Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will take his Canadian sales pitch to an influential U.S. audience Friday morning.
Trudeau is at the Council on Foreign Relations, a respected New York think tank, to promote Canada as a wise investment and trusted trading partner.
The idea is to capitalize on the momentum that was generated by last month’s visit to Ottawa by U.S. President Joe Biden.
The centrepiece of that visit was a new Canada-U.S. strategy for the extraction, development and processing of critical minerals.
Experts say would-be investors and developers now want to hear how Canada plans to streamline the regulatory process in order to capitalize on the country’s underground riches.
Kirsten Hillman, Canada’s envoy to the U.S., acknowledges the appetite for clarity and says it’s a high priority – although the details likely won’t come today.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, Canada’s permitting processes are actually more efficient than those in the U.S., although she agrees they need improvement.
“I’m not saying it’s good enough. And I’m not saying we don’t want to continue to streamline and improve,” Hillman said Thursday.
“But we already have a natural advantage there, and we’ll continue to improve it.”
Trudeau spent the bulk of the day Thursday focused on promoting efforts to advance sustainable development outside North America, in particular the Global South.
And he got a rough ride at a global summit of progressive thinkers when former CTV National News anchor Lisa LaFlamme pressed him on recent cuts to humanitarian aid spending.
Prior to 2019, the Liberal government in Ottawa committed to making steady annual increases in aid, “and we absolutely have,” Trudeau responded.
The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and other crises around the world, including in Afghanistan, resulted in outsized one-time spikes in spending, he said.
And while there’s likely to be more humanitarian disasters before the end of the fiscal year that will demand Canada make additional commitments, “the baseline continues to go (up),” Trudeau said.
“We spiked it massively…
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