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Analytical Studies > Analysis on the 2025 Kananaskis Summit
G7 Summits > 2025 Kananaskis Summit > Road to the 2025 Kananaskis Summit

The Kananaskis Summit’s Priorities, Prospects and Propellors

John Kirton, G7 Research Group
June 15, 2025

Introduction

What are priorities, prospects and propellors for the Kananaskis Summit’s performance?

There are ten priorities, across a wide array of fields. Seven come from Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney as the summit host and three have been thrust upon it by US president Donald Trump.

The prospects are that the Kananaskis Summit will produce a significant performance on them overall.

It will be propelled by the members’ very strong shock-activated vulnerability, multilateral organizations’ failure in response, G7 members globally predominant and internally equalizing capabilities, their core common principles, their leaders’ adequate domestic political support, and, above all, the value they place on their G7 club at the hub of a growing network of global summit governance (see Appendix A.

Priorities

First, the summit’s 10 priorities.

The first priority set by Prime Minister Carney, under the theme of “protecting our communities and the world,” is strengthening peace and security. This starts with supporting Ukraine, sanctioning Russia for its aggression against this embattled, resilient European democracy and creating a just and lasting peace there. It extends to the conflicts in the Middle East, including now Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, East Asia and, Canada hopes, Haiti, Venezuela, Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo. It includes criminals trafficking people and weapons, selling drugs and stealing cars in G7 members at home

The second priority is countering foreign interference and transnational repression, to protect citizens’ rights and their state’s sovereignty. The emphasis could be on transnational repression, foreign interference in diaspora communities, and against human rights activists and journalists, in a country-agnostic way.

The third priority is “improving joint responses to wildfires,” through multilateral efforts to prevent, fight and recover from them. It could include improving equipment interoperability, sharing satellite imagery, helping developing countries access, interpret and manage it, using artificial intelligence there, and mobilizing international organizations to act in a standardized way.

The fourth priority is building energy security, by “fortifying critical mineral supply chains,” which are needed to produce clean energy in the G7 and beyond, especially to feed the voracious appetite of artificial intelligence. This could start by setting labour, environmental and transparency standards, perhaps supported by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development or International Energy Agency, improving and diversifying technology for extraction and processing, and supporting developing countries to rise up the value chain.

The fifth priority is “accelerating the digital transition … to unleash economic growth,” by fostering AI adoption across public and private sectors, in small and medium-sized enterprises, and in the Global South, while creating better grids and cleaner energy to do so. This includes developing quantum technology to grow economies and solve global challenges, by setting high-level principles for its development and use.

The sixth priority is “securing the partnerships of the future,” by catalysing enormous private investment in stronger infrastructure, “higher-paying jobs, and opening dynamic markets.” This includes establishing principles and supporting platforms for private capital mobilization, as well as following up the G7’s Partnership for Growth in Infrastructure Investment, using multilateral and regional development banks.

A seventh priority is “building coalitions with reliable partners.” This starts with the strongest democracies in the Global North and Global South and includes cooperation with the G20 as a whole, as Canada is doing with South Africa’s G20 presidency on wildfires, disasters, critical minerals and private capital mobilization for infrastructure investment.

Three other priorities have been thrust upon the summit by Donald Trump.

The first is the tariff and trade war.

The second is migration. Here Canada seeks to have the G7 reduce illegal flows, especially from migrant smuggling, and support the lawful, humanitarian, economically beneficial movement of people.

The third is the financial fragility from fiscal policy, as all member governments’ cancerous annual deficits and accumulated debts relentlessly rise. Moody’s just ended America’s triple A credit rating for the first time in over a century. While Trump’s self-proclaimed “big beautiful bill” and tariff wars were the trigger, all G7 members have long loaded the revolver with bullets to kill their prospects of ever producing balanced budgets of their own at home.

Prospects

What are the prospects that G7 leaders will agree and act on them?

The prospects are, of course, unprecedentedly unpredictable, due to Donald Trump.

But they are still promising, for the Kananaskis Summit will probably produce a significant performance.

All leaders will attend, participate in most sessions, and contribute constructively on the issues most dear to their hearts and that they seek to lead.

They will produce several communiqués, most of them on specific priority subjects, and some including all eight members and their nine leaders. There could be separate documents on Canada’s six signature initiatives of transnational repression, wildfires, critical minerals, AI, quantum, and private capital mobilization, and even on other subjects.

They and Carney’s desired short, crisp, concluding chair’s statement will contain many commitments, on which all leaders agree.

The easiest ones to secure, where Donald Trump can credibly claim he led and won, are many.

1. First, fiscal stimulus through tax cuts and more spending on defence.

2. Second, fighting the drug trade and the cartels and criminals that conduct it, for fentanyl, opioids, heroin, cocaine, and more.

