Hard Centre: G7

The G7 survives… and in 2025 that’s a good news story!

Okay, thank God that’s done. The G7 summit in Alberta is over, and Prime Minister Mark Carney and his team deserve credit for an event that wasn’t derailed by US President Donald Trump or the cascading wave of crises gripping the world. Mr. Trump left early, clearly distracted by Israel and Iran, but not before signing a reasonable joint statement that recognized two key points the Canadian Future Party agrees with: Iran cannot be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons, and Israel has the right to defend itself.

Otherwise, the summit was a reminder of days gone by. The leaders of the some of the wealthiest democracies chatted about areas of mutual interest in some picturesque spot. They reaffirm their commitment to the obvious, which in this era of collapsing norms and institutions is a good thing: democracy, free trade, security.

Despite there being no final communique, a tradition abandoned due to Trump’s physical and political distance from the other leaders, and the US’ refusal to condemn Russia (big surprise, eh?), the summit wrapped up smoothly.

If anything, things went too smoothly. Prime Minister Carney’s decision to invite Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed, raised questions about the ethics of Canada’s foreign policy – even as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy literally and appropriately took President Trump’s seat next to our PM, on day two of the summit.

India is accused of interfering in Canada, including the murder of Sikh activists on our soil and trying to influence nomination races for Canadian political parties. The Saudi crown prince is famous for allowing women to drive and for ordering the murder of a Washington Post columnist with a bone saw.

The G7 was most relevant as the spine of the post-World War II alliance, a powerful list of ideas and principles: democracy, the rule of law, and free markets harnessed by protections for individual rights, equity-driven social programs, and competition. Those values, when connected to policies, unleashed a wave of creativity, wealth, and individual freedom the world has never seen. It took 40 years for liberal democracy to dispose of its major late-20th century challenger, Soviet Communism, and it would have taken less time had the West and G7 not propped up the Soviet bloc with food and tolerated the theft of industrial and military technology, from the 1970s onwards.

I’m worried that naïveté still guides our government. Giving non-democracies access to our wealth was supposed to spread our ideals, instead the West abandoned our ideals at their moment of triumph, descending into a spiral of self-loathing that infected the left and the right and leaving us with a hollow relativism at the heart of our politics: “who are we to impose our values on others?” is the common cry, justified by the belief on the left that Western democracies are no better than other forms of government, and on the right that Western democracies have been undermined by people and ideas from elsewhere… making Western democracies no better than other forms of government.

This is nonsense. Liberal Western democracy is, without any doubt, the best system of government yet developed by humans – if you believe that government should be about offering the best structures to support a free and happy life for as many people as possible.

That democratic identity crisis caused the G7 to slide from an exclusive club to yet another forum where Western governments show how open they are to humbly listen to alternative perspectives: a bizarre masochism that defines democracy’s recent decline. Rather than offering countries like India or other countries a path to membership in the G7, based on clear rules around making life better for its citizens – be they government structures, individual rights, anti-corruption efforts or whatever else the group decides – it persists as a rigid post-war relic like the United Nations Security Council, vulnerable to accusations of Western chauvinism. The one attempt at flexibility saw Russia join the briefly renamed G8 in 1997, only to be expelled in 2014 following Moscow’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

This week’s G7 is summed up by the premature departure of the Americans, leaving six hosts to welcome other leaders. The question is whether a distracted and weakened United States is needed to hold the group together – and, if not, how will the remaining members reshape the alliance?

The world isn’t short of global, regional and ideological groups, linking countries based on everything from a shared language (the Francophonie), a shared colonial heritage (the Commonwealth), to the desire of the BRICS countries to confront US (and democratic) global dominance. The G7 is one of very few united by a vague ideology that sums up most of the good ideas that made the world better since 1945. Rather than demonstrating inclusivity, by inviting murderers and tyrants to join the club, it’s time for a weakened West to redefine what made our societies work so well, to reform and strengthen those foundations, and then look outward. It's time to apply standards to our own democracy, and to those we trade with and trust – and the Canadian Future Party is here to provide our ideas on what those standards, what that trust, could look like.

Prime Minister Carney deserves credit for running a calm meeting in the middle of a global storm. He has yet to show he’s ready to embrace the real challenge of this moment in history: to define and defend modern democracy, and to turn every group Canada is part of, every alliance, into a fortress from which to push back against the forces of populism and ignorance that threaten to swamp the world. There were no signs of that, this week in Alberta, but at least things didn’t get worse. For now, I’ll take that as a win!