During a photo op at the G8 Summit here, U.S. President George Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair are caught chatting away. Neither men, it seems, were aware that a microphone was also recording their conversation. And so, as a result, we caught this quote from Bush, which we’e running on CTV Newsnet and which you may see on my report from St. Petersburg on tonight’s national newscast:
BUSH: The irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop this shit, then it's over.
Lots of pics posted in the photoblog here today of our time so far here in St. Petersburg, Russia. You should find some pictures of the Constantine (Konstantinovsky) Palace here, the building where many of the major meetings are being held; as well as pictures of other scenes from Russia’s G8 Summit. My favourite is the G8 juice they’re handing out around here.
We are on our final approach into St. Petersburg, Russia as I peck out this
post on my BlackBerry. We land at about 3 pm local time (7 am Ottawa time).
Harper, as usual is up front. I'm with the journalists in the back of Airbus
001.
On deck today: Harper has a one-on-one meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Together, they are the leaders of the G8 energy superpopwers but have quite different views about how to maximize that position for their
country's benefit.
Time to land the plane …
As blogger Stephen Taylor correctly reported today — scooping all of us in the MSM — former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher met this afternoon in London with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. The meeting took place in the hotel where I am typing this right now — the Renaissance Chancery Court Hotel in London’s West End. This is the hotel where the PM his delegation and the journalists travelling with him are staying.
Mrs. Thatcher was at the hotel for about an hour in mid-afternoon.
We started the day following Mr. Harper and his wife Laureen to 10 Downing Street. Harper arrived sharp at 8 am, followed about 30 minutes later by Laureen. The PM was met by Tony Blair; Mrs. Harper was met by Cherie Blair.
We were then escorted into 10 Downing — it’s a lot bigger inside than it seems from the outside — past black-and-white portraits of every UK prime minister since Walpole and into what’s known as the Pillared Room where, under a giant portrait of Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough, the prime ministers held a joint conference. Journalists were limited to four questions [read the English language transcript here], two each from the Canadian media and the British media. We asked about Israel and about climate change. The Brits asked about Israel and a growing scandal engulfing Blair and his party over party fundraising.
Harper then went to meet Queen Elizabeth II in Buckingham Palace. Their meeting was scheduled to last just 10 minutes but, apparently the Queen was enjoying the conversation enough, that they carried on their conversation for 35 minutes.
Harper is spending the rest of the day preparing to deliver a speech this evening in London to the Canada-UK Chamber of Commerce.
We are overnight here in London before jetting off early tomorrow to St. Petersburg, Russia.
Flying over the St. Lawrence river right now, on board Airbus 001, the military jet carrying Prime Minister Harper, his wife, political aides, diplomats and journalists to London, England where Harper will meet Tony Blair and the Queen tomorrow. Cdn Forces staff are serving us breakfast. This morning's in-flight movie is Syriana — which some on board here think is an odd choice.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke to reporters while travelling from Ottawa to London today.
Harper made a statement about the situation in Israel.
The following is my transcript of the English-language portion of the press scrum. The Prime Minister spoke at about 12:15 pm EDT for about four minutes.
Harper: “We're obviously concerned – our government is obviously concerned – about the escalation of violence in the Middle East. Israel has a right to defend itself. It's essential that Hezbollah and Hamas release their Israeli prisoners. Any countries in that area that have influence on those organizations should encourage an end to the violence and recognize and encourage the recognition of Israel's right to exist.”
Harper was asked what he thought of an observation by the Russians that Israel's military response has been disproportionately harsh.
“Israel has a right to defend itself. I think Israel's respnse under the circumstances has been measured. I think it's tremendously disappointing that these attacks are coming from areas that Israel evacuated and so I think the onus for this escalation is on the other side and I would urge them to return the prisoners.”
“I'm assuming this will come up at the G8.”
“Foreign Affairs will do everything it can to help Canadians that are there.”
ON BOARD AIRBUS 001 – Since taking office in February, Prime Minister Harper has already met Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and has twice met with U.S. President George Bush.
Tomorrow, he will have his first private meeting with UK Prime Minister Tony Blair at 10 Downing Street.
Then, on Saturday, it's off to the G8 in St. Petersburg where, according to the itinerary just distributed to us on the PM's plane, Harper will have hour-long one-on-one meetings with Russian President Vladimir Putin, with European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso, with Finnish Prime Minister Matti Vanhanen (the Fins, this year, hold the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union), and with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Then, after the G8, Harper goes to Paris for separate meetings with Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and President Jacques Chirac.
Italian Prime Minister Romano Prodi will be, by the middle of next week, the only G8 leader who has not found his way on to Harper's dance card.
My colleague Ellen Pinchuk, CTV's Moscow Bureau Chief, scored a rare interview with Russian President Vladimir Putin, a CTV exclusive. Packaged excerpts of this interview ran last night on our national newscast but the entire 28-minute interview, in three segments is available online.
Putin gave this interview in advance of the G8 summit. Ellen and I will be covering this summit for CTV. I will be travelling with the Prime Minister tomorrow when he heads to the United Kingdom to meet British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Queen ahead of the summit which begins this weekend in St. Petersburg.
After the summit, the PM will travel to France where he will tour the Vimy Ridge Memorial Site before separate meetings with French President Jacques Chirac and French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin.
The Canadian government has prepared a backgrounder on this trip.
in 1988, I edited the University of Guelph’s student newspaper The Ontarion and, while I (that's me on the left around this time — click on it for an explanation) was at that school and writing for the paper, I wrote a column called “Dance of the Wood Nymph”.
The headline writers at The Portico, the University of Guelph alumni magazine, picked up on that to title a profile about me, penned by writer Rebecca Kendall.
Remember the wood nymph?
Former Ontarion Editor brings home a Gemini“Cheating, like most forms of dishonesty, has its place and its purpose. In fact, in some cases, cheating is the only option available if . . . one wants to stay in the game. Right now, our federal government doesn’t believe in cheating — they think there’s something inherently bad about it, I suppose — so they have presented a bill to axe our National Policy on Cheating. And so we have free trade.”
Those words were written in the summer of 1988 by David Akin, a young reporter for the student newspaper at the University of Guelph. Back then, Akin’s byline most often appeared in the Ontarion on stories about U of G and campus life, but as editor, he also dabbled in voicing his views on government. Now he travels around North America covering the hottest political topics of our day and can be heard and read daily through the national media. If he wants to share his point of view on today’s political agenda, there’s his daily blog . . . [Read the full story]
A little more than 49,000 people dropped in here to look at something during the month of June and the odds are — as they have been for the last two years or so — that those folks weren’t so much interested in Canadian federal politics as they were in sports cars or Celine Dion. I make that conclusion based on the site traffic logs for On the Hill which continue to show that a picture of me in a Porsche at the Detroit Auto Show continues be heads and away the most popular thing people look at here (Question for Porsche fans: Did you get here from Google or is there a link somewhere that’s sending all the traffic here?) followed closely by a video of Celine Dion. I must say I’m pleased to see that a photo of me “Hard At Work” appears to be a top two favourite, for more than one month — although, again, I’m not sure why. The site logs show that 167,000 pages were served up on June. Here’s the top 15 most popular posts for June. These posts may have been made at any time (the date of the original post follows in brackets) but they were the tops for visitors here in June.