ottawa -- Against the backdrop of renewed angst over trade and immigration, President Bush began a two-day summit Monday with his Canadian and Mexican counterparts, seeking to enhance border security while keeping relations on an even keel.
The meetings with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon were his first with each since Democratic presidential candidates in a debate this month raised the prospect of scrapping, or at least renegotiating, the North American Free Trade Agreement. And congressional and administration efforts to rewrite U.S. immigration laws have melted down since Bush last met with the pair.
Flying here from Texas, where he had been on vacation for a week at his ranch near Crawford, Bush met in the resort of Montebello, about 40 miles east of Ottawa, first with Harper and then with Calderon. The trio were also to dine together in a massive cedar log chateau and discuss hemispheric issues.
With lower-level officials reporting progress in working out new U.S.-Mexican anti-drug measures, Bush and Calderon "expressed interest in a common strategy to deal with a common threat," said Dan Fisk, the U.S. National Security Council's director of Western Hemisphere affairs.
Fisk said Bush told Harper that the United States would not back off a plan to require all Americans returning to the United States from Canada and Mexico to carry passports beginning Jan. 1. Canadians fear the provision will cut down on tourism and routine shopping trips from its neighbor, with which it does about $1.4 billion of business a day, the NSC official said.
The three North American nations are looking for ways to avoid potential cross-border traffic tie-ups, and economic distress, that could follow a terrorist attack or other security threat such as an outbreak of avian flu.
Before Bush arrived, several hundred demonstrators gathered beyond a security fence surrounding the resort, the site of a summit of the leading industrialized democracies in 1981.
On Sunday, an estimated 1,000 people demonstrated in Ottawa, and the headline in Monday's Ottawa Sun read: "Bush told to go home."
In Montebello, riot police used tear gas to repel what the Reuters news agency reported were about 150 people confronting police lines.
