As Carney visits White House, Trump hasn’t committed to upcoming G7 in Canada

By Kevin Liptak, Kristen Holmes and Paula Newton, CNN

(CNN) — When President Donald Trump welcomes his new Canadian counterpart to the White House on Tuesday, among the questions looming over their Oval Office encounter will be whether Trump will agree to attend a major summit Prime Minister Mark Carney is hosting next month in Alberta.

Trump and his aides have not made a final decision on attending the Group of 7 meeting in Kananaskis scheduled for mid-June, according to three US officials familiar with the matter. American presidents have long attended the yearly conference of the advanced economies, and skipping it would amount to a major step away from the alliance system Trump has openly disregarded since taking office.

For Carney, Tuesday’s high-stakes meeting will provide a chance to discuss the G7 along with a host of cross-border issues that have caused US-Canada ties to collapse since Trump took office.

“Canada has never taken for granted the fact that President Trump would attend the G7,” a Canadian government official told CNN ahead of the meeting, adding a successful G7 summit with all members in attendance remains a priority for Canada. Tuesday’s meeting at the White House, Canadian officials believe, will be the strongest indicator of whether Trump is likely to attend.

Trump’s ongoing trade war and threats to Canada’s sovereignty played major roles in the national election that propelled Carney’s Liberal Party to victory last month.

The new prime minister has said the new Trump era amounts to an end to the old relationship between the neighboring countries. He’s called for a reassessment of trade and security ties amid the threats from the White House.

Carney’s invitation to King Charles III, Canada’s head of state, later this month has also been viewed as strategic pushback against Trump’s territorial aspirations. In announcing the plans, Carney said the king’s visit “clearly underscores the sovereignty of our country.”

Still, for all of his forceful pushback against Trump during this year’s campaign, Carney appears on better footing with Trump than his predecessor Justin Trudeau, whom Trump mocked as “Governor Trudeau” in a nod to his ambitions to make Canada the 51st state.

Trump still talks about taking over the United States’ northern neighbor but has dropped the moniker when referring to the country’s new leader. He told NBC’s “Meet the Press” in an interview that aired over the weekend he couldn’t foresee using military force to take Canada, but that if it became a state it would be “cherished.”

And he has been on the hunt for new trade deals as he looks to shift his messaging beyond the tariffs to major economic wins.

Speaking a day ahead of Carney’s visit, Trump was vague about what precisely he hoped to discuss.

“He’s coming to see me. I’m not sure what he wants to see me about, but I guess he wants to make a deal,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office.

Indeed, trade is poised to assume an outsized role in the talks after Trump imposed a series of tariffs on Canadian exports, including steel, aluminum and auto parts.

Canada is approaching the encounter cautiously, not setting any expectation except to have a good meeting that can improve relations between allies, officials from the country said. They acknowledged that as the visitors to the White House, they were not in a position to set the meeting’s agenda, though they said trade and security issues were likely to be discussed.

While Canadian officials expect to remind Trump that he negotiated and signed the US-Mexico-Canada trade agreement during his first term – and that he is breaking a deal he committed to by imposing new tariffs on national security grounds – they don’t expect major breakthroughs on the tariffs.

“I’m not pretending those discussions will be easy,” Carney said last week when he announced the trip to visit Trump. “There will be zigs and zags, ups and downs.”

Should Trump decide to skip next month’s G7, it would undoubtedly be a down.

Carney, as previous summit hosts have done since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, hopes to use the gathering in part to coordinate a unified response to the conflict, Canadian officials say. He has invited Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a potential cause of irritation for Trump, who has clashed with Zelensky in the past, although they had a more amicable meeting in Rome last month.

Canadian officials dispute that Carney’s invitation to Zelensky was a risk.

“We don’t see why this would be a deal breaker for the president; it’s a balancing act and we are committed to discussing key issues at the G7,” one official said.

While Trump’s team has begun taking preliminary steps to prepare for his possible attendance at the gathering, including sending an advance team to scout the location, US officials said this week he had not decided whether to go. During his first term, Trump repeatedly questioned in private why he needed to travel to G7 summits at all, believing them a waste of his time.

Now, one US official told CNN that Trump was more eager to ramp up his domestic travel in the coming weeks, as opposed to a focus on international trips. He’ll go abroad next week with visits to Saudi Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates. Officials also said there had not yet been a decision on whether Trump would attend the NATO summit at the Hague in June, although he discussed the summit with Secretary General Mark Rutte when he visited the White House last month.

The last G7 hosted by Canada ended in disarray when Trump withdrew his signature from a final communiqué and lashed out at then-Prime Minister Trudeau as he left early on Air Force One. That summit, held in 2018, became famous for a photograph of world leaders looming over Trump as he sat cross-armed with a smirk.

Trump doubted whether it was really necessary to attend the next year’s G7, held on the French Atlantic coast in Biarritz. When he arrived, he argued with world leaders at a dinner underneath the lighthouse over his desire to re-admit Russia to the group.

This year, as Trump imposes new tariffs and again floats the prospect of allowing Moscow back in, the G7 summit could again prove contentious.

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