U.S. President Joe Biden’s long-awaited Canada visit to happen March 23-24

WASHINGTON — U.S. President Joe Biden will travel to Ottawa on March 23 to meet with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Canadian soil, his first visit north of the border since taking the oath of office in 2021.

The White House said the president and his wife Jill Biden will spend two days in Canada, although a detailed itinerary has not yet been released.

The two leaders will discuss an ongoing upgrade of the jointly led Norad continental defence system, which came under heavy scrutiny last month following the discovery of a Chinese surveillance balloon over U.S. and Canadian airspace.

They will also discuss how to fortify shared supply chains, combat climate change and “accelerate the clean energy transition,” the White House said in a statement.

Biden will also address a joint session of Parliament “to highlight the importance of the United States-Canada bilateral relationship.”

A visit to Canada is customarily one of a new U.S. president’s first foreign trips, a tradition upended two years ago by the COVID-19 pandemic. Like the rest of the world at the time, the two leaders settled for a virtual meeting instead.

The virus interfered in Canada-U.S. relations again in 2022, when Biden tested positive for COVID a second time, forcing the White House to scrap its plan for a summertime visit that year.

Delayed though it may be, it will be an important bilateral meeting for both countries, said Scotty Greenwood, CEO of the Canadian American Business Council.

“It’s an occasion which focuses a bureaucracy on the breadth and depth of bilateral and multilateral issues … and that’s a really good thing, because it causes everybody here to focus on Canada,” Greenwood said.

“It also allows the president himself to think about and reflect on Canada in the context of all the other global relationships the U.S. has, and that can be a very good thing.”

In the end, however, it’s essential that the federal government in Ottawa make the most of the opportunity, she added.

“The extent to which Canada wants to lean in and try to help solve some of the pain points the U.S. has is a good opportunity for Canada,” Greenwood said. “We won’t know until the visit happens if Canada wants to do that.”

As always, the two leaders have a lot to talk about — much of it a direct offshoot of the pandemic as both countries recalibrate their domestic and international supply chains, bilateral travel rules and economic recovery efforts, all of it with an eye toward arresting the march of climate change around the world.

Strategies to minimize dependence on China for critical minerals and semiconductors, two vital components in the global push to expand the popularity of electric vehicles and fuel what some experts liken to a post-pandemic industrial revolution, are sure to be high on the agenda.

So too will be a united front in opposing Russia’s continued aggression in Ukraine, as well as what to do about Haiti, where Canada is facing international pressure to take a lead role in quelling widespread gang violence.

There will be bilateral tensions to address as well.

The post-NAFTA era, where the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement is now the law of the land in continental trade, has been marked by irritants, including access to Canada’s dairy market and how the U.S. defines foreign content in autos.

Immigration has also become a hot topic: while Republican lawmakers usually have a singular focus on the flow of migrants across the U.S.-Mexico border, a spike in the number of people entering from Canada has also caught their eye.

Trudeau has publicly acknowledged that the two countries need to renegotiate the 2004 Safe Third Country Agreement in order to staunch the flow of irregular migration into Canada, but there’s little appetite in the U.S. to do so.

Even so-called trusted travellers are having a harder time than they did before the pandemic, with the fast-track program known as Nexus having been hampered by a cross-border jurisdictional squabble.

The White House said “irregular migration and forced displacement throughout the region” will indeed be on the agenda, but offered no additional details.

Biden’s speech to Parliament will follow in the footsteps of his former boss, then-president Barack Obama, who made a similar address when he last visited Ottawa in June of 2016.

Biden himself visited the national capital in December of that year, as Obama’s second term was winding down and the world was bracing for the inauguration of his Republican successor, Donald Trump.

“I know sometimes we’re like the big brother that’s a pain in the neck and overbearing … but we’re more like family, even, than allies,” the vice-president at the time said during a state dinner in his honour.

He cheered Canada’s role in defending and strengthening what he called a “liberal international order” amid the rise of authoritarianism around the world, perhaps sensing what the next four years had in store.

“We’re going to get through this period because we’re Americans and Canadians, and so had I a glass I’d toast you by saying, ‘Vive le Canada,’ because we need you very, very badly.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published March 9, 2023.

James McCarten, The Canadian Press

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‘Weird and wonderful’ wells are boosting oil production in Alberta and Saskatchewan

Published on November 20, 2025

Todayville

From the Canadian Energy Centre

By Deborah Jaremko

Multilateral designs lift more energy with a smaller environmental footprint

A “weird and wonderful” drilling innovation in Alberta is helping producers tap more oil and gas at lower cost and with less environmental impact.

With names like fishbone, fan, comb-over and stingray, “multilateral” wells turn a single wellbore from the surface into multiple horizontal legs underground.

“They do look spectacular, and they are making quite a bit of money for small companies, so there’s a lot of interest from investors,” said Calin Dragoie, vice-president of geoscience with Calgary-based Chinook Consulting Services.

Dragoie, who has extensively studied the use of multilateral wells, said the technology takes horizontal drilling — which itself revolutionized oil and gas production — to the next level.

