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McCarney said she’ll be starting the first of a series of meetings this week at the Conference on Disarmament, the UN’s main arms-control body, with the aim of re-starting negotiations this year towards creating the fissile material treaty.

McCarney may have her work cut out for her, because Trudeau’s own briefing book says the UN effort towards crafting such a treaty dates back almost six decades and has been beset by “deadlock.”

“An FMCT has been on the UN’s agenda since 1957,” says the memo to the prime minister, which was obtained under the Access to Information Act.

In 1995, Canada brokered an agreement on a negotiating mandate for the treaty, but in the intervening years, the effort stalled. “Since 2008, Pakistan has blocked work on an FMCT,” the memo states. But Canada has also worked with Germany, the Netherlands and Australia to make progress.

Canada got the ball rolling again in 2012, when it sponsored a resolution at the UN General Assembly establishing a commission of experts to push the matter forward. More meetings and reports followed.

Trudeau now plans to support another process — Obama’s fourth and final nuclear security summit, an effort he launched in 2010 after a landmark speech in Prague a year earlier.

In that speech, Obama highlighted the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, as he announced an initiative aimed at securing nuclear materials and cracking down on the illicit trafficking in them.

Trudeau said last fall he wants to look for ways to work with Obama on major international issues in the president’s final year in office.