The President of the United States, Joe Biden has arrived in Canada where he is billed to meet Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and address parliament, with reports that a deal has been struck on managing undocumented migration across the neighbours’ long border.
With the activities mostly scheduled for Friday, trade, Canada’s meagre defence spending, and a prospective international force to manage troubled Haiti are expected to be on the agenda.
As Biden went north, news broke of a deal to crack down on unauthorised migration by asylum seekers transiting through the US into Canada, which had been another contentious topic in the otherwise cordial relationship.
According to The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, Canada will be able to stop illegal migrants at the Roxham Road crossing point on the frontier between New York state and Quebec.
The flow of migrants there has been a source of irritation in domestic Canadian politics, much as it is in Washington concerning illegal entries across the US-Mexico border.
The reports said that Canada has agreed in return to take in some 15,000 asylum seekers from Latin America through legal channels, a move that will ease the pressure on the southern US border.
But as Biden and his wife First Lady Jill Biden arrived at Trudeau’s home Thursday evening for dinner, the president declined to answer a reporter’s question on the deal.
He then accompanied the prime minister and his wife Sophie Gregoire Trudeau inside.
Earlier, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre would not confirm the news but said “we will hear more about it from the president and the prime minister tomorrow.”
Ahead of the visit, the two sides stressed their close integration.
“I think that’s going to be the theme of this visit, that we are there making each other stronger and better,” Canada’s ambassador to the United States, Kirsten Hillman, told CBC.
But only modest, if any, progress is expected on tensions over Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act — a massive programme to subsidise and kickstart US-based development of electric vehicles and other clean energy products.
‘We are looking for more inclusion in exactly those things,’ a senior Canadian government official told reporters.
‘We want a North America that is globally competitive, so that our two economies which are already so integrated, where so many businesses and jobs and supply chains rely on each other, can compete with the world and can be successful together.’
Another expected item on the agenda is the financing of the neighbours’ mutual defence pacts, both as members of NATO and their joint air defence system for North America, named NORAD.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the US government has been pressuring Canada to increase its defence spending, which in 2022 was just 1.33 percent of GDP. This is scheduled to rise to 1.59 percent from 2026 but that’s still well below the NATO alliance requirement of minimum two percent of GDP spending.