In 2009, hundreds of Canadians gathered in front of Parliament fell under the spell of Barack Obama, who had chosen Canada for his first official visit abroad.
The newly elected president had won everyone over by stopping unexpectedly at the ByWard Market to buy a beaver tail and maple leaf cookies. A fine diplomatic exercise.
President Joe Biden was more pragmatic. It is true that Canada is the 19e country he has visited since his election in 2021. But his time in Ottawa will have been most fruitful, while this kind of meeting does not always lead to concrete actions.
Rarely have we seen a presidential visit unblock so many seemingly insoluble problems, whether it is the Roxham road, the crisis in Haiti or even certain issues related to climate change.
If the solutions provided do not solve everything, far from it, we can at least rejoice to have come out of the immobility.
In a speech overflowing with optimism, Joe Biden flattered Canada in the sense of the hair, offering favors to Justin Trudeau, without asking anything in return, without even shooting him a few arrows, as Barack Obama had allowed himself to do. about Canada’s underinvestment in defence.
Needless to say, these political gains come at just the right time for the Liberal government, which is mired in the swamp of Chinese interference in Canada.
For Roxham Road too, the soup was starting to get hot. Boiling even.
The solution of applying the safe third country agreement to the entire border, which allows Canada to turn back asylum seekers all along the border, and not just at official border crossings, marks the closure of Roxham Road.
This is what Premier François Legault demanded, rightly arguing that Quebec’s reception capacity was exceeded.
With the movement of migrants to other provinces, the federal government gave this issue a national scope. In Niagara Falls, the hoteliers who accommodated the migrants watched with anxiety the arrival of the tourist season.
By concluding an agreement with the Americans that no one really hoped for, Prime Minister Trudeau scores points, even if the agreement is not a miracle solution.
You should know that Canada will now accept 15,000 migrants, which is very few compared to the 40,000 or so who arrived via Roxham Road last year.
Closing the road may discourage some migrants from coming to Canada, a country that seemed to open the door wide to them. In a tweet that went around the world, Justin Trudeau encouraged all “those fleeing persecution, terror and war” to come to Canada in 2017.
But other migrants will not be held back by the change in tone: they will simply cross elsewhere – our border of almost 9000 kilometers will never be hermetic – with the risks that this entails for their safety.
Migration will remain one of the major challenges for the coming years, here as elsewhere. But in the short term, Canada and the United States have found an imperfect compromise that breaks the impasse.
As we explain in a second editorial, a reasonable compromise is also taking shape regarding the heartbreaking situation in Haiti, with investments from Canada to better equip Haitian police officers.
Nor is the fight against climate change an issue that can be solved overnight. But Joe Biden has the great merit of having raised the bar for the whole planet with theInflation Reduction Act (IRA), which has a gigantic envelope of nearly 400 billion US over 10 years.
In fact, the United States wants to propel its economy into a new era, with tax credits and subsidies. For Canada, this is both an opportunity and a challenge.
An opportunity, because the United States wants to build a supply chain with friendly countries, in response to global geopolitical risks. Joe Biden’s visit led to the announcement of a $250 million investment in the IBM plant in Bromont to develop a semiconductor production corridor between Quebec and the United States. .
But the IRA also poses a challenge for Quebec and Canada, some of which will lose their competitive advantage over comparable companies that will benefit from substantial government assistance on American soil.
The Minister of Finance, Chrystia Freeland, is therefore under a lot of pressure to present a strategy in her next budget to allow Canada to pull out of the game, even if she does not have the budgetary flexibility to embark on a one-upmanship of all-out tax assistance.
We will see on Tuesday what wood – or other clean energy – it heats up.