G20 Summit: President Obama Meets with World Leaders in Canada

June 25, 2010 -- President Obama heads to Canada today for three days of meetings with world leaders. At the top of the agenda – securing the global economic recovery.

When the leaders of the world's 20 largest economies met in London last spring, the global economy was teetering on the brink of collapse.

Today the situation is more stable but the solidarity among world leaders has evaporated when it comes to the best way to keep a still fragile economy growing.

Obama is pushing his colleagues to keep up stimulus spending, but Europe's debt crisis has made world leaders hesitant to do that without also addressing skyrocketing deficits.

"We worked exceptionally hard to restore growth; we cannot let it falter or lose strength now," Obama said in a letter to G-20 leaders last Friday. "This means that we should reaffirm our unity of purpose to provide the policy support necessary to keep economic growth strong."

German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been a leading voice in Europe pushing for deficit reduction as a priority over stimulus spending. "We are going to implement the efforts we have agreed to," Merkel said in a television interview on Thursday, referring to a savings package Germany is set to implement. "I do not think we should relent."

Thursday at the White House Obama said that the United States can no longer serve as "the engine of world economic growth."

"We are obviously still a huge part of the world economy. We are still going to be open. We are still going to be importing as well as exporting," he said at a press conference with Russian President Medvedev. "But the economic realities are such that for us to see sustained global economic growth, all countries are going to have to be moving in some new directions."

Because of that, Obama said, "not every country is going to respond exactly the same way, but all of us are going to have responsibilities to rebalance in ways that allow for long-term, sustained economic growth in which all countries are participating and hopefully the citizens of all these countries are benefiting."

As he heads to Canada to try and convince world leaders that stimulus spending is necessary for continued global economic growth, at home Obama is facing a debt-weary Congress that is reluctant to approve more federal money for cash-strapped states.

The White House says that the president goes to the G20 summit, "in a position of strength, with the U.S. economy now growing at 3 percent when a year ago it was shrinking at 6 percent; with jobs being created here, including in the private sector, when last year at this time the U.S. economy was losing about 700,000 jobs a month; and with financial regulation on the verge of being approved by Congress."