no state to be able to lead any sort of intervention. U.S. officials said Wednesday they are pursuing a solution with urgency, but insist the discussions are multilateral in nature and will have to involve Haiti itself, and perhaps even the United Nations.
MISSION-CRITICAL MINERALS
No high-level conversation between the U.S. and Canada these days would be complete without talking about critical minerals, the 21st-century rocket fuel for the electric-vehicle revolution that Trudeau calls the "building blocks for the clean economy."
Canada has the minerals -- cobalt, lithium, magnesium and rare earth elements, among others -- and a strategy to develop them, but the industry is still in its infancy and the U.S. wants those minerals now. The issue has profound foreign-policy implications: China has long dominated the critical minerals supply chain, something the Biden administration is determined to change.
"This really is one of the most transformative moments since the Industrial Revolution," said Helaina Matza, the State Department's deputy special co-ordinator for the G7's Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment. "We understand that we can't do it alone."
WATER, WATER EVERYWHERE
Canada and the U.S. have been negotiating since 2018 to modernize the Columbia River Treaty, a 1961 agreement designed to protect a key cross-border watershed the size of Texas in the Pacific Northwest.
Despite 15 separate rounds of talks, progress has been middling at best. Meanwhile, Canada is under U.S. pressure to allow the International Joint Commission -- the investigative arm of a separate 1909 boundary waters agreement -- to investigate toxic mining runoff in the B.C. Interior that Indigenous communities on both sides of the border say has been poisoning their lands and waters for years.
Add to all of that the mounting pressure on Canada to supercharge efforts to extract and process critical minerals, and the plot promises to thicken.
BORDER BLUES
The flow of irregular migration isn't the only bilateral issue focused on the border.
Critics on both sides say travel between the two countries hasn't been the same since the COVID-19 pandemic. The Nexus trusted-traveller program, a popular fast-tracking system in Canada, broke down last year amid a dispute over U.S. border agents working on Canadian soil; the fix is widely seen as less streamlined than the old system.
Many of those same critical voices are taking issue with Canada's imposed new tax measures to discourage foreigners from owning real estate north of the border; some on Capitol Hill have been vociferous in pressing the Biden administration to demand an exemption.
A TRADE DEAL BY ANY OTHER NAME
Regardless of what the two leaders end up talking about, it will happen within the framework of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, known in Canada as CUSMA.
The USMCA era of continental trade, which began in earnest in 2020, has not been without its hiccups, including disputes over U.S. access to Canada's dairy market and the way the U.S. defines foreign automotive content. The Biden administration is also staunchly opposed to Canada's plans for a digital services tax, which it considers a violation. The agreement is due to be reviewed in 2026, and a lot could happen -- especially on Capitol Hill and in the White House -- between now and then.
It's also worth noting that while it's not covered by the trade deal, the softwood lumber dispute remains a perennial irritant. International Trade Minister Mary Ng met earlier this month with industry leaders to discuss "unwarranted and illegal U.S. duties" on softwood lumber, vowing that a solution that protects Canadian jobs "is the only resolution that we will accept."
In other words, don't hold your breath for a breakthrough on a dispute "that's been going on since Adam and Eve," said Tony Wayne, a former U.S. ambassador to Mexico and the former U.S. assistant secretary of state for economic and business affairs.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 23, 2023.
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Monday morning, the Public Service Alliance of Canada announced it had reached a 'tentative' agreement with the federal government for the 120,000 picketing Treasury Board workers who, since April 19, had been engaged in one of the largest strikes in Canadian history. Here's a rundown of the developments from Parliament Hill as they happened.
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The Nova Scotia government says it is investigating the theft of personal information stolen through a global privacy breach to a third-party file transfer system the province was using.
Quebec provincial police (SQ) have identified the adult victim of a fishing incident that claimed five lives over the weekend, most of them children. Keven Girard, 37, was among a group of 11 people swept up by the tide late Friday night while fishing along the shore in Portneuf-sur-Mer, a village about 550 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
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A Ukrainian man rushed to his home outside the central city of Dnipro in hopes of rescuing his family, only to find his two-year-old daughter dead and wife seriously wounded as he helped pull them from the rubble of their apartment destroyed in one of Russia's latest airstrikes of the war, authorities reported Sunday.
