Welcome to Canada, Mr. President

By Rachel Mendleson - Tuesday, February 17, 2009 at 7:27 PM - 1 Comment

Since Barack Obama will be in Ottawa this week, we thought it timely to look back at some previous presidential visits to our nation’s capital.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: August 1943
The city proclaimed a half-day holiday to mark the first-ever U.S. presidential visit to Ottawa. About 27,000 people jammed Parliament Hill to hear FDR’s public address. During his car tour of Ottawa, spectators held up black Scottie dogs as a show of support for his dog Fala.

Harry S. Truman: June 1947
While in Ottawa, Truman met with Mackenzie King and Governor General Alexander. During his parliamentary address, Truman praised Canada for achieving internal unity. When he was finished, politicians thumped their desks in approval. Truman’s trip to the capital included lunch at the Chateau Laurier, a tree-planting and a state dinner at Rideau Hall. He also traveled to Montebello, where he fished for trout. It was his second trip abroad after the Second World War.

Dwight D. Eisenhower: November 1953, July 1958
Both visits to the capital included a parliamentary address. In 1953, more tickets were sold to the House of Commons gallery than there were seats, and some spectators had to be turned away. In 1958, Ike drew fire for his virulent defence of U.S. trade interests in his speech. It was during his second visit that he and PM John Diefenbaker agreed to set up the Canada-United States Committee on Joint Defense. While in Ottawa, Ike played a round of golf at the Ottawa Hunt and Golf Club and took a trip to Gatineau Park.

John F. Kennedy: May 1961
When JFK and Jackie arrived on Parliament Hill, there were reportedly 50,000 people there to greet them. It was their first post-inauguration trip. Jackie looked on from the visitors’ gallery during the President’s Parliamentary address, during which he famously said: “Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners. And necessity has made us allies.” He even tried to articulate a few sentences in French — albeit poorly. And he hurt his back while planting a tree on Parliament Hill.

Lyndon B. Johnson: May 1967
While in Canada for Expo 67, Johnson spent some time at the prime minister’s official retreat on Harrington Lake, where he met with Lester B. Pearson. As the story goes, a security stopped PM Pearson on his way to the bathroom to ask him who he was and where he was headed. “I’m the Prime Minister of Canada and I’m about to go and have a leak,” he reportedly answered.

Richard Nixon: April 1972
Vietnam War protestors greeted Nixon when he arrived in Canada. Despite his infamously acrimonious relationship with Pierre Trudeau, he opened speech to the House of Commons with a joke about Ottawa’s weather, and cheered Canada for being a fine neighbour. “The Canadian-American example is an example for all the world to see,” he said. The Great Lakes Pollution clean-up agreement was inked during his visit.

Ronald Reagan: March 1981, April 1987
During Reagan’s address to Parliament in 1981, NDP MPs sported black armbands to indicate their opposition of the U.S. involvement in El Salvador. Though his relationship with Brian Mulroney was much warmer than it had been with Trudeau, Reagan only visited Ottawa once while Mulroney was in office. When Reagan spoke in the House of Commons in 1987, he was interrupted by MP Svend Robinson, who implored the president to “Stop Star Wars now.” During their time in Canada, Nancy Reagan urged students at Ottawa’s Brookfield High School to “say no to drugs.”

George H. W. Bush: February 1989, March 1991
George and Barbara traveled to Ottawa less than a month after Bush’s inauguration. While the President met with Mulroney, Barbara read to local students at a nursery school in  Fern Hill. Among the pupils was the PM’s son, Nicholas.

Bill Clinton: February 1995, October 1999
Jean Chrétien, with whom Clinton had a close relationship, took the President on a tour of the Centre Block while Hillary skated on the Rideau Canal. During his first address, Clinton touted Canada as an example “of how people of different cultures can live and work together in peace, prosperity and respect,” and spoke of the “ties that bind the United States and Canada.” In 1999, he came to Ottawa to dedicate a new Embassy building.

