MONTEBELLO, Quebec -- President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper are sometimes referred to as close allies because they are both conservative, but signs of personal warmth between the two leaders were nonexistent today.
Mr. Bush, emerging onto a stage with Mr. Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon for a news conference after two days of meetings, was grim-faced and frowned through much of the hourlong event.
Mr. Bush's mood lightened as the news conference wore on, but during Mr. Harper's opening remarks, in which he spoke of disagreements he had presented to Mr. Bush, the two leaders pointedly avoided making eye contact.
When Mr. Harper said the talks between the U.S. and Canada were "as cordial as they were constructive" and glanced over at Mr. Bush, the president looked down and continued to frown.
The two-day summit produced no results in Canada's efforts to gain U.S. concessions on a few issues of concern. Canada wants the U.S. to ease rules requiring Canadians to show their passports at the border and to recognize Canadian sovereignty over the Northwest Passage in the Arctic.
A close aide to Mr. Bush who attended most of the meetings over the last two days said the president and Mr. Harper were "fine."
"I think people feel like it's been a good couple days," the aide said. "Everybody's got their concerns but ... I haven't sensed any tension at all."
Mr. Harper and Mr. Bush reaffirmed the friendship between their countries, but both leaders displayed only half-smiles, at best.
Mr. Bush's most energetic display during the talk occurred when he leaned forward and then toward Mr. Harper and said, “I think we made some good progress toward eliminating barriers and toward harmonizing regulations to a point where more prosperity will ... come to be.”
Mr. Harper was tight-lipped.
-- Jon Ward, White House correspondent, The Washington Times
Comments (2)
See it's already secure "their" borders. Once they decide to merge their countries, meaning those three dictators, we will no longer have a say in any national policy of our own. Everything will be a decision between the three of them.
In The United States we have been unable to live under our own immigration laws for decades.
They (who) seek to establish systems of government based on the regimentation of all human beings by a handful of individual rulers. . . call this a new order. It is not new and it is not order.
-- Franklin D. Roosevelt
Posted by Carson | August 21, 2007 8:03 PM
Peoples concerns about superregions come from eight years of dysfunctional multilateralist policies of the 1990's. It is an evolutionary process of the U.N. consensus without compliance model guided foreign policy. Global consensus was agreed upon and regional interests formed alliances for enforcement. With the contraction of U.S. global autonomy from anti-Americanism, those dominance alignments are now evolving into Russian - European, Chinese - Asian, US - Americas, Venezuela - South America and Iran - Middle East. What the final stages will look like will be determined by the policies of the next President. If that President turns U.S. foreign policy over to the U.N. and focuses on fortress America, it is likely that the alignments driven by economics will continue down their current path to a stabilization phase and then begin new expansion.
Posted by Larry Stone | August 22, 2007 2:03 AM