For G7 leaders, immense global challenges weigh on agenda overshadowed by Trump

Globe and Mail

a day ago

The last time Canada hosted a G7 summit, Tristen Naylor gained access as an unusual spectator. He was embedded as an academic observing the summit management office that oversaw the 2018 events at Charlevoix, Que. It was, he recalls, a marvel of organization, governed by a 132-page event 'bible.'
'It's page after page of minute-by-minute play-by-play on how the summit runs, with schematics and diagrams of every room setup, who stands where, how many cars you need,' said Mr. Naylor, the director of the Oxbridge Diplomatic Academy.
But as Canada once again prepares for some of the world's most powerful leaders to meet at G7 meetings that begin this weekend, all of that meticulous planning – and any hopes for agreement or even basic comity – must reckon with a series of unknowns.
There are new faces: Britain's Keir Starmer, Germany's Friedrich Merz, Japan's Shigeru Ishiba and the host himself, Prime Minister Mark Carney.
There is a horizon clouded with haze, from the wildfires burning across this country, from the street fires lit in protests across the United States, from the conflagrations still raging in Ukraine and Gaza, from the trade wars that have drawn the U.S. into conflict with the other countries whose leaders will attend – and, perhaps more than anything, from Donald Trump, who has returned to power with a palpable disdain for the elite multilateralism that is the pillar on which the G7 has stood for a half-century.
And there is history.
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The Charlevoix summit ended with Mr. Trump calling then-prime minister Justin Trudeau 'very dishonest & weak,' and withdrawing by tweet from a joint statement. Seven years later, 'at the end of the weekend, if there is no big explosive Trump story, that alone will be a success,' Mr. Naylor said.
'The game is damage limitation.'
The world leaders gathering this weekend in Kananaskis, Alta., are confronted with a scale of problems that the original Group of Six meeting in 1975 had determined to avoid (Canada did not join until the following year). That first summit, held in France, concluded with an agreement to pursue the 'maximum possible level of trade liberalization,' while striking a note of optimism. 'Our success will strengthen, indeed is essential to, democratic societies everywhere,' the leaders said in their closing communiqué.
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Fifty years later, the World Bank is forecasting the slowest decade of global growth since the 1960s – the result, in part, of rising tariff rates – while new levels of doubt have shrouded democratic governance. One third of the world's voters now live in countries where election quality has eroded, the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance has found.
The immensity of those issues stands in contrast to the limited hopes for this G7 meeting, which are so dim that Canada is not planning for a joint communiqué at its conclusion, a senior official told reporters Thursday. Instead, the summit hosts are looking for short joint statements focused on concrete actions and agreements in certain areas. The Globe is not identifying the official, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
Forgoing such a communiqué again this year could sidestep sparring over what language everyone, Mr. Trump included, would find acceptable.
It would also reflect reality. This year's summit will draw together leaders as a group. But the greatest priority for most of those leaders is one man alone. Since he has returned to office, Mr. Trump has shattered expectations about how international trade should flow, how diplomacy should be done and even how secure other countries should feel within their own borders.
If that means limited progress on matters of acute global concern, all may not be lost. The G7 has always been a place where personality matters, its annual gathering structured with extensive time for discussion outside the strictures of formal government business. Historically, leaders 'were supposed to develop a personal level of relationship and trust, so that at a point in which they might need one another, they knew and trusted one another,' said Douglas Rediker, a Washington-based political adviser who is a non-resident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.
That mandate, he said, matters more than ever.
'This becomes a meeting about taking the temperature of Donald Trump as a man, as a leader, as a policy-maker – as someone they can and cannot do business with, and can and cannot trust,' Mr. Rediker said.
By the standard measure of things, this should be Mr. Carney's party. As host, he has power over the guest list and influence over the broad agenda for conversation. For Mr. Carney, a former central banker who has spent much of his life in elite company, the summit offers a venue to show action at a time when patience for political puffery has grown thin.
'The publics in the western world are just tired of leaders that spout rhetoric and then don't get anything done,' said Janice Stein, the founding director of the Munk School of Global Affairs.
Mr. Carney, she said, has at the G7 a moment to pursue his ambition to remake Canada and its place in the world. The question is 'how much support can he build for his priorities, and how much traction will he get for them at the G7?'
Elements of that strategy have come into view with those invited.
With Mexico's Claudia Sheinbaum, Mr. Carney 'is rebalancing our relationships with other powers, but he is still renegotiating a security and economic relationship with the United States. Claudia Sheinbaum is a big piece of that,' Ms. Stein said.
India's Narendra Modi represents an enormous economy that is for Canada a potential counterweight to China and the U.S. India, which like Canada has struggled to navigate Mr. Trump's tariffs, 'also needs to ramp up its trade policies,' Raja Mohan, a distinguished fellow with the Delhi-based Council for Strategic and Defense Research, said this week in remarks to the Asia Pacific Foundation of Canada.
A meeting between Mr. Carney and Mr. Modi, he said, could deliver a fresh start to trade talks that have been stalled since 2023. 'So there is a moment, there, of economic reconstitution that is possible,' Mr. Mohan said.
Elsewhere, though, foreign leaders are preparing for Kananaskis with questions about just how Mr. Carney intends to rebalance international relationships.
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Take North American trade.
The U.S. government has privately given some positive signals on the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, a senior Mexican government official said. On one recent occasion, a top U.S. Trade Representative official said behind closed doors that the U.S. may choose to only 'review' USMCA rather than renegotiate it, the Mexican official said. The Trump administration is considering a timeline of July or September to get started, the source said, and Mexico would like to work more closely with Canada. The Globe is not identifying the official because they are not authorized to speak publicly.
