With our Policy summer reading issue falling between the Hiroshima G7 in May and the Delhi G20 in September, we’ve asked Senator Peter Boehm, who chairs the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade and served as sherpa for six G7s, for a status report on both groups.

Peter M. Boehm

With all the talk about the commitment — or lack thereof — of various countries to “the rules-based international order” as defined in the United Nations Charter as well as those of the postwar International Financial Institutions (IFIs), the persistence and activities of less formal international political groupings in shaping the global agenda deserves continued attention. I refer, of course, to international summitry, and in particular as it is practised through the G7 and G20 groupings. Unlike the UN or the IFIs, neither association has a permanent secretariat or a governance charter, nor do they feature member voting. Decisions are taken by consensus, albeit with some exceptions. Instead, the country that holds the “presidency” organizes and chairs policy, planning and ministerial meetings that set a path toward a leaders’ summit. These entities have evolved in different ways, yet despite — or because of — pandemics, global economic crises and wars, they continue to bring leaders and decision makers together. In fact, in 2025 Canada will have the G7 presidency and host the 50th summit.

Notwithstanding recent geopolitical ructions involving China and Russia’s stated designs on replacing that rules-based international order via both covert and kinetic aggression, both groups appear to be in fine shape. To make a generational reference, assessing the G20 and the G7 is not a Beatles vs Stones comparison. While both groups have their individual (and overlapping) memberships, styles, functions and fans, their issue sets and approaches to global problems have tended to be different. Of interest too, especially outside our country, is the perception that Canada has been an engaged, committed member of both in functional terms, regardless of who our prime minister was at the time. Within Canada, our punditry often succumbs to the “we are not worthy” perspective, arguably a Canadian trait. The bottom line is that summits, related ministerial meetings, working groups and related structures would simply fall into desuetude were government leaders to question their usefulness. So, they persist.

The G7 was born out of the OPEC oil crisis of the early 1970s, with Canada joining the group in its second year, 1976, and the European Union the following year. The G20, in part an initiative of former Prime Minister Paul Martin, who worked hard to establish a finance ministers’ group of 20 in 1999 to facilitate better North/South global economic coordination including through the IFIs, has been around in summit form since 2008 and had its early baptism with the sovereign debt crisis of that year. Canada has chaired the G7 process six times and has hosted as many summits. Of course, the G7 was also the G8 from 1997 to 2014 until Russia’s seizure of Ukraine’s Crimea and incursion into the Donbas changed the arithmetic. Former Prime Minister Stephen Harper chaired both the G8 and G20 summits in 2010, with the latter in Toronto garnering more attention for violent demonstrations on the streets rather than the content of leaders’ discussions.

Its consensus- and values-based approach has allowed the G7 to influence formal international institutions and to establish related initiatives. Examples include the Financial Action Task Force (1989), the Chernobyl Shelter Fund (1997), active endorsement of the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria (2001), an anti-terrorism working group following 9/11, the L’Aquila Global Food Security Initiative (2009), active support for the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (2015) and the Pandemic Emergency Financing Facility (2016; originally designed to deal with the devastating Ebola outbreak in West Africa). This served as a precursor to the work on the Access to COVID-19 Tools Accelerator. Host leaders have pursued their own initiatives as chairs of the G7 process, the Canadians being no exception. Jean Chrétien placed a great emphasis on Africa at the Kananaskis Summit in 2002, Stephen Harper on maternal, newborn and child health at Muskoka in 2010, and Justin Trudeau on gender equality, ocean plastics and economies of the future at Charlevoix in 2018. Such initiatives invariably required funding and this is where both the G7 countries as donors and the IFIs came into the picture.

His political longevity as prime minister allowed Jean Chrétien to host two G7 summits, the first in Halifax in 1995. I recall very well travelling to Moscow early that year with then deputy minister of foreign affairs and G7 sherpa”, Gordon Smith, to assess Russian interest in our process; the result was the participation of President Boris Yeltsin in a foreign policy dinner discussion with leaders at the summit itself. Within two years the G7 would become the G8. The collective G7 view was that by bringing Russia into the club there would be more dialogue, better economic development for Russia and reduced geopolitical security tension in Europe. As Prime Minister Harper’s sherpa, I attended a meeting in Moscow in early 2014 that was meant to prepare for the G8 summit in Sochi in June. That all ended when Russia invaded Ukraine shortly afterwards, with all of us deciding to boycott the process, not attend the summit and Russia declaring the G20 a better forum in which to further its interests. Even in retrospect, I continue to believe that our intentions over those years were noble, but were thwarted by the rapacity of the Russian oligarchs (and the West’s willingness to embrace that style of capitalism) that only added to Vladimir Putin’s cynical, and brutally revisionist objectives.

What distinguishes the G7 from the G20 is its informality, both at the round table and when leaders meet bilaterally. While sherpas and others undoubtedly prepare the agenda in consultation with their leaders, invariably the participants can put down their notes and engage in an informal discussion, away from the pressures of having to deliver speeches to large audiences in whichever forum they are participating. Leaders relish this, and this is in itself another reason why the group is not about to fade away any time soon. Having served as sherpa at three G7 summits each, for both prime ministers Harper and Trudeau, I know that both leaders appreciated this type of engagement.  Two occasions that stood out for me in very different ways were the discussion on Asian security at the 2016 Ise Shima summit in Japan (Trudeau’s first, he has now gone full circle and is the only leader left standing from that group) and the discussion on climate change at the Taormina summit in Italy the following year. The first G7 summit for President Donald Trump, that session reminded me of an episode of “The Apprentice” where Trump, in listening and judging mode, encouraged leaders to convince him of the virtues of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. It was wide-ranging with Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron and Justin Trudeau all making persuasive arguments. But to no avail. They were all fired. The president pulled the United States out of the agreement after the summit.

