It’s quite something looking back on Barack Obama’s 2016 address to the House of Commons, the last formal state visit an American President made to Canada.
Obama, nearing the end of his presidency, gave a speech that was light-hearted and carefree. He laughed a lot. He told jokes. Genuinely funny ones.
It was clearly a different time, seven years ago.
The pushback against ISIS was going well, the Xi Jinping regime in China was still in its infancy, and liberals, while wary of Donald Trump’s recent lock on the Republican nomination, cockily assumed Hillary Clinton would be the next leader of the free world.
While Obama spoke to Parliamentarians about income inequality and climate change, he wasn’t really there to make any big ticket demands of the newly elected Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
It was an easygoing affair. He was more there to pat Trudeau on the back and say, “Go forth, young man!” It was something of a passing of the progressive torch.
“My time in office may be nearing an end, but I know that Canada — and the world — will benefit from your leadership for years to come,” Obama said. “Justin is just getting started.”
How things have changed. It’s just been confirmed that President Joe Biden will be making a formal visit to Canada in March, and there’s no way it’s going to be as rosy as the mutual love-fest that was Obama’s last visit.
Things just aren’t looking as good as they were back then. A global recession is all but guaranteed and U.S. foreign policy has grown increasingly hawkish on China.
It’s likely that Biden’s message to Trudeau will be less of a “carry on, young man” one and more of a “here’s where we need you to step up, son.”
On the China file in particular, the Americans have already been leaning on Trudeau. The White House under both Trump and Biden sent multiple signals to Canada that we needed to reject Huawei’s involvement in our 5G grid.
The implication was that our failure to do so would threaten our equal partnership in intelligence circles. We learned our lesson the hard way when Biden excluded us from a security partnership with Australia and the United Kingdom that he announced in September 2021. (It was after this, in May 2022, that Trudeau finally said bye-bye to Huawei.)
More recently, a handful of prominent cabinet ministers led by Deputy PM Chrystia Freeland have given speeches aimed at Washington, DC, audiences on how Canada is now all of a sudden committed to decoupling from China and “friendshoring” towards Pacific countries that wish to stay out of Beijing’s orbit.
It seems that the White House has basically been reading the Trudeau government the riot act about getting with the program on the China file.
It may be that the hard work is out of the way and Biden’s visit is more of a reward for the fact that the Liberals are now in alignment with American objectives. It’ll be interesting to see what action items Biden subtly presents to the Canadian people.
What Biden won’t deliver though is some airy speech on feminism and climate change that plays to Trudeau’s comfort zone. He’ll talk about issues that require heavy-lifting, because that’s where the world is at right now.
The world is a very different place than it was when Justin Trudeau was first elected.
