Keenan: New start with good vibes,
WASHINGTON—For Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, Joe Biden’s early presidency has been a lot of good vibes and bad news so far, at least in the headlines.
Good vibes: a president who said Tuesday, “The United States has no closer and no more important friend than Canada” and emphasizes his commitment to global engagement. Bad news: the Keystone pipeline cancelled, Buy America protectionism, vaccine protectionism and relative inaction on the two Canadians imprisoned in China.
You have to think that coming out of his first bilateral meeting with Biden on Tuesday — conducted virtually in Washington and Ottawa — it would be nice for Trudeau to have some big concrete “win” to announce. Truckloads of vaccines coming north. A plan to reopen the border. A policy edit to “Buy North America.”
Instead, Canada got Biden saying, “Canada and the U.S. are going to work in lock-step” as Trudeau watched along on the livestream, smiling and nodding. The president used the phrase “work together” in a long list of policy variations. He talked about “launching an expanded dialogue” and exploring “our bilateral partnership.”
It was heralded as the “U.S.Canada partnership road map,” which a White House announcement describes as “a blueprint for our whole-of-government relationship, based on our shared values and commitment to work in partnership on areas of mutual concern, such as the recovery from COVID-19 and global health security, efforts to combat climate change and shared priorities in defence and security.”
Which, you know, isn’t nothing. Trudeau seemed pleased. “Today, we’re taking our next step forward,” he said of the road-map concept. “This is our moment to act.”
It’s not nothing. Just how much of something it turns out to be will depend on what it leads to.
With his first bilateral meeting with a foreign leader, Biden is trying to put some muscle on the bones of his stated commitment to reinvigorate his relationship with allies. There are domestic political points to be scored by performing a bromance with well-liked Canada, and with Trudeau, who is still viewed as the celebrity face of global progressive politics by many American Democratic voters.
But Biden is still just over a month into his presidency — and navigating a divided Senate — with an avalanche of domestic crisis-level issues on his plate. There are practical and political limits to how far Canada can expect him to stretch his neck out for a foreign policy partner.
In place of immediate “announceables,” what Biden’s administration is setting up with Canada is a commitment to working together on a range of files, across the cabinet and government departments, starting immediately. For their virtual meeting, Trudeau and Biden were joined by Vice-President Kamala Harris and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, and a long list of Biden cabinet officials met simultaneously with their Canadian ministerial counterparts.
“I haven’t seen this, ever,” said Maryscott Greenwood, the CEO of the Canadian American Business Council, who was a Clinton-era American diplomat in Ottawa and has been tracking relations between the countries closely since 1996.
“It’s short of creating an institution, but it’s going further than just having a one-off meeting. So that’s different, and if it amounts to anything, that will be incredibly meaningful.”
A big complaint from Canadian officials about former president Donald Trump was that foreign policy for him was “transactional.” He wanted every interaction to yield a headline or the cable news segment showing a victory. Canadians tempted to measure success by marks on the northern side of the tally sheet 34 days into Biden’s presidency may be mimicking the mindset they complained about under Trump.
“People want to go out of their way to try to define a relationship by the bits and pieces of an individual announcement by one country or another, or a specific interaction,” said Bruce Heyman, who served as the U.S. ambassador to Canada during the Obama administration.
“But our relationship together is as integrated and complex and important as any two countries that I think exist in the world. And the recognition of that, and the working on the depth and breadth of the relationship, I think is the bigger story here.”
Heyman says the amount of work that has gone into setting up the meeting, across different government departments on both sides of the border, and that Canada is the first country to get a meeting after the inauguration, are good signs for Canadian prospects and a signal to others around the globe.
“The president said America’s back on a G7 call. That’s nice to say, but this bilateral meeting is now the demonstration of that,” he said. “A bilateral meeting like this is work. And it is intended to be substantive. And it is intended to engage at multiple levels and, hopefully, find pathways where the two countries can work together to drive outcomes. Short, medium and long term.”
How successfully they accomplish that — and how well Canada’s interests are served by it — will likely depend in part on the Canadian government’s doggedness in working the ballyhooed framework.
“It will be on the Canadians, as usual, to do a whole bunch of follow up,” Greenwood said. “It is possible that what comes out of today’s (meeting) is laying the groundwork for some incredibly meaningful progress on issues. You know, it matters that there is high-level agreement on big global issues that matter.”
Perhaps, in the long term, the new framework could lead to more important results than a one-off, headline-grabbing announcement would provide. But it’s harder to gauge at this point than a clear good-news announcement would be. The meeting produced no obvious new bad news. And it showed there are plenty of good vibes to fuel the work still to come.
“It’s short of creating an institution, but … if it amounts to anything, that will be incredibly meaningful.” MARYSCOTT GREENWOOD CEO, CANADIAN AMERICAN BUSINESS COUNCIL