Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said today U.S. president-elect Joe Biden’s incoming administration will deliver progress on important international challenges like climate change and global stability — but warns that a return to pre-Donald Trump politics in the United States is not likely to happen soon.
“Leadership obviously matters, but there are lots of domestic pressures that he’s going to be facing,” Trudeau told a virtual meeting of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) forum. “Anyone expecting a sudden, massive, rapid shift to the way things were in some idealized past, I don’t think anyone can meet those expectations.
“There’s going to be a lot of work for all of us to do, to try and move the world forward in the right direction. And yes, I’m sure that president-elect Biden is going to be a powerful ally in that. But we cannot expect to sit back and just say, ‘OK, bigger countries are going to do the heavy lifting.'”
Trudeau, China’s President Xi Jinping and other leaders from around the Pacific Rim will take part in virtual talks about trade on Friday.
The prime minister said Biden has been saying all the right things on multilateralism, the rules-based international order and the fight to slow climate change, but Canada is going to have to step up and do its part.