Assessing the G20 and the G7 is not a Beatles vs Stones comparison. While both groups have their individual (and overlapping) memberships, styles, functions and fans, their issue sets and approaches to global problems have tended to be different.

The G20 culminates in a larger summit with many more participants, including foreign and finance ministers as well as central bank governors and heads of international organizations, the latter also usually attending a portion of the G7 summit. The table is large, the leaders’ speeches pro forma and there is much emphasis on bilateral meetings, planned —sometimes unplanned— “bump-intos” and “brush-bys” (you don’t have to be a practitioner to appreciate these esoteric terms of diplomatic art). The focus is on the global economy, on international development financing and trade. But important decisions can be taken. Examples include the establishment of the “Montreal Consensus on Globalization”, where finance ministers and central bankers agreed to link global economic issues with social policy issues, the International Monetary Fund quota reforms of 2008 and the creation of the Financial Stability Board in 2009 to ward off extreme global economic downturns. More recently, the G20 agreed to inject $5 trillion of liquidity into the global economy at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020. Last year, at its summit in Bali, the G20 moved into the geopolitical arena with a leaders’ declaration that admonished Russia for its invasion of Ukraine, citing some of the language of UN General Assembly resolutions.

The clear advantage of the G20 is the presence of China and Russia, who are also involved in the ministerial and sherpa tracks where they can make their own contributions, by either supporting, attempting to create or diluting consensus. But unless there is a clear decision on a global economic initiative to respond to a crisis, G20 documents often represent a very low common denominator in collective will. Nonetheless, preparations for this September’s G20 summit in New Delhi feature work on anti-corruption, the digital economy, disaster risk reduction, environment and climate and interestingly, NFTs, artificial intelligence and the metaverse. Discussions on AI, more in the context of the impact on workers, were first featured at Charlevoix in 2018.

There are crossovers between the G7 and G20. The G7 summits invariably begin with a discussion of the global economy, usually led off by the US president, and, as reflected in the summit communiqué, the G7 leaders go forward into the G20 discussions with a fairly united position. In what is known as the outreach component of summits, other leaders and the heads of international institutions are often invited to participate on the second day of the summit to discuss particular issues. For example, a dozen additional leaders were invited to Charlevoix in 2018 for a discussion on climate change and oceans, which led to further work in the UN and beyond on this pertinent issue. Japan followed suit at Hiroshima this year in inviting a number of other leaders, including Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who will chair the G20 summit in September. Civil society engagement groups, including those representing the private sector, organized labour, women, scientists and youth feed into both the G7 and G20 preparatory processes. A plethora of government working groups feed the agendas of both bodies and are usually populated by the same experts. Innovation of format can take place: during its G7 presidency in 2018, Canada chose to have overlapping ministerial meetings of foreign/defence, innovation/labour, environment/energy, finance/development ministers to reflect intersecting policy interests. There is a verisimilitude in legacy of summit presidencies and agendas, with continuity and adjustments being made to respond to events or crises, as was the case with the war in Ukraine for both Germany and Japan during their presidencies over the past two years.

Brinksmanship and disruption can also be factors. I recall Vladimir Putin monopolizing the foreign policy discussion at the last G8 summit at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in 2013 by extolling the virtues of Bashar al-Assad of Syria, which prompted Barack Obama to say that this was a waste of time. At Charlevoix, a clearly unprepared Donald Trump told the other leaders that he strongly believed Putin should be at the table, countenanced an absurd debate by his team on “the rules-based international order” (captured in the famous photo) and in a moment of pique seemingly directed at his host, attempted to disassociate himself and his government from the final communique which had already been issued. The fallout continued into the French G7 presidency following ours in 2019 (imposing steel and aluminum tariffs on US allies didn’t help) and into the American presidency in 2020 where the pandemic and political turmoil in Washington obviated having a summit at all. But by and large, differences are smoothed over in both the G7 and G20 contexts.

Having been at the G7 summit in Hiroshima, hosting the G20 summit in September, with his participation at the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) summit in South Africa in between, Modi will have an opportunity to play the role of conciliator/mediator whether or not Putin attends either event. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Samarkand last year, Modi told Putin publicly that “today’s era must not be one of war”. Perhaps he can press him some more. So too, the newly re-elected Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Türkiye can continue to promote food security for the global south with guaranteed movement of grains through the Black Sea. Erdoğan could also proffer the gift of dropping his opposition to Swedish membership in NATO at the organization’s summit in Vilnius in July. As with all the global turbulence over the past two years, the next few months should keep summit aficionados and foreign policy wonks very engaged. 

Senator Peter M. Boehm, a regular contributor to Policy magazine, is a former senior diplomat and current chair of the Standing Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade. He served as Canada’s Sherpa for six G7 summits.