For a quick round-up of the night’s highlights, check out the CTV News Snapchat account.
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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, wrapping up a three-day Washington visit, is referencing a famous U.S. presidential speech during this morning’s appearance at American University.
Trade and climate change will top the agenda, according to White House officials. He’s praising Obama as a man with “tremendous heart and tremendous intellect”.
“On the world stage”, Obama continued, “his country is leading on climate change and cares deeply about development”.
“May my grey hair come in at a much slower rate than yours”, he said to Obama.
But the evident rapport between the two received more serious treatment otherwise. But they’ve lost both houses of Congress, and the White House is up for grabs in a few months.
Privately, staffers were unusually excited, perhaps even feeling a touch of nostalgia because a charismatic, young leader reminded them of their own, eight years ago.
A White House “Arctic science ministerial” meeting next fall, involving multiple Arctic nations, will attempt to keep the momentum rolling.
He did the same at a tall cross which commemorates Canadians who died fighting alongside Americans in two world wars and Korea. “Trudeau is so incredibly appealing”. The White House East Room was transformed by the addition of cascading arrangements of blooming orchids, hydrangeas and amaranth in shades of green and white intended to evoke the coming of spring – much like Trudeau’s election in October has ushered in a new season in Canadian politics.
Prominent U.S. politicians, loudly and wrongly, proclaimed the attackers arrived from Canada, Bush’s envoy to Ottawa suggested a continental security perimeter, the border thickened overnight and Bush snubbed Canada by ignoring this country’s help to Americans stranded in the wake of the attacks. Obama eventually rejected it on climate grounds.
“Allies, partners, and friends” Trudeau said.
The visit will include the first state dinner for a Canadian prime minister in nearly two decades.
Obama will host Trudeau, the Liberal Party leader who took office in November, for an Oval Office meeting where they will talk about curbing climate emissions from oil and gas fields – a dramatic shift from years of debate over building the Keystone XL oil pipeline, a project Obama blocked last year.
“He’s going to freak out”, Cory Martin, dean of curriculum at Calvary Day School in Savannah, Ga., said of his colleague. Trudeau even seemed to lift many elements of his election campaign from Obama’s electoral playbook.
Instead, it was Trudeau’s tone of optimism, and his embrace of a style of politics marked by positivity, inclusion and equality, that truly shined through.
Then, the two men put aside differences over Syria and the fight against the Islamic State group to joke about graying hair and trade compliments about their spouses and kids.
The New York Times proclaimed: State Dinner Becomes a Catwalk for Canadian Style.
Hey, we’ll take it. Ahem.
“If the initiatives are enacted, less oil and gas will be produced in our state, more jobs will be lost, and state coffers will be increasingly diminished”, said US Senator Dan Sullivan in a statement.
“Is it in my hometown with the Chicago Blackhawks?”.
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From left: Sophie Grégoire-Trudeau, Michelle Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and President Barack Obama. “You hit a certain point, it’s too late”.
