Once ensconced away from protesters at a luxury hotel in Montebello, Quebec, down the Ottawa River from the Canadian capital, the leaders are expected to review the global economy and examine progress towards integrating North America.
They are meeting as partners in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, to develop what they have called a Security and Prosperity Partnership, or SPP.
That was drafted in 2005 following the 11th September 2001, attacks on the United States to try to ensure that North America is a safe place to live and to do business, seemingly innocuous but upsetting to activists on the left and the right who are concerned about a loss of national sovereignty.
Fences three meters (10 feet) high have been erected around the hotel grounds to keep at bay the thousands of anti-capitalist protesters expected to descend on Montebello.
Bush and the other leaders might have to go part way by boat if protesters block the way.
On the agenda are global competitiveness, the safety of food and products -- including Chinese-made toys -- energy, the environment and secure borders.
Christopher Sands, an expert on Canada at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said the meeting was unlikely to produce major strides, but would show that the United States was tending regional ties.
"The summit is a symbolic manifestation of the fact that Bush, the United States, is in fact paying attention to its neighbors and working on an agenda of mutual concern," he said.
AGENDA
Bush will have separate one-on-one meetings with Harper and Calderon on Monday.
Canadian officials said they were likely to discuss Russia's symbolic laying of claim to the North Pole, where it placed a flag on the seabed, as well as the war in Afghanistan, where Canada has committed 2,500 troops through February 2009.
The head of Canada's opposition, Liberal leader Stephane Dion, says Harper should demand that NATO start finding a replacement for Canadian troops.
Bush and Harper were also expected to discuss the Middle East, Iran, climate change, and the Doha trade negotiations.
Opposition politicians regularly accuse Canada's Conservative prime minister of being a Bush protege, but Harper's spokesman, Dimitri Soudas, pointed out that Liberal Paul Martin was in power when the SPP was set up.
For Bush and Calderon, it will be their first face-to-face meeting since U.S. immigration overhaul legislation collapsed in Congress and dealt a blow to a key issue for U.S.-Mexico relations.
The Bush administration said this month it would increase scrutiny and impose heftier fines on U.S. businesses that employ illegal immigrants.
The United States also will expand the visa term for professional workers from Mexico and Canada to three years from one year. "I don't think either country was clamoring for this. It's a gesture," Sands said of the visa change. - DDNEWS
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