Canada sighs with relief after Biden, Trudeau meeting
No fiery exchanges. No angry tweets. No insults. No bruised feelings. No problem.
You may not have noticed — the dutiful “PBS Newshour” devoted only three sentences to it 12 minutes into its broadcast, The New York Times buried it at the bottom of page A12, and The Boston Globe ignored it completely — but the president of the United States and the prime minister of Canada held a video meeting the other day.
Talk about a new world order, or at least a new North American order. The operative word here is “order.” Add two characters — and by that I don’t mean Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Justin Trudeau — and you have the word “orderly.” Then it’s a mere hop, skip and lexicological leap to the word “ordinary.”
As in: the orderly transaction of ordinary business.
Biden and Trudeau “met” to discuss environmental, international and pandemic-related issues, all of which are consequential. But the most consequential part of their 90-minute parley was that they met at all, and that the president didn’t call the prime minister “dishonest” and “weak,” and one of his top advisers didn’t suggest there was a “special place in hell” for Trudeau.
“More than anything,” wrote the Globe and Mail columnist John Ibbitson, “everyone just seemed so relieved.” Foreign-policy scholars talk endlessly about the American relationship with China and Europe, but the Canadian-american relationship — a topic of eyes-glaze-over disinterest south of the 49th parallel, a constant preoccupation north of it — arguably is the country’s most important one. Canada remains our biggest trading partner, and we share the longest land border in the world.
Which is why Canadians were so unsettled by Donald J. Trump, who brandished trade penalties on steel and aluminum while claiming that Canada — which has had a military understanding with the United States since the Franklin Roosevelt years — was a national security threat. The United States has 22 times more people on active military duty than does Canada, which has fewer people in arms than Nepal. The United States has 5,800 more nuclear weapons than Canada, which has none.
This is how Chrystia Freeland, now the deputy prime minister and who is married to an American, reacted to the national security contretemps: “I think what is important for Americans to understand is the justification under your rules for the imposition of these tariffs was a national security consideration. So, what you’re saying to us and to all of your NATO allies is that we somehow represent a national security threat to the United States. And I would just say to all of Canada’s American friends … Seriously?”
That represented perhaps the lowest point in the relationship since the War of 1812, when an American invasion of Canada was repelled.
“Trump was the most difficult president we have ever had,” said Colin Robertson, vice president of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute. “Yes, there were differences before, but they pale in comparison to the way he treated Trudeau — and the way he treated others. This warm opening with Biden is being watched not only in Ottawa but also in London, Paris, Berlin, Canberra and Tokyo.”
It did not help that there has been no American ambassador in Ottawa for 18 months and that the last envoy, Kelly Knight Craft, spent half of the time she was in the post in the United States.
“Canadians have great hopes for the Biden administration,” said John English, a former Lib
eral Party member of Parliament and the biographer of Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau, father of the current prime minister.
“People here were deeply offended by the threat to Canada, and the way Trump handled Trudeau was terrible. Richard Nixon had a hard time with Trudeau’s father, but publicly he was civil and respectful, and in the end, Pierre Trudeau had a measure of respect for Nixon. That is not the case with Justin Trudeau.”
Experts on both sides of the border believe the warm talks between the two leaders and — this was noted several times in Canada, where such nuances take on enormous importance — among the cabinet members of both countries was an important first step.
“Like everything in the context of this relationship, almost everything is more important for Canada,” said Christopher Kirkey, director of the Center for the Study of Canada and Institute on Quebec Studies at the State University of New York in Plattsburgh. “There’s no expectation for only smiles and giggles, but they are happy we might be moving to a more predictable environment and a friendlier look toward Canada.
“But,” he continued, “Mr. Trudeau shouldn’t think that all of a sudden there will be a profoundly warm embrace.”
Indeed, one of Biden’s first actions in the White House was to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline, which would have allowed the conveyance of Alberta oil to refineries in Texas. Canadian officials also are concerned about the president’s “Buy American” initiative. And they’re hoping for American intervention to extricate from China Canadian diplomat Michael Kovrig and Canadian consultant Michael Spavor, both arrested in 2018 after Canada, at the request of American officials, arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou, charged south of the border with fraud. Biden vowed “to work together until we get their safe return.”
Trudeau opened the meeting — which included Freeland and Vice President Kamala Harris — by saying, “U.S. leadership has been sorely missed over the past years.” The president soothingly told the prime minister that the United States “has no closer friend than Canada.”
The two agreed to a continental alliance against climate change, setting a goal of zero emissions by 2050. Their conversations touched on other issues, but the principal effect of their session was to smooth relations between the two countries, whose borders have been closed except to essential travel and commerce for nearly a year. Wait times to travel between western New York and Ontario can sometimes extend for nearly an hour; when I checked just before noon Wednesday, there were no delays at either the Lewiston-queenston or Rainbow bridges.
When President John F. Kennedy visited Ottawa four months into his presidency, he told Parliament, “Geography has made us neighbors. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies. Those whom nature hath so joined together, let no man put asunder.” This month, two men put it back together.