The agreement set a positive tone as Biden arrived here Thursday evening, kicking off a trip that is aimed at bolstering a close alliance, reaffirming efforts to counter Russia and China, and tackling the thorny questions that continue to bedevil the North American neighbors, from immigration to trade.
On Friday, Biden plans to address Canada’s Parliament, meet one-on-one with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and hold a news conference with the Canadian leader. Following a whirlwind 24 hours, concluding with a gala dinner Friday night, Biden is set to depart for his home in Wilmington, Del.
The successful conclusion of the immigration deal ensures that the two leaders will have a high-profile agreement to announce during their summit. Renegotiating the Safe Third Country Agreement, under which Canada and the United States share responsibility for migrants in need of protection, has long been a priority for Canada.
Under the current pact, which went into effect in 2004, asylum seekers who enter Canada at official land border crossings are sent back to the United States, and vice versa. But the agreement has not applied to unofficial crossings along the 5,500-mile border.
The number of asylum seekers crossing into Canada at those unofficial points of entry rose sharply under President Donald Trump, and the rate has not abated under Biden. Nearly 40,000 asylum seekers crossed into Canada from the United States in 2022, the most since Canada began tracking the number in 2017.
Canadian officials have for years pressed the United States to extend the Safe Third Country Agreement to cover unofficial crossings as well, and American officials had said in recent days it would be a topic of the Biden-Trudeau meeting.
“Without question, they’ll be talking about issues of migration, which affects us both,” National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said in a briefing ahead of the trip. “There are more people on the move in this hemisphere than there have been since World War II, and that affects both our countries.”
He added: “We are well aware of Canadian concerns. We have concerns of our own. And — I mean, it’s a shared hemisphere, a shared regional challenge.”
David Cohen, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, said last month that the situation at the U.S.-Canadian border is a “symptom” of a larger problem of irregular migration in the hemisphere and that the countries need to work together to address its root causes.
Trudeau, who has faced pressure from Quebec’s premier and the opposition Conservative Party to close the “loophole” in the agreement, told reporters this week that his government has “been working very closely with the Americans for many months” on this issue and that he hoped to have an announcement soon.
White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters traveling to Canada on Air Force One on Thursday that Biden and Trudeau would have more to share Friday about any agreement.
“We’re seeing an increase in irregular migration going north into Canada, which reflects the regional and global migration challenge, as we’ve been talking about,” she said. “We’re committed to working with them to address it, including by prioritizing orderly and safe migration through regular pathways.”
The Biden-Trudeau meeting comes at a tense moment in the world, as Biden works to hold together the international coalition confronting Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The United States and Canada have also had to coordinate a response to China’s growing aggressiveness, especially since a Chinese spy balloon flew over North America earlier this year.
Underlining the global divisions, the summit between the two Western leaders comes just days after Putin met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Moscow.
“We’re going to talk about our two democracies stepping up to meet the challenges of our time,” Kirby said. “That includes taking concrete steps to increase defense spending, driving a global race to the top on clean energy, and building prosperous and inclusive economies.”
The two leaders are also expected to discuss efforts to fight climate change, stabilize Haiti and curb migration. And they are planning to discuss ways to modernize the North American air detection and defense system known as NORAD.
“The issue of the Chinese spy balloon was a good reminder for all of us that we need to continue to make sure that when it comes to our defensive capabilities, particularly our air defensive capabilities, that we are at the cutting edge all the time,” Kirby said.
While it has taken Biden two years into his presidency to visit Canada, his first call to a foreign leader after becoming president was to Trudeau.
Biden and first lady Jill Biden arrived on Thursday evening, where they were greeted by Mary Simon, the governor general of Canada, and then joined Trudeau and his wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, for a private dinner at their residence.
The visit has been a major focus of news coverage here, and the streets around Biden’s downtown hotel are displaying American and Canadian flags. A pastry shop, which still boasts of the time President Barack Obama made a brief stop there for a cookie in 2009, has been selling cookies marked “U.S. Presidential Visit Ottawa 2023.”
Biden’s visit could provide a welcome change of subject for Trudeau, who for weeks has faced questions on what his government knew about alleged Chinese interference in recent Canadian elections and how it responded to the meddling.
But the long-awaited visit is shorter than Canadian officials had hoped, as Biden is set to depart Friday around 9 p.m. The trip will not include what Trudeau had mused might include a visit to a “shop floor” so that Biden could get a firsthand look at the close linkages between the two economies.
The trip marks Biden’s first official visit to Ottawa since late 2016, when he was the outgoing vice president. At a state dinner that year in Biden’s honor, he gave a toast noting that his first wife’s family was from Toronto and said his sons grew up wanting to be Mounties.
During that visit, about a month after Trump’s election, Biden told Trudeau that the world would be looking to him to champion the “liberal international order” as it faced more challenges than at any time since the end of World War II.
“The way I look at our relationship … I know sometimes we’re like the big brother that’s a pain in the neck and overbearing,” Biden said in his remarks at the time. “I get it. But we’re more like family, even, than allies.”
That traditionally close tie was tested during the Trump administration, which saw the former president lob personal attacks at Trudeau and levy tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum, enraging Canadians and prompting retaliation.
Most Canadian officials breathed a sigh of relief when Biden was elected in 2020, and officials said they were eager to collaborate with his administration to tackle issues such as climate change.
But while Trudeau has a far warmer personal relationship with Biden than Trump, irritants remain. They include U.S. trade policies that Canadians view as protectionist as well as issues related to defense and security.
Biden’s “Buy American” rhetoric has made Canadian businesses anxious — as have the tax credits and other incentives for U.S. manufacturers in Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, including for clean energy.
In a fall economic update, the Canadian government announced two clean-energy tax credits in response to the Inflation Reduction Act, warning that without new measures to “keep pace” with the U.S. legislation, “Canada risks being left behind.”
In addition, the United States has been pressing Canada to assume a “leadership role” in Haiti, including by leading a multinational armed force tasked with restoring order to the Caribbean nation, which is reeling from gang violence, hunger and a cholera outbreak.
Canadian officials have given little indication that they are eager to lead such a mission, particularly in a country that has a long history of destabilizing foreign interventions and where the idea of such a deployment is divisive. Canada’s top soldier has expressed doubts about whether the military even has the capacity for the task.
Instead, Canada has provided aid, including armored vehicles, to the Haitian National Police and imposed sanctions on Haitian gang leaders and their backers.
The United States has imposed sanctions on far fewer Haitians, a fact that is not lost on Ottawa. Trudeau said last week that other countries, including the United States, needed to do “much more” to penalize those responsible for the chaos in Haiti.
“Outside intervention, as we’ve done in the past, hasn’t worked to create long-term stability for Haiti,” he told reporters.
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