When Mark Carney greets the leaders of the world’s largest industrialized nations on Sunday in Alberta, it will be his real international debut as prime minister. His star-turn at the G7 summit has been a lifetime in the making.
For Canada, it will also mark a return (or the beginning of a return) to the world after a long season of detachment and decline. Carney’s introduction and Canada’s restoration are not a coincidence. They are cause and effect.
The annual summit, which runs from June 15-17 in Kananaskis, will be a pivotal moment. It is the first since the re-election of Donald Trump. As a protectionist, isolationist, nativist, and authoritarian, he distrusts the pillars of the postwar international system — free trade, collective security, multilateralism, immigration, foreign aid. Old allies are scrambling for ways to preserve their prosperity and security amid growing expansionist threats from China and Russia.
It takes place as war flares between Israel and Iran, while conflicts in Gaza and Ukraine grind on. This year, unusually, the leaders of Australia, Indonesia, South Korea, South Africa, Ukraine, Mexico, Brazil, and India will also attend.
As chair, Carney will have to find a way to placate Trump while maintaining solidarity with the others on defence and trade. He will have to navigate a minefield, given the aggrieved, mercurial president who has imposed punishing tariffs on many nations, including Canada, which he calls “the 51st state.” All are adapting to a darker world in which America is now less ally than adversary.
The challenge is daunting. The last time Canada hosted the summit in 2018, Trump left angry at Justin Trudeau, and their relationship never recovered. Carney isn’t Trudeau. Nor is he Stephen Harper, Paul Martin, Jean Chrétien, Brian Mulroney, or any of his predecessors. He brings a heady mix of academic, institutional, and practical experience in international finance and economics, unmatched by any prime minister in our history.
Pierre Trudeau studied in London and Paris and knew the world as scholar and intrepid traveller. Lester Pearson was a veteran of the Great War, Canada's most famous diplomat, and Nobel Laureate as foreign minister.
But Carney represents a unique meeting of man and moment. In less than 100 days in office, he is reimagining Canada beyond its shores. He made a lightning trip overseas to consolidate relationships with Britain and France as a counterweight to the United States; joined others in criticizing Israel for its conduct in its war in Gaza; and visited the Arctic to underscore the threat to national sovereignty there.
Carney carries a strong belief that Canada needs real resources to matter in the world. Soft power isn’t enough anymore. He wants to rebuild the arms of internationalism. It’s about hard power.
Just days before the summit, he announced that Canada would spend 2 per cent of its GDP on national defence, the standard NATO has set for all its members — something Canada has avoided for decades (while saying it would do it, eventually).
Carney says Canada will pay up this fiscal year. Where he will find billions more is uncertain. He may broaden the definition of defence spending, practice creative accounting, or simply increase the deficit. But the reality is that he is not waiting until 2030, as Justin Trudeau had promised.
He is also committed to maintaining levels of developmental assistance, and says he will invest in the foreign service, promising to restore Canada’s once extraordinary presence abroad “through a new full foreign policy.”
This would be the first review since 2005. It’s about deploying more diplomats, he says, and restoring leadership. He also wants a national security review.
“I know how the world works,” says Carney. This is not an empty boast. It’s about principles, ideas, and values (the title of his first book) developed in the private sector, as a senior public servant, governor of central banks in Canada and England, and ties to institutes of international affairs, including Chatham House in London, where he was a president.
To guide him, Carney will turn to an experienced circle of advisors. His senior advisor on foreign, defence, and security policy, Scott Gilmore, is a former Canadian diplomat and innovative social entrepreneur. He is shrewd and unconventional. Carney’s chief of staff, Marc-André Blanchard, is a prominent lawyer, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, and a manager of Quebec’s largest pension fund.
The head of the public service is the much-travelled Michael Sabia, who has led the Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto, served as deputy minster of finance, and led initiatives in the G7. Carney’s principal secretary is David Lametti, the former minister of justice and law professor at McGill, whom Carney has known since they were both at Oxford.
Like Carney, all of them studied abroad, which is unusual among public servants today. Carney’s brain trust has a sophistication and breadth less present in those who advised Justin Trudeau and Stephen Harper on foreign affairs.
In rethinking Canada in the world, Carney can rely as well on Anita Anand, foreign minister; her parliamentary secretary, Rob Oliphant, who had that role in the last government; and Senator Peter Boehm, chair of the Senate Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. Boehm, a decorated former ambassador, led an innovative study on renewing Canada’s foreign service that could be a blueprint for the new government.
Carney arrives in Kananaskis as prime minister of the world’s second-largest country in size and ninth-largest economy, with an opportunity to return Canada’s reputation to that of the post-war era, when it was an activist middle power, a generous donor, a creative diplomat, and the world’s leading peacekeeper backed by a small but substantial military.
In his early days as prime minister, Carney radiates a sense of authority, confidence, vision, and intelligence. He is unlikely to declare that “Canada is back”, as Justin Trudeau did in 2015. But more than any figure since Pierre Trudeau in 1968, he has the chance to make Canada matter again in the world.
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