Latest news with #Charlevoix
National Post
a day ago
- Politics
- National Post
Ivison: President Trump, the G7 and Canada's new ‘realistic' foreign policy
Article content The last time he came north was to the Charlevoix summit in 2018, when he refused to sign the joint communiqué and called his host, then prime minister Justin Trudeau, 'dishonest and weak.' Article content Article content To discuss whether we can expect another Trump wrecking ball in Alberta, John Ivison is joined by Louise Blais, former Canadian ambassador and deputy permanent representative at the United Nations, who is now a strategic advisor to the Business Council of Canada. Article content Ivison asked if the G7 can function properly when the president of the United States clearly disdains multilateralism in all its forms. Article content Blais pointed out that this is the first multilateral meeting since Trump was re-elected. Article content 'But all the leaders this time have had practice. They've had their one-on-one meetings with them. We're all at the receiving end of a slew of tariffs. But you can see that the leaders are trying to find a way to keep relations cordial. I think everyone will try to avoid a disaster. It's not without its dangers. It can be unpredictable. But it is my sense that the prime minister has been speaking to the president and I don't think he has been speaking to him only about Canada-U.S. relations and the lifting of our tariffs. I think he's also been speaking to him about the G7 and how we can maybe make him at ease and move some things of common interest forward,' she said. Article content Prime Minister Mark Carney has said that if the U.S. does not want to lead, Canada will. Ivison asked if this is empty rhetoric or whether Canada has a real opportunity to set the agenda? Article content 'I'm very cautious about that ambition personally. I think there's a very good chance that the prime minister will shine next week. If you had asked me a month ago: 'Should we pass on this G7 this year?', I would have probably said yes. Too risky, wrong year for us. We're in an election. It was really difficult to prepare. Article content 'But now that we're on the other side, we're already seeing the elements of the foreign policy that the prime minister wants to put forward. We have established some form of cordial dialogue with the president. I think that it's actually turned into an opportunity for Mark Carney to show leadership and to balance sort of the core interests of Canada with international leadership. Article content 'On the other hand, he needs to be careful and not present himself too overtly as an alternative. If the world sees it that way, then fine. But I think he personally has to be careful because he has to balance both the president and the president's sense of himself.' Article content Blais said Trump's relationship with China will have a massive influence on how he handles allies at the G7. 'I think that the sense probably now in the White House is that it's difficult for the Americans to take on China on their own. And so, the president is coming to the summit having absorbed that and having (concluded) that if they really want to make headway, they will have to work with allies,' she said. Article content Ivison said former G7 Sherpa and now Canadian Senator Peter Boehm has suggested there will be no consensual joint communiqué this time, and that the G7 may wrap up with a summary statement from Carney, as the chair of the meeting. Article content Blais said she is hearing that there may be separate statements on different issues like Ukraine. Article content 'In other words, not putting everything into one, where if you don't agree on every single comma and every single period, the whole thing is out the window. I know that from experience at the UN, it can happen. It's tough. It's really tough to get consensus now in general in the multilateral world,' she said. Article content Ivison suggested Carney's decision to invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, despite human rights concerns, is symbolic of a new realism in Canada's foreign policy under Carney. Article content Blais agreed: 'It's clear that he's signalling that he wants a foreign policy that is much more focused on our core interests. And those core interests are very simple. They're sovereignty, territorial, primarily, and of course, economic prosperity. Those are the two things that really Canada needs to focus on… We need to grow up. We need to adapt. And we need to prioritize those interests. That doesn't mean that we will sacrifice our values at the altar of our own core interests. But it's a balance that is shifting.' Article content Blais said her time at the United Nations taught her that world leaders and ambassadors quickly grew tired of Canada attaching progressive values to its relationships. Article content 'We were pushing things that certain countries weren't ready for. And it's okay to try to improve the lives of people around the world. But at the end of the day, we have to think about our impact as a nation. We're not a super-power, we have to be realistic. And we certainly can't promote those things at the expense of our own interests. I think that's where it went too far. Article content 'To be honest, what always struck me is no matter how principled the position we took, and no matter what the price of that position might have been, we did not impact the change that we had hoped for. Article content 'We ended up really with very complicated relationships with very important powers, some of them regional, some of them global, and it hurt our interests.' Article content