3. Third, raising defence spending, as a share of gross domestic product, to the long-agreed NATO target of 2%, then toward 5%, including the infrastructure in the tail that the tooth up front needs to deliver its deadly bite.

4. Fourth, controlling AI and the internet to take down the child pornography that kills kids and sustains crime.

5. Fifth, clamping down on illegal migration, by criminals, who kill innocent citizens in G7 countries.

6. Sixth, confronting China, through a collective strategy covering security, the economy, trade and investment, transnational repression and foreign interference, and health.

Propellers of Performance

This significant performance with by propelled by six forces, which will largely stay steady for the next ten days.

The first is unprecedentedly strong shock-activated vulnerability. This now includes the wildfires burning across much of Canada, devastating homes and livelihoods, and sending unhealthy smoke across the United States, and the Atlantic to the United Kingdom and Europe on the other side.

The second is equally strong multilateral organizational failure to control these shocks

The third the significant predominant and equalizing capability of G7 members, to fill the gap together by themselves

The fourth is the still solid common principles and practices of G7 members, despite the unprecedented divergence of Donald Trump. They are still all open democracies, whose people are devoted to democracy and to countering the shocks to it from abroad and home.

The fifth is the leaders’ substantial domestic political support and control of their legislatures to implement at home the commitments they make abroad. While G7 leaders’ domestic political approval averages only 35%, Mark Carney as host has 53%, followed by Donald Trump at 46%, Giorgia Meloni 43%, Keir Starmer 26%, Shigeru Ishiba 19% and Emmanuel Macron 19% (see Appendix B).

The sixth is the G7’s unique position as its leaders’ cherished club, at the hub, of a growing network of global summit governance. Kananaskis will provide the trajectory and thrust for the summits coming shorty after, of NATO in the Hague a week later, the BRICS in Brazil in July, the United Nations climate summit in Belém, Brazil, in early November, and the G20 in Johannesburg on November 22–23.

G7 summits uniquely have a perfect attendance record, as all G7 leaders have always come to every annual one for the past half century.

Donald Trump came to every one during his first four years as president, even after his post-summit dissatisfaction with the media pictures from Charlevoix in 2018.

Kananaskis is his first outing on the full world stage during his second term. It sits right beside his MAGA base in the USA.

He is bound to be the centre of attention for all the audience, which he craves above all else.

And he will claim that he caused all the big wins at Kananaskis. So, he must produce some of them, to make his claims credible to the world.

Above all, in 2027 he is due to design, host and chair the G7 summit in the United States, probably at a golf course or residential resort of his choice. It will be his last chance to do so, before he dies. So, he will not want to kill his G7 golden goose at Kananaskis, before he can produce a bigger, better and the best summit ever a short two years from now.

Appendix A: G7 Summit Performance, 1975–2024 ↩

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Updated: Brittaney Warren, October 14, 2023, John Kirton, June 17, 2024.

• Notes: n/a = not available.
• Grade: Kirton scale is A+ Extremely Strong, Striking, Standout, Historic; A Very Strong; A− Strong; B+ Significant; B Substantial; B− Solid; C Small; D Very Small; F Failure (including made things worse).
• Domestic political management: # communiqué compliments = the number of favourable references to G7/G8 members by name. Spread = number of G7/G8 members complimented.
• Deliberation: # days = the duration of the summit; # statements = number of official statements issued in the leaders’ name; # words = number of words contained in the official statements.
• Direction setting: # affirmations of G7/G8 core values of open democracy, individual liberty and human rights contained in official documents.
• Decision making: # commitments contained in the official documents.
• Delivery: Compliance: compliance with selected commitments assessed as follows: 1975–1989 assessed elsewhere by George von Furstenberg and Joseph Daniels; 1990–1995 assessed elsewhere by Ella Kokotsis; 1996– assessed by the G7 Research Group. # commitments: number of commitments assessed.
• Development of global governance: # ministerials created = number of institutions at the ministerial level created; # official-level groups created = number of institutions at the officials-level created. Institutions created at or by the summit, or during the hosting year, at least in the form of having one meeting take place.
• Participation: # members = number of leaders of full members, including those representing the European Community from the start; Russia started as a participant in 1991 and became a full member in 1998 until its last participation in 2013; the G4 met in 1974 without Japan and Italy and later that year the G6 (without Canada) met. participating countries = number of full members plus number of leaders from other countries. # participating international organizations = number of heads of international organizations.

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Appendix B: G7 Leaders’ Domestic Political Approval ↩

Source: World of Statistics, June 8, 2025, from Morning Consult Political Intelligence, WICOM and Gallup.

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