George W. Bush: November 2004
Though George W. was scheduled to address Parliament in May 2003, he cancelled the trip, citing the war in Iraq. Others suggested that the President’s relationship with Chrétien, which had become strained, was to blame for the change in plans. When he did arrive in Ottawa in November 2004, some 5,000 protestors demonstrated against the Iraq war. The first couple visited a Gatineau archival presentation centre, where they reportedly set eyes on Shania Twain’s songbook, and one of the earliest baseball rule books.

The dream job from hell

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Thursday, February 5, 2009 at 7:12 PM - 3 Comments

The most memorable television ad that Hillary Rodham Clinton ran during the Democratic primary campaign against Barack Obama was the one with the red telephone that rings at 3 a.m. “While your children are safely sleeping,” the announcer intoned, “something’s happening in the world. Your vote will decide who answers that call.” That Obama was dangerously unprepared to deal with a foreign crisis was a key Clinton campaign theme. She pronounced herself and Republican candidate John McCain as passing the “commander-in-chief threshold”—and pointedly refused to say the same of Obama.

Their fiercest campaign clashes involved foreign policy: Obama wanted to sit down with leaders of rogue nations such as Cuba, North Korea or Iran “without preconditions,” an idea Clinton dismissed as “irresponsible and frankly naive.” She voted for a Senate resolution asking the Bush administration to designate the Iranian Quds force a terrorist organization—something Obama said was playing into a Bush administration ploy to lay the groundwork for war against Iran. And Obama boasted of superior judgment in opposing the Iraq invasion (she voted to authorize the use of force), while implying Clinton’s foreign policy experience as first lady consisted of having tea with ambassadors. “What exactly is this foreign policy experience?” Obama said mockingly of the New York senator. “Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no.”

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Meeting the new neighbour

By John Geddes and Paul Wells - Monday, November 24, 2008 at 9:00 AM - 3 Comments

On the evening of last Aug. 28, as 80,000 pumped-up Democrats streamed into Denver’s Mile High Stadium to cheer Barack Obama’s acceptance of their party’s presidential nomination, a lone Canadian politician strolled the streets of Boulder, about 50 km away from the action. Lawrence Cannon, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s transport minister at the time and now his foreign minister, was in Colorado to make contact with Obama’s team, but opted against attending the big show that night. Even on a solitary walk, though, he encountered the man of the hour at every turn. Happening upon a movie theatre that was screening a live feed of Obama’s speech, Cannon tried to get in, but the place was sold out. So he ducked into a restaurant. “There were about 75 people eating,” he recalls. “Nobody was talking. They were all glued to the television set.”

Wandering unnoticed on the fringes of a historic American political moment—it’s a plausible image of what’s in store for the Harper government in Obama-obsessed America. What are their chances of making Canada’s presence felt in a transforming Washington, D.C.? Competition for a fragment of Obama’s attention is fierce. Not only does he come to power lugging enormous domestic expectations, he’s also the focus of unprecedented world attention. He has an economic crisis to wrestle into submission, and a war to wind down in Iraq. Still, several key Harper ministers spoke optimistically to Maclean’s about their bid to be heard, on everything from climate change to Afghanistan to aid for the auto industry. “We’re pretty confident,” said Industry Minister Tony Clement, “that there will be an openness to continental solutions.”

The first concerted attempt from the Harper government to crack Obama’s charmed circle came at that landmark Democratic convention in Colorado. Three ministers—Cannon, Clement, and Peter Van Loan, then government House leader, now public safety minister—attended as guests of the National Democratic Institute, the Democrats’ international affairs organization. Cannon and Clement both declined to say which Obama-linked figures they met with, saying the discussions were private. However, Maclean’s has learned that among the key players they gained exposure to through the NDI were Washington lawyer Greg Craig, who was named Obama’s White House counsel this week, and Anthony Lake, an Obama foreign policy adviser who was former president Bill Clinton’s national security adviser.

