Prime Minister Paul Martin had his first face-to-face meeting with his U.S. counterpart, President George H.W. Bush, on this date in 2004. Their bilateral discussions took place on the margins of a meeting of North American leaders in Monterrey, Mexico.
“That first meeting …. was primarily a get-to-know-you session rather than a substantive policy discussion,” Martin wrote in his memoirs, Come Hell or High Water: My Life in and Out of Politics. The former PM added that more serious talks between the two leaders took place later in 2004.
There was one amusing incident at the meeting that involved Martin’s communications director, Scott Reid. He happened to resemble Bush’s own press secretary Scott McClellan.
Martin recalled what happened when Bush met Reid. “You’ve got a pretty face,” Reid was told by the 43th President. “You’re a good-lucking guy. Better looking than my Scott anyway.”
Canada’s Scott, however, had the last word (as he usually does ….) He admitted, as Martin recalled in his book, that he would have preferred a different way to have been described by the President. “But I’ll take what I can, I guess. When a Texas Republican says you’ve got a pretty face, then I guess there is just no way around it.”
There is no word if Reid and the former President remain in contact today.
You can read the public statements made by Bush and Martin after their bilateral in Mexico at the link below.
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PPP-2004-book1/pdf/PPP-2004-book1-doc-pg54.pdf
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.
Arthur Milnes is an accomplished public historian and award-winning journalist. He was research assistant on The Rt. Hon. Brian Mulroney’s best-selling Memoirs and also served as a speechwriter to then-Prime Minister Stephen Harper and as a Fellow of the Queen’s Centre for the Study of Democracy under the leadership of Tom Axworthy. A resident of Kingston, Ontario, Milnes serves as the in-house historian at the 175 year-old Frontenac Club Hotel.