Barack Obama’s in Ottawa today. The snow’s falling. People are skating on the canals. The president and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper will meet and Obama will fly home after a few hours. It’s the classic first presidential visit abroad.
But there are a couple of things to watch out for in this meeting with America’s largest trading partner. The first is backtracking on the North American Free Trade Agreement. During the primaries Candidate Obama vowed to rewrite the deal. Now, uh, not so much. In an interview with Canadian TV he hinted that this wasn’t the time to start getting all disruptive with settled agreements. Will organized labor let this one slide? A lot will depend on the language coming out of Obama’s meeting with Harper.
Here’s Thea Lee, policy director at the AFL-CIO was pretty mellow in her comments about the trip:
“We hope there will be greater fiscal cooperation in response to the economic crisis … both in terms of scale and content,” she said.
“We would like to see the labor and environment provisions in NAFTA strengthened and enforced more effectively.”
Second, Afghanistan. What kind of commitments can he get out of Canada to help with the Obama surge? Canada’s been in this fight from the start and their military is not huge but can Obama get more out of them? It’ll be at least a bit of a harbinger of what could happen when he goes to the Europeans hat in hand.
National Security Adviser Gen. Jim Jones is on the trip. Hillary Clinton is in Asia. Could be some intereseting Kremlinology in who actually does the readouts to the press. Jones, by the way, won’t need translation gear. Raised in France for much of his youth, he speaks fluent French.
