The leaders spoke in public before and after the confabration – Biden speaks from the Roosevelt room in the White House, Trudeau from his office on Parliament Hill. Media access in Ottawa and Washington was limited and they did not ask any questions.
The first virtual bilateral meeting in the White House yielded a roadmap for cooperation with a strong focus on the environment.
There may not have been handshakes, but the tone was warm. “The United States has no closer friend, no closer, than Canada,” Biden said.
Trudeau and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland beam under their face masks.
Trudeau has been on a first-come, first-served basis with Biden, a habit of dating the Obama administration. By the end of the afternoon, Biden was responding in kind.
There was no talk of immediate President Donald Trump, though Trudeau praised Biden for reaffirming US leadership on global climate policy. “As we prepare for the joint implementation and communication of this preparation, it’s nice when the Americans do not take out all the references to climate change, and rather add it,” he says, nodding to the Trump administration’s efforts to water it down. . lay down international declarations of allies on the issue during his presidency.
At the start of the two-hour meeting, Vice President Kamala Harris spoke warmly about Montreal High School. Freeland said she read Harris’s autobiography and agrees that French is a difficult language to learn. Biden joked about his French skills, despite having studied the language for five years in his youth.
Despite all the goodies, the assembly did not resolve a fixed issue between the nations.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki warned reporters in advance that the US would not announce a plan to share Covid-19 vaccines with its northern neighbor, or release it from Biden’s executive order from Buy , of which the White House has no application. still evaluate. “Administration officials have also promised that nothing will change Biden’s position on the Keystone XL pipeline.
Yet the leaders have made sure that in public they focus on common priorities and on issues that are of particular interest to others.
In the joint ‘road map’ for renewed cooperation between Canada and the US issued after the meeting, Biden and Trudeau undertook to update their 2030 carbon targets according to the Paris agreement by the time the US presents its climate summit in April. . They have agreed to rely on scientific and public health recommendations when considering the future weakening of the border restrictions between Canada and the US, and have pledged to work with multinational organizations to support the worldwide distribution of the Covid-19 vaccine. .
Biden confirmed Washington’s support for Michael Kovrig and Michael Spavor, two Canadians who have been detained by China for more than two years, in apparent retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Huawei driver at the request of the United States. Trudeau acknowledges the crippling winter storm in Texas and notes that Saskatchewan’s SaskPower force has exported power to the state.
They ended the day virtually side by side, with one leader on a monitor visible next to the chair on which the other was speaking.
“We’re having hard times, there’s no doubt,” Trudeau said. “But we are not standing alone in front of them.”