Clement boasts that the Tories (who hedged their bets by also reaching out to Republican nominee John McCain’s camp last summer) were “aggressive” and “prescient” in their courting of Obama’s coterie. Their efforts to introduce themselves, and a Canadian perspective, followed months of diplomatic slogging, orchestrated largely by Canada’s embassy in Washington, to connect with the teams of all of the possible next presidents, including, of course, Obama’s. Now those nascent relationships will begin to be tested against real issues. And Harper has chosen an unexpectedly ambitious idea—a shared trading system for greenhouse gas emissions—as his opening bid to grab the incoming administration’s policy imagination.

The file makes Jim Prentice, the new environment minister, one of the Harper government’s most important envoys to the Obama White House. That’s because, after three years of aligning his policies with a George W. Bush administration that was doing as little as possible on global warming, Harper must now keep step with Obama’s activism. In both cases, the Tory line goes, Canada had little choice. “We occupy the largest free-market energy system in the world, us and the United States,” Prentice said. “It would be hard to imagine a policy framework between us and the United States that would be discordant.”

For the moment, Prentice can do little more than wait while his officials analyze Obama’s campaign rhetoric and scrutinize signals coming from the Democratic transition team. They’ve identified three figures close to Obama who will probably be big players on energy and climate change. Robert Sussman was the second-in-command in Bill Clinton’s Environmental Protection Agency. Todd Stern was the senior White House negotiator for the Kyoto accord. But the key player seems to be John Podesta, who was Clinton’s last chief of staff, and is one of the Obama transition team’s three leaders.

Podesta is said to covet an “energy czar” role, if Obama creates one—a new White House position along the lines of the national security adviser. He is the driving force behind the Center for American Progress, where Sussman and Stern also work. The highly influential centre-left think tank advocates bringing energy and environmental policy together under the aegis of a new “National Energy Council.”

The council’s rough Canadian counterpart will be the Harper cabinet’s environment and energy security committee, whose key players are Prentice, rookie Natural Resources Minister Lisa Raitt, and the committee’s chairman, Transport Minister John Baird.

“We’re very much at a crossroads,” Prentice said of energy and environmental issues. He named three factors driving decisions: the continuing global economic crisis, the “extraordinarily ambitious” Obama environmental agenda, and the looming Copenhagen conference of December 2009, that will seek global consensus on a post-Kyoto agenda for the fight against climate change.

The Harper government’s goal is to be part of a North American energy market and a carbon cap and trade mechanism. Versions of the concept featured in both Harper’s and Obama’s fall campaign platforms. Companies would face limits on how much carbon dioxide they are allowed to pump out, but they could buy the right to emit more—and thus burn more fossil fuels—from firms willing to sell their own emissions credits.

Republican Sniping

By John Parisella - Thursday, August 28, 2008 at 6:03 PM - 0 Comments

In a year where the issues and the political climate favor the Democrats, it is not surprising the Republicans are using the airwaves to push their message and attack Barack Obama during his convention week. Aside from their surrogates, they have placed ads mocking the Democrats, using material from the primaries where Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are seen questioning Obama’s capacity to lead. They have had some success.

The ads prior to the convention, very much in the spirit of Karl Rove tactics, have contributed to a tightening in the polls between the candidates. So why stop, they surmise. However, the Republican message of ‘not ready to lead’ probably did more to get Bill Clinton off the fence even though it remains the conversation. Obama will surely address it in some form tonight.

This negative form of campaigning has paid dividends in the past. We all remember the Swift Boat ads or the ‘Wille Horton ads in 1988—all Rove inspired. With the race in a dead heat, many pundits are saying ‘negative works.’ Obama and his surrogates have hit back but there is a fine line between defending yourself and conducting the politics you are purported to run against. The Biden choice will help balance the Obama hesitancy in this regard. But Biden is not Karl Rove. He is a decent man but he will be tough on McCain. Continue…

Updated: Bill redeems himself

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 9:48 PM - 0 Comments

As someone here has noted, he has a lot of practice at redeeming himself — but seriously, I don’t know what else more he could have said. Clinton gave the strong endorsement of Obama as commander-in-chief that was missing from his wife’s speech.