Globe and Mail
a day ago
- Business
- Globe and Mail
For G7 leaders, immense global challenges weigh on agenda overshadowed by Trump
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. Carney should ignore any antics from Trump at G7 and focus on business, Chrétien says Canada to seek agreements in global peace, energy security and new partnerships at G7, Carney says 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. Ottawa under pressure to raise plight of Jimmy Lai at G7 summit Opinion: Massive fires burning across Alberta have helped put climate change back on the G7 agenda 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. Opinion: Mark Carney's go-it-alone approach is born of necessity Germany embraces militarism for the first time since the Second World War 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
USA Today
06-05-2025
- USA Today
Michigan community rallies around high school golf team involved in fatal car crash
Michigan community rallies around high school golf team involved in fatal car crash CHARLEVOIX, Mich. — When getting ready for school on Friday morning, students and teachers at school districts throughout the region donned Charlevoix's maroon and white in honor of Rayder Strong Day. Charlevoix Public Schools and the Charlevoix-Emmet Intermediate School District called upon schools, residents, businesses and others across Northern Michigan to celebrate "Rayder Strong Day" on Friday, May 2 to show support for the Charlevoix High School varsity boys golf team. They were joined by the Cheboygan-Otsego-Presque Isle Education Service District and Northwest Education Services to spread the message far and wide. "It truly has been amazing to see the outpouring of support. I know 'outpouring' is a word that's used a lot in these situations, but I can't come up with a better word," Char-Em Superintendent Scott Koziol said. "People are just freely giving and doing anything they can to support (the community)." The golf team was traveling in a van on Sunday, April 27 in Benzie County when a suspect fleeing police in a stolen vehicle crashed into them. The suspect died at the scene. Charlevoix's coach Doug Drenth and seven student-athletes were injured and hospitalized. Since the crash, Northern Michigan has rallied around the Charlevoix community. A GoFundMe for the victims has soared past its updated $200,000 goal. According to a May 2 update from the GoFundMe's organizer Scott Kelly, "It is hoped that one more player will be released from the hospital today to bring it to six of the seven players being out of the hospital. Coach Drenth and one player remain in the hospital with expected extended stays." In addition to the GoFundMe and Rayder Strong Day, many local businesses are stepping up to host their own fundraisers. For example, all proceeds from the Charlevoix Dairy Grille on May 2 will be donated to the team. Staff is donating their tips and wages as well, according to their Facebook page. Charlevoix Public Schools has posted a Google Doc with a full list of fundraisers taking place throughout the community. "We are incredibly grateful for the overwhelming outpouring of support for our community from neighboring districts, local businesses and the junior golf program," Charlevoix's Superintendent Mike Ritter said. "Your kindness has provided comfort and strength to our students, families and staff during this profoundly difficult time. We ask that you continue to keep students and coach in your thoughts and prayers as they continue to heal. #RayderStrong." Rayder Strong has become a rallying cry in Northern Michigan, but the support has extended past state borders, with the Illinois State University golf team sending their love Charlevoix's way. "The far-reaching aspect of it is mind-blowing," Koziol said. "When you are made aware of a situation as tragic as this, it's nice to see that the inherent reaction in people is, 'How can I help? What can I do?' ... What a great opportunity for people to see the potential that social media does have when it's used for good and to build people up and to support people." Here's how Northern Michigan (and beyond) has rallied around the Charlevoix team: Reporter Annie Doyle contributed to the reporting of this article. — Contact reporter Karly Graham at kgraham@ Follow her on X, formerly known as Twitter, at @KarlyGrahamJrn.
