BANFF, Canada – President Donald Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will face off on Monday during the 2025 Group of Seven leaders summit in Canada, with their second meeting carrying higher stakes than their first.
Months after mocking former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as governor of the 51st U.S. state and relishing in the negotiating pressure caused by his tariffs, Trump and Trudeau’s successor will convene on Carney’s home turf.
“Mr. Carney needs to be careful about bending the knee,” Jeremy Ghio, a senior director at Montreal-based public affairs firm TACT and a Canadian political analyst, told the Washington Examiner. “He needs to find this balance between flattering Mr. Trump and not giving him an inch, and especially in terms of Canadian sovereignty.”
Although Canada is in a “better position” with the U.S. than under Trudeau, “nobody is safe” from Trump’s “temperament,” according to the former Trudeau government official.
Carney held his own during the first meeting at the White House in May by asking Trump not to call Canada the 51st state while also pleasing Trump enough for the president to call him a “step up for Canada.”
As host of the G7, Carney now has a tougher task of not only making progress on his relationship with Trump on issues such as trade, but also making sure Trump gets along with everyone else, too.
Carney is hoping to avoid the optics of the last G7 summit hosted by Canada. That 2018 Charlevoix meeting is remembered for being the one during which Trump was photographed with his arms crossed across from former German Chancellor Angela Merkel before he decided to unendorse the leaders’ communique. Trump’s decision was prompted by Trudeau promising during his post-summit press conference to retaliate against the president’s tariffs. That communique was the first in G7 history not to be endorsed by all leaders at a summit.
Josh Lipsky, international economics chairman at the Atlantic Council, argued that the “best-case scenario” for Carney “is that there’s no real blow ups coming out of the back end.”
“They don’t want this feeling of it’s a G6 plus one, and that image that came out of the 2018 G7 summit is in everyone’s mind and everyone wants to avoid it,” Lipsky told reporters in a pre-summit briefing. “Carney has been through enough of these ministerials as a central banker to know that you don’t want to get too hung up on the fact that there’s a communique or not, but that’s what I see as a positive outcome: a continuation of the G7, not a breakup of the G7 and what you need from that is at least a productive weekend where everyone has conversations.”
For Caitlin Welsh, who was part of Trump’s White House National Security Council and National Economic Council before becoming a director at the CSIS, the 2018 summit has cast a “long shadow” over its 2025 counterpart. That includes the knowledge that the president firmly believes that “no deal is better than a bad deal,” and that consensus at a G7 should “not be taken for granted.”
“If it [Canada] wants a unified outcome of this year’s G7 leaders’ summit, then it should stick close to traditional G7 values while avoiding controversial topics,” Welsh told reporters during a CSIS pre-meeting briefing.
That means staying away from climate change and gender issues, and “promoting very little that the Trump administration would find reason to oppose,” Welsh suggested.
Canada’s economy is also at stake. Canadians are concerned that Trump will continue to weaponize tariffs against them as he did early during his second administration, particularly with auto and lumber industry duties. And that is before the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, which Trump negotiated during his first administration, will be reviewed next year.
The G7 summit will be a “high-wire act” for Carney, according to Navin Girishankar, president of the Economic Security and Technology Department at CSIS.
That is because Carney is trying to “sidestep the multi-front trade war and refocus on shared priorities such as supply chains, [artificial intelligence] and quantum, and fighting financial crimes,” Girishankar told the Washington Examiner.
“A recently announced U.S.–China detente and anticipated U.S.-Japan deal provide precedents for the U.S. and Canada to de-escalate their trade tensions — reducing tariffs and counter-tariffs in exchange for purchase and investment agreements, as well as increased defense spending,” he said. “While a detente between North American neighbors will be too tall an order [this] week, bilateral discussions on an off-ramp would send a strong signal to North American supply chain partners, investors, and workers.”
In an interview with the Washington Examiner, Lipsky underscored how Canada has received some tariff relief under Trump’s exemptions, especially with USMCA-compliant products, but that the residual steel, aluminum, and auto duties are “still a factor.”
“The most important thing to understand about trade with Canada, and Mexico, and the U.S. is how deeply integrated it is, and most goods like car parts flow across the border 15, 20, 25 times for one car,” Lipsky said. “It’s important to think about it as, like, an integrated North American market. And so that’s why these tariffs have been so painful and concerning both for the Mexicans and the Canadians.”
But regardless of what is at stake for Canada, Ghio, the Canadian political analyst, contends the stakes are also high for the U.S.
“Entrepreneurs in Canada are looking towards new markets – Europe, France, Asia, even India,” he said. “There’s a real appetite in Canada to reduce the interdependence with the United States and to look and do business elsewhere. We were used to seeing business thrive north and south. Now Canadians are looking east and west.”
Canadian Trump supporter Derek Noonan, whom the Washington Examiner met earlier this year at the president’s pre-inauguration rally at Capital One Arena, agreed with Ghio that tariffs would be a focal point of the G7 summit.
But Noonan, a Toronto businessman, criticized Canada’s news media for undercovering how the government has permitted “China to dump steel into our market for years, hence the tariffs.”
Meanwhile, Noonan, who disagreed with Trump involving himself in Canada’s elections, which arguably resulted in Carney and the Canadian Liberal Party’s resounding victory, welcomed the prospect of his country becoming the U.S.’s 51st state.
“Canada’s only viable future rests with being the 51st state, provided we keep our cultural heritage and traditions, as well as our treaties with First Nations,” the 59-year-old said. “Debt levels, negative growth, and faulting [gross domestic product], coupled with out-of-control corruption, spending, and [Chinese Communist Party] influence, our country risks collapse in the near future. The average Canadian is paying 55 to 64 cents in taxes on every dollar, yet the country still goes deeper and deeper in debt. Yes, 51st [state] please.”
Tensions between the U.S. and Canada reached fever-pitch earlier this year when Trump’s approach to Trudeau and tariff policy coincided with the 4 Nations Face-Off, an ice hockey tournament between Canada, Finland, Sweden, and the U.S. during which American and Canadian fans were unsportsmanlike, even hostile, toward one another.
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But as protesters gather in Canada’s Alberta region, ranging from host town Kananaskis to Calgary and Banff, the Heritage Foundation’s Nile Gardiner declined to advise Trump to soften his 51st state talk.
“He’s not going to change his messaging from what he says in the White House to what he says at a summit,” Gardiner, the director of the Margaret Thatcher Center for Freedom, told the Washington Examiner. “Trump is a politician who will say the same thing at home as he does abroad.”