Former Harvard prof meets Obama as Canada's opposition leader

Michael Ignatieff (REUTERS)

On his first foreign trip in office, President Obama will observe diplomatic protocols -- one measured in how much time he is scheduled to spend with Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, and how little with the leader of the opposition.

Obama's itinerary has him on tap for three-and-a-half hours at Parliament Hill meeting with Harper, then having a working lunch, then holding a joint press conference.

He is scheduled to only have 20 minutes at an Ottawa airport conference room with Liberal Party leader Michael Ignatieff, who spent five years at Harvard.

But the Canadian press reports that Ignatieff has a clear agenda to push, including making clear that there is no give on our northern neighbor's plan to pull out of Afghanistan. Canada plans to withdraw its 2,500 combat troops by 2011, after the deaths of more than 100 since 2001. Obama announced this week he is sending 17,000 more US troops to take on the resurgent Taliban.

While Harper gets more face time, there's also a lot of buzz in Canada that Ignatieff might have the ear of the White House.

Harper leads the Conservative Party and was tied to former President George W. Bush. Ignatieff, on the other hand, knows quite a few key players in the Obama administration from his stint as director of the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at Harvard, including Obama's top economic adviser Lawrence Summers (who is accompanying Obama on the trip), legal adviser Cass Sunstein, and foreign policy adviser Samantha Power.

Ignatieff, a human rights activist and journalist, entered Canadian politics in 2005, then was chosen leader of the Liberal Party in December after its crushing loss in parliamentary elections in October.