Carney leaves G7 without bilateral meeting with Trump as trade talks stall

Mark Carney left the G7 summit without a formal one-on-one meeting with Donald Trump, a small piece of summit choreography that carried outsized weight for the Canada-U.S. relationship. With trade talks still stuck and the North American trade framework facing an uncertain future, the missing bilateral highlighted how much of the agenda now rests on tariffs, supply chains and security coordination rather than ceremonial diplomacy.

Carney pushed back on the idea that the absence signaled a break. “I wouldn’t take a big message from that,” he said, adding that he had “seven or eight discussions” with Trump over the previous 36 hours and expected more talks that day. Those conversations, Carney said, covered the economy, relations, Trump’s birthday, artificial intelligence, Ukraine and Iran, a broad list that suggested the relationship remained active even without a staged meeting in the G7 format.

The summit in Évian-les-Bains, France, which ran from June 15 to 17, came at a delicate moment for Canada, the United States and Mexico. The latest version of their trade framework has bound the three economies together since the early 1990s, but the deal is now under pressure as tariff negotiations stall and the future of the agreement becomes less certain. Trump had scheduled bilateral meetings with French President Emmanuel Macron and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but not with Carney, even though Canadian leaders have typically secured a bilateral meeting with a U.S. president at G7 summits.

That omission landed against a tense political backdrop. Trump’s trade war and his repeated jabs about Canada becoming the 51st U.S. state have angered many Canadians and further strained ties between Ottawa and Washington. The absence of a formal Carney-Trump meeting also followed earlier efforts by the two leaders to put a 30-day deadline on finding some kind of tariff deal, underscoring how central trade has become to every layer of the relationship.

For Carney, the larger signal was not that the meeting never happened, but that the relationship is being managed through constant contact while the two governments work through a high-stakes dispute. The summit optics may have been subdued, but the policy stakes were not.