A competent leader at a critical time

Opinion

As the dust clears on this week’s G7 summit in Kananaskis, Alta., many Canadians and commentators are asking if it lived up to the pre-conference hype, if it was worth the expense and inconvenience and, most importantly, if it really accomplished anything.

Those are all fair questions, but they may be rooted in an inaccurate understanding of what the G7 is and the purpose it serves.

The G7, more formally known as the Group of Seven, is not an international organization analogous to the United Nations or NATO. Rather, it is an informal political and economic forum composed of seven of the world’s most-advanced economies — Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union. It provides an important and rare opportunity for international leaders to meet, discuss and co-ordinate policies on economic issues, as well as broader global concerns.

The G7 holds an annual summit during which those discussions occur, and the G7 presidency rotates among the member countries each year. Canada held the presidency this year, meaning that it hosted the event and it was chaired by Prime Minister Mark Carney. As part of that role, he set the meeting’s agenda, based on prior discussions with the other national leaders.

The meetings, which also included several world leaders such as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum as invited guests, began on Sunday and ended on Tuesday.

At the conclusion of the conference, the G7 leaders avoided issuing a joint communiqué, as occurs after most G7 meetings. They instead published six joint statements that addressed a range of economic and security issues, including foreign interference and repression, economic opportunities created by artificial intelligence technology, migrant smuggling, critical mineral supply chains and a “wildfire charter” that called for the strengthening of global capacity to prepare for and respond to the growing threat of wildfires.

That’s a notable amount of consensus by the leaders of many of the world’s leading economies on a range of critical issues, but this year’s G7 summit will also be remembered as a missed opportunity to address and resolve the most serious economic issue currently facing many nations: the threat of tariffs imposed by the United States and the danger it poses to the world economy.

The presence of U.S. President Donald Trump at the meeting would have presented an ideal forum for the other G7 leaders to jointly and individually confront him about the issue and work toward a realistic solution, but the opportunity was derailed when Trump unexpectedly departed from the meeting early on Monday.

With Trump absent and the trade issue effectively off the table, the leaders focused on the issues they could resolve. It is fair to say they made some progress, but it is also notable that no statement was issued by the leaders expressing support for Ukraine in its conflict with Russia — apparently due to Trump’s reluctance — nor was there a statement specifically addressing the issue of climate change.

Beyond that, however, it is also important to note what Carney accomplished by hosting the meeting and navigating the leaders through the many complex issues on the agenda. By doing so, he has decisively extinguished the widely held perception that Canada was a nation led by an un-serious lightweight who was more focused on photo-ops and virtue-signalling than playing a meaningful role in resolving international issues.

That may have been the international perception when Justin Trudeau was PM — and it may have been all too accurate — but it certainly does not apply with respect to Mark Carney.

Our new prime minister has shown himself to be a strong, steady and confident presence on the international stage, at a time when such leadership is in short supply and desperately needed.

With both the Canada-European Union Summit and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Summit happening in the coming days, followed by further trade negotiations with the Trump administration and then the G20 Summit in Johannesburg, South Africa, Canadians can be reassured that they have such a competent and skilled leader to represent our national interests in those important negotiations.