The derailment in eastern India that killed 275 people and injured hundreds was caused by an error in the electronic signalling system that led a train to wrongly change tracks and crash into a freight train, officials said Sunday.
Quebec provincial police (SQ) have identified the adult victim of a fishing incident that claimed five lives over the weekend, most of them children. Keven Girard, 37, was among a group of 11 people swept up by the tide late Friday night while fishing along the shore in Portneuf-sur-Mer, a village about 550 kilometres northeast of Montreal.
The Nova Scotia government says it is investigating the theft of personal information stolen through a global privacy breach to a third-party file transfer system the province was using.
Allowing new Canadians to take the oath of citizenship by clicking a box online is a disgusting idea that will cheapen the process and open the door to fraud -- or a forward-thinking notion that will help decrease a backlog of citizenship applications, depending on who you ask.
A wildfire that tore through homes and businesses in the Halifax area is 100 per cent contained, but a historic fire in southwestern Nova Scotia remains out of control.
Wildfires in northwestern Quebec prompted thousands to evacuate the area over the weekend, as the number of blazes pushed past 140 and the military geared up to fight the encroaching flames -- even as that threat eased slightly Sunday on the North Shore.
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China's defence minister defended sailing a warship across the path of an American destroyer and Canadian frigate transiting the Taiwan Strait, telling a gathering of some of the world's top defence officials in Singapore on Sunday that such so-called 'freedom of navigation' patrols are a provocation to China.
Russian forces declared victory in Bakhmut last month after the longest, deadliest battle since their full-scale invasion of Ukraine began 15 months ago, but Ukrainian defenders aren't retreating. Instead, they are keeping up the pressure and continuing the fight from positions on the western fringes of Bakhmut.
NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg made no breakthrough on Sunday in talks about Sweden's membership in the military organization with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, with officials from the two countries to meet in just over a week to try to bridge their differences.
Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson says the federal government is not ruling out finding ways to achieve net zero sooner than the existing 2050 goal, but would not say whether there would be a definitive commitment to move up the target.
Jenny Kwan has been outspoken against human-rights violations by the Chinese Communist Party and often advocates for the country's Uyghur Muslim minority. The Hong Kong-born member of Parliament said in an interview with The Canadian Press that that's what made her an 'evergreen' target of the Chinese government.
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The number of people in Canada with inflammatory bowel disease is increasing rapidly and is expected to grow to 470,000 by 2035, according to a new report from Crohn's and Colitis Canada.
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Apple appears poised to unveil a long-rumoured headset that will place its users between the virtual and real world, while also testing the technology trendsetter's ability to popularize new-fangled devices after others failed to capture the public's imagination.
The Nova Scotia government says it is investigating the theft of personal information stolen through a global privacy breach to a third-party file transfer system the province was using.
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Apple appears poised to unveil a long-rumoured headset that will place its users between the virtual and real world, while also testing the technology trendsetter's ability to popularize new-fangled devices after others failed to capture the public's imagination.
Saudi Arabia will reduce how much oil it sends to the global economy, taking a unilateral step to prop up the sagging price of crude after two previous cuts to supply by major producing countries in the OPEC+ alliance failed to push oil higher.
A tanker transporting crude oil broke down in a single-lane part of Egypt's Suez Canal on Sunday, briefly disrupting traffic in the global waterway, Egyptian authorities said.
Constructed by a team at London, Ont.’s Western University, a tiny satellite — roughly the size of a Rubik’s cube — will ride aboard a SpaceX mission bound for the International Space Station.
The joy Paul Maurice felt on the morning of the start of the Stanley Cup Final was also tinged with sadness. The veteran coach knew there were only at most seven more games left to play.
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America apparently needs more car seats. So, when Volkswagen unveiled the ID. Buzz, a retro-styled electric van, last year, it noted that the version for the North American market would be longer and would have three rows of seats.
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