President Donald Trump will attend a summit of Group of Seven leaders in Canada next month, the White House said on Thursday, despite tensions over his calls for the neighboring nation to become the 51st US state.
“President Trump will travel to the G7 leaders’ summit in Canada from June 15 through the 17th,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters at a daily briefing.
Relations between Washington and Ottawa have been strained by Trump’s repeated statements urging Canada to join the United States and his sweeping tariffs against the country.
But ties improved after newly elected Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Trump at the White House earlier this month following his victory in Canada’s general election in April.
Carney told Trump in a sometimes tense Oval Office encounter that Canada was “never for sale”, but both leaders hailed the talks afterwards as having made progress.
A day earlier, finance leaders from the G7 democracies sought to downplay disputes over Trump’s tariffs and find some common ground to keep the forum viable as they met in the Canadian Rocky Mountains.
G7 finance ministers put a positive spin on discussions in Banff, Alberta, to try to reach an agreement on a joint communique largely covering non-tariff issues. The discussions included support for Ukraine, the threat from non-market economic policies of countries, including China, and combating financial crimes and drug trafficking.
“I had a very productive day,” US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told reporters when asked about his bilateral meetings as he departed the venue for a mountaintop dinner with fellow G7 ministers and central bank governors.
The finance leaders were striving to avoid a repeat of a fractured G7 finance meeting hosted by Canada in 2018, when Trump’s first-term steel and aluminium tariffs made a joint statement impossible.
That meeting, described as the “G6 plus one,” ended with Canada, Japan, Germany, France, Britain and Italy expressing “unanimous concern and disappointment” over Trump’s tariffs.
Trump’s tariffs are far more extensive this time, but G7 sources said there was an effort to find a compromise with Bessent.
“There’s been a marked improvement in the mood,” a spokesperson for French Finance Minister Eric Lombard said after Lombard’s bilateral meeting with Bessent. “We had sincere and honest discussion between allies.”
Earlier, Lombard said that he was willing to live without a joint statement as long as the G7 reached a better understanding on how to reduce trade imbalances, better growth policies and the war in Ukraine.
“And making progress is what matters ultimately. It’s not just a question of agreeing on a statement today for the sake of it,” Lombard said.
But Italian Economy and Finance Minister Giancarlo Giorgetti took a different tack, saying on X that reaching a communique compromise was “a step we consider crucial.”
