President Barack Obama: Plan Of Action

Dept: But that s the view from 40,000 feet. Down in the weeds, the deal looks less like the bold Action Plan that Canadians were led to expect to ease America s chronic 9/11 anxieties and to bolster trade, and more like a cautious work in progress that will be figured out, fought over, and rolled out in pilot projects for years to come. As the perfunctory Obama/Harper meeting indicated, and the documents make plain, it s a plan to come up with a plan, mostly, with pertinent details to follow, according to The Star. The sheer opacity of such a target makes the cost/benefits hard to gauge at this point. As interim Liberal Leader Bob Rae sees it, there s a lot less here than meets the eye. If so, that s not necessarily a bad thing, given concerns that the Conservatives may be trading away sovereignty and travellers privacy rights for dubious economic gain and prime Minister Stephen Harper is promoting the new Beyond the Border deal as an ambitiously large vision, the biggest breakthrough in Canada/U.S. affairs since the North American free trade pact. And President Barack Obama found a few words in Washington on Wednesday to hail the greater convergence that it will bring to continental security and trade. We intend for the Beyond the Border Working Group to report to Harper and Obama in the coming months, says one text, and after a period of consultation, with a joint Plan of Action to realize the goals of this declaration, that would, where appropriate, rely on existing bilateral border-related groups, for implementation. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.