But there has, to date, been little co-ordination between the two countries, particularly at the political level, the official said.
Other countries will arrive in Canada with eyes trained on Washington, not Ottawa.
For Mr. Ishiba, one of the primary attractions of Kananaskis is the chance of a sideline meeting with Mr. Trump, where the Japanese Prime Minister has said he will press his country's case personally as tariff negotiations between the two countries drag on.
In return for any tariff carve-outs, Japan is likely to promise to buy large amounts of U.S. energy and weapons.
'Japan's major priority will be twofold – ensuring the focus is on a rules-based international order and making progress on bilateral tariff negotiations when Ishiba and Trump meet,' said Rintaro Nishimura, a Tokyo-based associate with the Asia Group, a strategic advisory firm.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, meanwhile, will arrive in Kananaskis with hopes that other G7 leaders can together persuade Mr. Trump to take tough new measures against Russia.
Response to Russia's actions in Ukraine, including massive air attacks over the past week, should be met not with 'silence from the world, but concrete action,' Mr. Zelensky wrote on social media this week. 'Action from America, which has the power to force Russia into peace. Action from Europe, which has no alternative but to be strong. Action from others around the world who called for diplomacy and an end to the war – and whom Russia has ignored.'
Lisa Yasko, a member of the Ukrainian parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee, said her country was looking to the G7 to lead the way with a new round of sanctions to punish Russia for refusing to accept a ceasefire.
The joint communiqué issued by G7 foreign ministers at the end of their March meeting in Charlevoix had threatened exactly that.
But as foreign leaders arrive in Canada seeking time with Mr. Trump, they worry his focus is directed somewhere else.
Ms. Yasko said there was concern that Mr. Trump was too preoccupied with domestic politics – his feud with Elon Musk, and the deployment of troops to California – to focus on helping Ukraine, which has a dwindling supply of U.S. weaponry sent by Mr. Trump's predecessor, Joe Biden. Mr. Trump has approved only a single arms sale to Ukraine – US$310-million in spare parts and other support for F-16 fighter jets – since taking office in January.
'It's not that easy for the average Ukrainian person to understand why the Americans are not doing certain things,' Ms. Yasko said in a telephone interview. 'It all looks as if all the attention is more focused on the internal agenda, rather than what happens in foreign affairs, where the actions of United States are very much needed.'
The G7 concluded last year's summit in Apulia, Italy, with a 36-page statement that listed 11 main points of agreement, from standing in solidarity with Ukraine to a renewed commitment toward gender equality and taking concrete steps on reducing climate change.
Few expect such language to emerge from Kananaskis.
'This is not going to be Trudeau and Macron smiling and chatting it out. That is a different world,' said Sumantra Maitra, a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America, a MAGA think tank.
Instead, in the areas where previous summits found common ground, Mr. Trump's arrival at the gathering may bring reason for dispute. Take Mr. Zelensky, who sparred with the U.S. leader in the White House. Having the Ukrainian President there 'is potentially far more destabilizing than anything,' said Mr. Maitra, who has advised Mr. Trump but does not speak for the administration.
Then there is Mr. Trump's personal distaste for some leaders, such as France's Emmanuel Macron, and his distrust of multinational institutions.
'He's not looking for some kind of consensus-building, kumbayah exercise on the international stage. That's not his style and approach,' said Nile Gardiner, a specialist in foreign policy with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
Across a series of issues at the G7, he said, 'one cannot rule out the strong potential for real conflict.'
Mr. Trump, for example, has sought major spending increases among NATO allies, 'and I would expect that he will be raising that issue significantly, especially on Canadian soil, as Canada has been in President Trump's eyes one of the worst offenders on low defence spending,' Mr. Gardiner said.
Mr. Carney has sought to blunt that blow, saying this week Canadian defence spending will soon reach two per cent of GDP. Mr. Trump is likely to seek more.
Even so, against that set of low expectations, the G7 leaders may discover more areas of agreement than anticipated, said John Kirton, a political scientist at the University of Toronto who is director of the G7 Research Group.
'The secret to success is letting Donald Trump credibly claim that he led and won the G7 on some serious things. And there are standout candidates where it's relatively easy to do,' he said.
Take a need for stimulus spending through tax cuts or defence spending. Or a commitment to fighting transnational crime and the drug trade. Or a pledge to make mandatory the removal of non-consensual sexual imagery, including pornographic deepfakes, from the internet – something the U.S. recently legislated. Or a common dedication to confronting China on security, trade and transnational repression. Or a pledge to act against crimes committed by undocumented migrants, a subject of nearly as much concern in Berlin as in Washington.
Yet Mr. Trump could just as easily be provoked into anger by some perceived slight.
Worse, he could back his hosts into a corner from which there is no polite exit.
'If he says something really outrageous about Canadian sovereignty or the 51st state that can't be characterized as a joke – the only precedent we have in this country for that kind of behaviour is 1967,' said Chris Alexander, a former cabinet minister under Stephen Harper, recalling Ottawa's bitter condemnation of Charles de Gaulle's 'Vive le Québec libre' refrain that preceded the French president cutting short his visit.
Still, he said, diminished expectations for what this G7 will accomplish should not diminish its importance. Whatever it yields – be it insults or be it harmony – will offer insight into the direction of international affairs at a moment when Mr. Trump is far from the only leader questioning old assumptions.
'We are in something like a pivot away from globalization,' said Mr. Alexander. 'Does the summit amplify those trend lines? Or does it slow them down and moderate them? That is a question that I think is worth watching for.'
With a report from Steven Chase