It's been pouring rain all day but when you're in Paris in the spring, who cares?
I'm travelling this week with Prime Minister Harper on a whirlwind tour through Western Europe. We left Ottawa last night at 11 pm local time and, seven hours later, we landed at Orly International Airport where it turned out to be noon and wet. That's the Canadian Forces jet (left) on the tarmac at Orly International Airport in Paris.
We're not staying here long. After a busy day, we're about to fly to Cologne, Germany and, once there, we will travel to Bonn where we will stay the night.
Harper, on this trip, is visiting Paris, Bonn, Rome and London before flying back to Canada late Thursday night.
For this trip, Harper is travelling without his wife. As his communications director Sandra Buckler said before we left, this is a “tightly-focused” trip.
For the ride over, we were joined by various staffers from the PMO, including Buckler, press secretary Carolyn Stewart-Olsen, deputy press secretary Dimitri Soudas, PMO policy and research director Mark Cameron, and, of course, Harper's executive assistant Ray Novak. Novak goes wherever the PM goes and, as I've often said, is underestimated power in the PMO as he is the first person Harper sees (other than his wife) when he gets up and the last person he sees before going to bed.
Also on board was Thunder Bay-Superior North Joe Comuzzi. Comuzzi, of course, was the Liberal MP who crossed the floor to sit as a Conservative over the 2006 budget. I've known Joe since I was a reporter at The Chronicle-Journal in his hometown and we had a great chat about all the infrastructure that's needed in his gigantic territory north of Lake Superior — a riding, incidentally, that's bigger than the country I'm in right now.
Harper got the French honour guard/red carpet on arrival (below) and, as I write this, is wrapping up a one-on-one meeting with French president Nicolas Sarkozy.