Continue…

Bill just can't help himself

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 3:43 PM - 0 Comments

The McCain campaign is already sending out emails with his quote:

IN CASE YOU MISSED IT:
Bill Clinton On “Candidate X” And “Candidate Y”

“For example, you’re a voter, and you have Candidate X and Candidate Y. Candidate X agrees with you on everything. But you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues, but you believe that, on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom will you vote?” – President Bill Clinton

Bill Clinton
Remarks
August 26, 2008

Of course, they leave out what he said immediately afterward:

“This is the kind of question that I predict — and this has nothing to do with what’s going on now — but I am just saying if you look at five, 10, 15 years from now, you may actually see this delivery issue become a serious issue in Democratic debates because it is so hard to figure out how to turn good intentions into real changes in the lives of the people we represent.”

But still.

Video

More background here.

Bill hearts Hillary

By Anne Kingston - Wednesday, August 27, 2008 at 12:54 PM - 0 Comments

Hillary Clinton’s speech was bang-on. And yes, we can — and will — spend days dissecting what she didn’t say, more “how HIllary screwed it up” deconstruction that has eclipsed the fact Clinton didn’t lose the nomination, Obama won it. But what she did say was powerful, particularly her “keep going” remark, referencing  Harriet Tubman. Will it be enough to sway the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pantsuits? Who knows? That’s one aggrieved gaggle of women. More interesting is the question of whether that shade of orange (more Hermès packaging than pumpkin) will henceforth be known as “Hillary Clinton citrus,” along the lines of “Nancy Reagan red.”

The unexpected bonus of the night had to be the seemingly heartfelt delight/devotion on Bill Clinton’s face as he watched the missus knock it out of the park. Check out minute 2:46. I’m not a lip-reader but the famous horndog whose concerned meddling had a big hand in his wife’s campaign’s detonation appears to be saying: “I love you. I love you Hillary forever.” Continue…

Worship or Fatigue

By John Parisella - Tuesday, August 12, 2008 at 11:30 AM - 0 Comments

August was supposed to be a quiet month for Americans: people would enjoy of the final weeks of sun and surf, watch the Beijing Olympics, and take well-deserved break from presidential politics. Even Barack Obama was going to take a vacation! The month would end with the Democratic National Convention/lovefest in Denver, where Obama would be coronated in a show of unity not seen since the events of 9-11. So far, so good, right? Not so!

To the competitive McCain’s most boring campaign by any candidate since Bob Dole, you can now add the juiciest sex scandal since Bill Clinton “didn’t have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” Last week, former presidential candidate John Edwards admitted having an affair with a former campaign worker, Rielle Hunter. (At least Bill mentioned his mistress by name, which is more than the latest political perpetrator of “inappropriate” behaviour could muster.) Edwards’s admission may further prove that the cover-up is often more damaging than the deed.

We’re also now hearing that Clinton supporters are considering forcing a vote on the floor of the convention in a show of disunity in the Democratic party not seen since 1968 in Chicago. In all likelihood, the Obama forces will do their utmost to avoid a confrontation, and they have made some gracious moves in recent days.

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Finally Unity

By John Parisella - Friday, June 27, 2008 at 10:50 AM - 0 Comments

Today in Unity, New Hampshire, both Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton will be holding their first official rally since the primary season ended. This follows a closed door meeting with Senator Clinton’s fundraisers and Barack Obama where the presumptive nominee made an important but symbolic contribution to eliminating the campaign debt incurred by the former first lady during the primary season. It is clear that this is an alliance of convenience but undoubtedly the active support of Hillary Clinton will go a long way in helping the Obama campaign.

I recall in 1964 that President Lyndon B. Johnson and Robert F. Kennedy campaigned together despite personal animosities. While it may have appeared as a marriage of convenience at the time, it is an historical fact that both candidates helped themselves in achieving their political goals. I believe Hillary’s support of Barack Obama will be highly significant in key swing states and with key demographic groups. Most of her supporters will gravitate to Obama as recent polls indicate but with Hillary’s presence, energy and enthusiasm will gradually follow.

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Surprise: Bill's indiscreet

By Paul Wells - Monday, June 2, 2008 at 1:39 PM - 0 Comments

“This may be the last day” the former president is ever involved in a presidential campaign.