Reaching Canada’s G7 summit
As leaders come together in Charlevoix, Quebec, OpenCanada’s Catherine Tsalikis takes a look at the world’s most intimate summit, with views from those who’ve had a seat at the table.
Later this week, leaders from the world’s most powerful democracies will meet in the scenic region of Charlevoix, Quebec, set between the St. Lawrence River and the Laurentian Mountains, for the forty-fourth annual Group of Seven (G7) summit.
Charlevoix is spectacularly beautiful — its most celebrated summer resident, former US President William Taft, famously said its air “intoxicates like champagne.” A New York Times travel column describedit as the author’s “childhood imaginings of heaven.”
In that idyllic setting, on June 8 and 9, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will host his counterparts from the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Japan, along with the presidents of the European Council and the European Commission, at the Fairmont Le Manoir Richelieu. Located on a cliff overlooking the river, a 140 km drive from where the world’s media and civil society representatives will be gathered in Quebec City, the hotel has been chosen to provide leaders with as much of a “retreat” atmosphere as possible, where they will be free to move around and discuss the most pressing economic and political issues of the day.
Madeline Koch, the executive director of the G7 Research Group at the University of Toronto, has attended every G7 or G8 summit since 1999 (the group was known as the G8 — Group of Eight — from the time Russia was admitted in 1998 to when it was suspended in 2014). Koch says it is a “Canadian tradition” to host summits in a remote location; at the 2002 summit in Kananaskis, Alberta, she recalls, then Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s direction to his summit management team was to never have a security person in a leader’s line of vision. For protestors, journalists or any other non-official delegates trying to get access, a secluded site is obviously not ideal. But for the leaders themselves, this set-up is invaluable.
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