Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is set to leave Peru this morning to attend the G20 summit in Brazil, as Ottawa seeks its place in the dispute between the United States and the developing world’s booming economies.
The G20 is an intergovernmental forum with leaders ranging from longtime allies like French President Emmanuel Macron to populist troublemakers like Argentine President Javier Miley.
They are meeting in Rio de Janeiro to try to find common ground on issues ranging from solving global hunger to setting rules around digital currencies.
The summit comes less than two weeks after American voters decided to return Donald Trump to the White House next year. During his election campaign, Trump promised to withdraw the United States from global institutions and increase tariffs on foreign goods.
John Kirton, head of the G20 think tank, says the forum is the main tool countries have to prepare for a second Trump presidency.
“What you really need is basically for the most powerful leaders, from the most powerful countries in the world, to talk to each other — because only they know what it’s like to deal with a leader of the same category,” he said.
Most of Trudeau’s time at the summit will likely involve informal talks with various leaders, although he is expected to have some formal discussions as well.
On Sunday afternoon, he is scheduled to participate in an event held by the anti-poverty group Global Citizen on the sidelines of the summit. As of Saturday evening, Trudeau’s office had not specified which leaders he would meet at the G20 summit.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum will attend the summit, which could provide her first opportunity to meet in person with Trudeau since she took office. Both countries face a 2026 review of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement, and both leaders were elected on pledges to combat climate change.
“There are concerns about the level of Chinese investment in Mexico that I think need to be addressed, but I hope we can work constructively over the coming months,” Trudeau said at a news conference on Saturday in Lima. Adding that Mexico was a “strong partner” of Canada.
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Trudeau is likely to meet the summit host, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, known as Lula.
Kirton said Trudeau is on pace with Lula’s three main priorities for the summit: economic equality involving indigenous peoples, climate change and clean energy, and reducing poverty and hunger.
Lula added a fourth priority, artificial intelligence, something Trudeau championed when Canada hosted the G7 summit in 2018, and which Trudeau says will be a major focus of Canada’s term as G7 host next year.
“It’s hard to think of a G20 summit where the priorities of the host and the Canadian prime minister were so well aligned,” Kirton said. “We have a lot we can do to help Lola get what he wants.”
Another point of consensus concerns Lula’s desire to reform global governance, something Ottawa has pushed for among the G7 and at the United Nations.
Countries like Brazil say they do not have a proper voice in institutions designed at the end of World War II, when Europe and Washington had a dominant role in crafting rules governing military matters, trade and sovereignty.
Countries in regions like the Caribbean have the same grievances about financial institutions that were designed over decades. They complain of their inability to obtain sufficient financing to invest in infrastructure to mitigate the effects of climate change caused largely by industrialized countries.
Instead, they pay huge interest fees at a time of high inflation. In July 2023, a United Nations report found that nearly half of the world’s population lives in countries that spend more on debt interest payments than on education or health care.
Brazil prides itself on being a democracy based on what it calls a pragmatic approach to diplomacy, although both have come under pressure.
Lula has made climate change one of his primary concerns. Brazil has seen widespread urban flooding and record forest fires in vital areas such as the Amazon, where there has been conflict over natural resource projects.
The dictatorship in neighboring Venezuela has imposed economic pain and state violence on its people, sending waves of refugees into Brazil.
In early 2023, Brazil was stunned when supporters of Lula’s predecessor Jair Bolsonaro stormed the country’s presidential palace, parliament and Supreme Court in what many likened to the events of January 6, 2021, in Washington.
Brazil has since sought to stamp out the misinformation, blocking access to Platform X for five weeks when the company refused to comply with court orders.
Meanwhile, the country is a member of the BRICS club of emerging economies that seeks more influence in the world for countries such as China and South Africa, and an end to US dominance in areas such as the reserve currency.
Vina Nadjibula, vice-president of research at the Asia Pacific Foundation, urged Canadians “not to mistakenly place Brazil in the … anti-Western bloc represented by Russia, China, Iran and other BRICS members.”
She said Ottawa should instead focus on shared priorities with Brazil such as free trade, democracy and respect for global rules, including moves to make those rules work better for the countries where most of the world’s population lives.
“It is important, as we enter this most volatile and unpredictable period in international relations, to maintain careful and intelligent approaches and policies towards emerging and middle powers like Brazil,” she said.
Nadjibola said it was difficult to get the right balance, but she said not doing so would push partners like Brazil into the arms of disruptive powers like Russia and China, and foster more anti-Western sentiment.
“We need to be more prepared to make these global institutions fit for purpose,” she said.
“This will be a real challenge under the incoming Trump administration, which has a very limited commitment to multilateralism and global institutions, and much more isolationist tendencies.”
As in the last two G20 summits, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov is in Rio instead of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who since March 2023 has been the subject of an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court for his role in the deportation of Ukrainians. children.
Russia’s large-scale invasion of Ukraine has caused tension at the last two summits, although leaders were able to agree on Russia’s call for “aggression” in 2022 and “the use of force to seek to seize territory” in a 2023 statement.
Kiron wonders whether that war will be mentioned in this year’s joint statement, as well as the war between Israel and Hamas, which began after the last summit in New Delhi. Lula sparked controversy in February when he compared Israel’s war on Gaza to the Holocaust.
