Canada and Mexico will redistribute millions of doses of the COVID-19 vaccine they received from the United States to other countries in the Western Hemisphere as part of today’s revived Tres Amigos leaders summit.
Senior US government officials outlined the move ahead of today’s meeting that President Joe Biden is organizing at the White House with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity as authorized informants, provided advance details of US priorities ahead of the first summit of US leaders since Canada hosted the last five years ago.
Only Trudeau remains among those leaders, but Biden, an American task force on violence against indigenous women and girls, is reviving an initiative it announced with former US President Barack Obama in Ottawa in 2016.
The three leaders will also seek to strengthen trilateral cooperation in the Western Hemisphere’s unprecedented migration crisis that has seen millions of asylum seekers from Central America collapse Mexico’s borders, while Venezuela’s economic and political crisis is expected to produce six million refugees at the end of the year.
The overarching theme of the summit is to join forces to rebuild after the COVID-19 pandemic and make the continent of North America more resilient and self-sufficient in the face of global supply chain bottlenecks.
The plan for Canada and Mexico to share the excess vaccines supplied by the Americans is part of that economic rebuilding plan. When the United States loaned Canada and Mexico millions of vaccines, there was an agreement that they would “pay for those vaccines” to regional partners, an official said.
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The exact details of the distribution will be worked out later by public health experts, the officials said.
US officials said there can be no economic competitiveness without fairness and justice, so Biden is eager to forge a continental partnership on racial equity and inclusion. One of Biden’s top priorities is the creation of a trilateral task force on violence against indigenous women and girls.
The Obama White House heralded the same initiative after the 2016 Three Friends summit, saying that Canada would host the first meeting on the issue in 2017. After Donald Trump arrived at the White House, that initiative was shelved.
North American leaders will speak about the vaccine exchange and immigration issues at the summit. #CDNPoli #USpoli #TresAmigos
Biden also wants to engage with Canada and Mexico to address the root causes of the mass migration of asylum seekers south of the Mexican border.
Biden wants to “close arms with Canada and Mexico” in a joint approach to address the economic inequalities that are forcing people in the Western Hemisphere to flee their countries in record numbers, authorities said.
Given the labor shortage in North America, new approaches need to be found to match economic migrants with potential job opportunities in the United States, Canada and Mexico, authorities said.
As expected, the three leaders will focus on supply chain issues that are hampering the post-pandemic economic recovery.
Canada is expected to be added to the US-Mexico Supply Chain Task Force to make it a North American-wide effort aimed at minimizing future disruptions to the continent. The new working group will look at the definition of essential industries, including critical minerals, officials said.
Trudeau took advantage of his first day in Washington on Wednesday to speak about Canada’s competitive advantage in critical minerals, which are used in batteries for computers, cell phones, electric vehicles and other essentials.
Trudeau told a think tank audience that his government began talking to the United States two to three years ago about Canada’s abundant supply of critical minerals.
China is the world’s leading supplier of these minerals, but pandemic-induced bottlenecks have created major shortages.
This Canadian Press report was first published on November 18, 2021.
Reference-www.nationalobserver.com