There is value in talking face-to-face

But old habits die hard, especially when you are Canada and you are worried the coolest kids might ditch you to spend time with the new scenesters.

We were scheduled to host the G7 in 2010, and former prime minister Stephen Harper decided to use the opportunity to prove to Canadians that Canada still mattered. Instead of letting the G7 fade away, the late Jim Flaherty, who was finance minister, cajoled his colleagues to join him in Iqaluit in February to compare notes on the crisis, which was at an acute phase in Europe by then. Harper held a summit in Muskoka in June, which he used as an excuse to host an ad hoc G20 summit in Toronto immediately after.

The G7 ended up deciding to keep the band together. They found the G20 frustrating, as it takes a long time to get around a table that large. Putting rivals such as the U.S. and China in the same room created trust issues. So the G7 found new life as a place for the postwar powers to vent about upstarts such as China and Russia.

And just like Harper, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is using his chairmanship to demonstrate to Canadians that Canada matters. You can decide that for yourself whether that’s true when Trudeau hosts President Donald Trump and the rest of the gang at the Manoir Richelieu in Quebec’s Charlevoix region in a few months.

Between now and then, various sets of ministers will meet to discuss security issues (Toronto, April 22-24) and “growth that works for everyone” (Whistler, May 31-June 2).

The Montreal meeting of innovation and labour ministers was the first of Canada’s G7 presidency. Predictably, it concluded with little worth noting. Employment Minister Patty Hajdu announced the creation of 500 paid work placements at tech firms working on Artificial Intelligence. Together, the labour ministers said they formed a task force to study the shift to contract work and other issues. The industry ministers pledged to keep talking about the broader implications of AI and how older, developed countries can keep pace with China in the race to dominate technology. “We need to be more nimble,” Innovation Minister Navdeep Bains said at a press conference.

Your assessment of whether these meagre results justify the time and expense of hosting these meetings will depend on whether you think relationships matter, and perhaps whether you think the world’s most important countries should be trying harder to get along.

The G7’s selfish decision hurt the G20 by creating the impression that the colonial powers weren’t really willing to let go of the wheel. Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa started their own group, going so far as to set up a bank with a mandate to back investments in each of the five countries. The G20 now is another arena for the legacy and emerging powers to bicker, just like they do at the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund. It’s little wonder the G20 failed to convince China to stop producing so much steel, setting the stage for Trump to take matters into his own hands this month, risking a trade war.

Still, there is value in talking face-to-face. The countries of the G7 are facing similar problems and an exchange between peers spark an idea that one country hadn’t considered, or kill a notion that flopped elsewhere.

Hajdu said she had a useful conversation with her U.S. counterpart on upgrading the skills of trades workers. Let’s hope the employment minister learned something, because the Americans are much better at pairing vocational schools and employers than we are.

Big announcements are easier to write about, but their absence from the final press release isn’t necessarily a sign of failure.