Ranking Member Shaheen Leads Bipartisan Congressional Delegation to 2025 Halifax International Security Forum

WASHINGTON – This weekend, U.S. Senator Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), Ranking Member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, led a bipartisan congressional delegation including Senators Mike Rounds (R-SD), Chris Coons (D-DE), Kevin Cramer (R-ND), Angus King (I-ME), Thom Tillis (R-NC), Peter Welch (D-VT) and John Hoeven (R-ND) to Halifax, Canada to attend the 2025 Halifax International Security Forum. Ranking Member Shaheen and members of the delegation met with a Canadian delegation led by Minister of National Defence David McGuinty, a Colombian delegation led by Colombian Minister of Defense Pedro Sanchez-Suarez, Dutch Minister of Defense Ruben Brekelmans and Chief of Defense General Onno Eichelsheim two Ukrainian Parliamentarians Andrii Nikolaienko and Lesya Zaburanna, a delegation from the European Union including EU Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius and EU Military Committee Member Sean Clancy and Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs for Taiwan Dr. Chen Ming-Chi.

Ranking Member Shaheen also conducted interviews on CNN and Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) discussing Ukraine-Russia peace negotiations and U.S.-Canada relations. The Senator also participated in multiple events at the conference, including a widely covered press conference with the members of the congressional delegation, opening remarks and a conversation with PBS Newshour’s Nick Schifrin.

Watch Ranking Member Shaheen’s interviews with CNN’s Jake Tapper and CBC's Rosmary Barton here. Watch the Senator’s press conference, opening remarks and conversation with PBS Newshour’s Nick Schifrin here.

Key quotes from Ranking Member Shaheen:

Ukraine-Russia Negotiations:

• CODEL Press Conference: “There is so much in that plan that is totally unacceptable if we're going to have a real negotiation that is actually going to produce a peace deal for Ukraine and Russia.”
  
  
• Conversation with Nick Schifrin: “That’s not a compromise, that 28-point peace plan. That’s a plan Russia wrote to benefit Russia. That’s not a compromise. I think most of us would agree that when you do a peace negotiation, everyone has to give something up, but Russia isn’t giving anything up.
  
  
• Conversation with Nick Schifrin: “We saw what they did with Georgia in 2008, we saw what they did in Crimea in 2014, we saw them go into Ukraine and they’re going to continue if we don’t saw enough and put some pressure on them ... I think the only thing Vladimir Putin understands is pressure. And what President Trump has failed to do is put pressure on Putin and the Russian regime to force them to come to the table.”
  
  
• Conversation with Nick Schifrin: “We have a bill in the United States Senate that has over 85 cosponsors, Republican and Democrat – you never get over 85 cosponsors on a bill in the Senate. It would put significant secondary sanctions on those countries that are still doing business with Russia. We need to pass that bill and President Trump has refused month after month to endorse the bill until recently, and we still haven’t taken it up.”
  
  
• CNN: “What the United States needs to do is to put pressure on Putin, to provide those long-range weapons, to put secondary sanctions on the companies that are fueling Russia’s war machine and bring Putin to the table to really negotiate. We should not be representing Russia in this deal. We have been a partner of Ukraine, and we need to continue to support the courageous people of Ukraine."
  
  
• CBC: “It’s also about what our other adversaries are going to take away from this conflict. China is going to look at this, North Korea is going to look at this, Iran is going to look at this and if the United States walks away from this, they’re going to say ‘we don’t have to worry. We can go into other sovereign countries’ ... There are significant, long-term ramifications for what we do here.”
  
  
• CBC: “I hope that negotiations going forward are going to include Ukrainian interests and recognize what we’re going to need to make sure is that Ukraine has a security guarantee for the long term and that Russia cannot continue to advance and engage in its hybrid attacks into Europe.”

U.S.-Canada Relations:

• CODEL Press Conference: “Get this trade deal done so that we can stop the tariffs, because they are not only damaging your economy, they’re damaging our economy. In New Hampshire, I can quote you business after business that I’ve visited that have told me that the tariffs that have been invoked on Canada and what’s happened to our relationship has been detrimental to their business and it’s affecting our economy.”
  
  
• Conference Opening Remarks: “Sadly, our relations, the U.S. and Canada have been strained. We've seen a wedge created between the United States and Canada, where we share deep cultural, political, economic and social bonds.”
  
  
• CBC: “It’s in not just Canada’s interest, but in the United States’ interest to restart these talks. I live in a border state, New Hampshire. We do a lot of business with Canada. We have a lot of Canadian tourists that come down. We have missed you all this year! We want you to come back to the United States. It’s important to New Hampshire, it’s important to our economy, to the U.S. economy.
  
  
• CBC: “These tariffs have had a difficult economic impact not just in Canada, but in the United States. Every business I visited in New Hampshire has been hurt by the tariffs. We need to get back to the negotiating table.”
  
  
• CBC: “In the U.S., we think the average household will pay about $1800 more this year because of those tariffs.”
  
  
• CBC: “The United States and Canada have had one of the most complementary, most important trade relationships, one of the best friendships of any two countries in history certainly from the United States’ perspective. We want to restore the good relationship with Canada, that’s why we had a strong bipartisan delegation here at the Halifax Security Forum to say ‘we are here because we know how important relations with Canada are, how important our economic relationship is and we want to do everything we can to improve that.’”
  
  

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