Washington Governor Chris Gregoire was scheduled to meet Tuesday in British Columbia with Premier Gordon Campbell. It's a big symbolic step toward deepening Cascadia ties.
Gregoire plans to hold frequent cross-border meetings and wants to broaden links between the government agencies of the state and province, she said at a press conference Monday. The announcement was broadcast on TVW but it barely merited a sidenote in this AP story in the Seattle Times.
Meetings between the leaders of Washington and British Columbia have been rare. During the 1990s the most prominent visits by Washington's governor were for the annual Puget Sound business leaders' retreat in Vancouver.
Gregoire said she plans to focus on border security, economic development, capitalizing on the 2010 Olympics, and measures to deal with a pandemic. She said Washington and B.C. need to convince the federal government to make sensible improvements to border security. Recent talk about requiring passports to cross the border already have scared off tourism though there's no immminent change in the rules, she said.