Trudeau heads to Washington with glitz and packed agenda

[U.S. President Barack Obama and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stand up following their bilateral meeting at the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation summit in Manila, Philippines. THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/Susan Walsh]

Canada and the United States are poised to make significant progress this week on an agreement that will help create a more seamless way of sharing the personal information of people travelling between the two countries during the prime minister’s official visit in Washington, D.C., says a former Canadian diplomat.

“This is an issue that has been discussed for a long time and that, frankly, Canada hasn’t yet followed through on implementing despite promises to the contrary,” says Colin Robertson, vice-president and fellow at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute, in Ottawa.

In 2011, then-prime minister Stephen Harper and President Barack Obama announced a comprehensive plan called the Beyond the Border Declaration and Action Plan. The agreement included a long list of programs aimed to help strengthen continental security and improve economic competitiveness.

According to the Canada Border Services Agency, a key plank of that deal was how the two countries would work together to harmonize the sharing of information, and create a paper trail about people entering and exiting either country.

The plan, known officially as the Entry/Exit Initiative, was supposed to be implemented in four phases. To date, however, the Canadian government has only progressed to the second phase.

The third phase of the program, which would see information shared on all travellers crossing the border by land, was expected to begin last summer. That plan, however, was scuttled.

Robertson says that progress on implementing the entry-exit information sharing has been held up in Canada for several reasons.

These reasons include uncertainty over the costs of managing the additional oversight mechanism on the part of the federal government, as well as privacy concerns, raised by the federal privacy commissioner.

Emily Gilbert, a professor of Canadian studies at the University of Toronto, agrees that making progress on this issue will be a key item on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s seemingly exhaustive ‘to do’ list when he arrives Wednesday in Washington, D.C., for an official visit and state dinner with Obama.

“Clarifying how Canada will implement the Entry/Exit Initiative is a way that Trudeau can come out of this meeting with something substantive behind him,” she says.

Laura Dawson, director of the Wilson Center’s Canada Institute in Washington, D.C., agrees with Gilbert.

She says discussing solutions to the current holdup over the Entry/Exit Initiative could be a good way to help set the tone for a more positive discussion on other larger areas of common interest, such as the climate change and softwood lumber.

To read more coverage about Trudeau’s upcoming Washington visit, click, here, here, here, and here.