“It’s something that was not invented in Canada, but was perfected here. And it’s something that I think in the next few years will be exported as a technology to other parts of the world,” he said.

Dragoie’s research found that in 2015 less than 10 per cent of metres drilled in Western Canada came from multilateral wells. By last year, that share had climbed to nearly 60 per cent.

Royalty incentives in Alberta have accelerated the trend, and Saskatchewan has introduced similar policy.

Multilaterals first emerged alongside horizontal drilling in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Dragoie said. But today’s multilaterals are longer, more complex and more productive.

The main play is in Alberta’s Marten Hills region, where producers are using multilaterals to produce shallow heavy oil.

Today’s average multilateral has about 7.5 horizontal legs from a single surface location, up from four or six just a few years ago, Dragoie said.

One record-setting well in Alberta drilled by Tamarack Valley Energy in 2023 features 11 legs stretching two miles each, for a total subsurface reach of 33 kilometres — the longest well in Canada.

By accessing large volumes of oil and gas from a single surface pad, multilaterals reduce land impact by a factor of five to ten compared to conventional wells, he said.

The designs save money by skipping casing strings and cement in each leg, and production is amplified as a result of increased reservoir contact.

Here are examples of multilateral well design. Images courtesy Chinook Consulting Services.

Parallel

Fishbone

Fan

Waffle

Stingray

Frankenwells

Alberta

Alberta to protect three pro-family laws by invoking notwithstanding clause

Published on November 19, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Premier Danielle Smith said her government will use a constitutional tool to defend a ban on transgender surgery for minors and stopping men from competing in women’s sports.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith said her government will use a rare constitutional tool, the notwithstanding clause, to ensure three bills passed this year — a ban on transgender surgery for minors, stopping men from competing in women’s sports, and protecting kids from extreme aspects of the LGBT agenda — stand and remain law after legal attacks from extremist activists.

Smith’s United Conservative Party (UCP) government stated that it will utilize a new law, Bill 9, to ensure that laws passed last year remain in effect.

“Children deserve the opportunity to grow into adulthood before making life-altering decisions about their gender and fertility,” Smith said in a press release sent to LifeSiteNews and other media outlets yesterday.

“By invoking the notwithstanding clause, we’re ensuring that laws safeguarding children’s health, education and safety cannot be undone – and that parents are fully involved in the major decisions affecting their children’s lives. That is what Albertans expect, and that is what this government will unapologetically defend.”

Alberta Justice Minister and Attorney General Mickey Amery said that the laws passed last year are what Albertans voted for in the last election.

“These laws reflect an overwhelming majority of Albertans, and it is our responsibility to ensure that they will not be overturned or further delayed by activists in the courts,” he noted.

“The notwithstanding clause reinforces democratic accountability by keeping decisions in the hands of those elected by Albertans. By invoking it, we are providing certainty that these protections will remain in place and that families can move forward with clarity and confidence.”

The Smith government said the notwithstanding clause will apply to the following pieces of legislation:

Bill 26, the Health Statutes Amendment Act, 2024, prohibits both gender reassignment surgery for children under 18 and the provision of puberty blockers and hormone treatments for the purpose of gender reassignment to children under 16.
Bill 27, the Education Amendment Act, 2024, requires schools to obtain parental consent when a student under 16 years of age wishes to change his or her name or pronouns for reasons related to the student’s gender identity, and requires parental opt-in consent to teaching on gender identity, sexual orientation or human sexuality.
Bill 29, the Fairness and Safety in Sport Act, requires the governing bodies of amateur competitive sports in Alberta to implement policies that limit participation in women’s and girls’ sports to those who were born female.”

Bill 26 was passed in December of 2024, and it amends the Health Act to “prohibit regulated health professionals from performing sex reassignment surgeries on minors.”

Last year, Smith’s government also passed Bill 27, a law banning schools from hiding a child’s pronoun changes at school that will help protect kids from the extreme aspects of the LGBT agenda.

Bill 27 will also empower the education minister to, in effect, stop the spread of extreme forms of pro-LGBT ideology or anything else to be allowed to be taught in schools via third parties.

Bill 29, which became law last December, bans gender-confused men from competing in women’s sports, the first legislation of its kind in Canada.  The law applies to all school boards, universities, and provincial sports organizations. 

Alberta’s notwithstanding clause is like all other provinces’ clauses and was a condition Alberta agreed to before it signed onto the nation’s 1982 constitution.

It is meant as a check to balance power between the court system and the government elected by the people. Once it is used, as passed in the legislature, a court cannot rule that the “legislation which the notwithstanding clause applies to be struck down based on the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Alberta Bill of Rights, or the Alberta Human Rights Act,” the Alberta government noted.

While Smith has done well on some points, she has still been relatively soft on social issues of importance to conservatives , such as abortion, and has publicly expressed pro-LGBT views, telling Jordan Peterson earlier this year that conservatives must embrace homosexual “couples” as “nuclear families.”