T7 2025: Aligning G7 Priorities with Global Challenges

“It is an obligation for researchers to put their experience to use in the service of fact-based research and education.”

On April 1, 2025, during this first panel of the Think 7 (T7) Canada Summit, the Chairs and Co-chairs of the four T7 Task Forces convened to discuss their research and the issues they’ll be tackling, and the items they want the G7 countries to prioritize in their upcoming discussions.

Recordings of the introductory session and all the public panels that followed during the two-day summit, which took place earlier this month at the CIGI Campus, are now available for viewing. Find all six in the T7 2025 Playlist.

“For nearly a century, the US dollar has dominated international financial transactions, and US bonds serve as a pre-eminent store of value. But could the Trump administration’s tariff actions and threats precipitate the end of US dollar hegemony, or will this upheaval trigger a reset that reinforces a strong greenback? Both outcomes are possible, but a diminished role is more probable, opening space for new scenarios.”

In this opinion, CIGI President Paul Samson and CIGI Senior Fellow Angelo Federico Arcelli take a look at some of those possible scenarios, and the rise of digital currencies and multipolar geopolitics as new disruptors.

Almost 20 years ago, North Atlantic Treaty Organization defence ministers agreed to commit at least two percent of their GDP to defence spending for collective security. But, Jordan Miller writes, the question of defence spending has long been politically fraught in Canada, with insufficient public pressure or political will to push defence spending anywhere close to that target.

In recent months, and notably since Trump’s claim that “inadequate Canadian defence spending, along with an alleged trade imbalance and concerns about border security…justify blanket tariffs on Canadian goods,” support to get there has been steadily growing. In this commentary, Miller addresses the “how,” describing the headwinds and tailwinds affecting the course.

In this opinion, Marie Lamensch discusses the rise of the “broligarchy” — “a group of ultra-rich tech CEOs and entrepreneurs who have gained influence under the new Donald Trump presidency in the United States,” including Mark Zuckerberg, head of Meta. In January, Zuckerberg removed content restriction and eliminated fact-checking, and abandoned its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives, changes that reflect a larger shift in Silicon Valley.

Lamensch writes that as tech companies seek to curry favour with Trump, it appears that women, immigrants, people of colour and LGBTQ+ people will feel the impact, particularly in the United States, and “if the company’s decision to end fact-checking is rolled out internationally, it could have disastrous consequences.”

Data doesn’t currently show up in national accounts, nor on corporate balance sheets. But that is changing, Kean Birch writes, as international standards setters try to establish a consistent way to value digital data. What might seem an esoteric issue has “a significant bearing on the world — especially as we have become more dependent on data as the primary asset underpinning innovation, competition and productivity” — and is “particularly pertinent in light of the tariffs imposed by the United States against Canada.”

In this opinion, Birch overviews findings he and his colleagues discovered using Google as a case study of how big tech firms configure and value data as an asset, and concludes “corporations such as Alphabet, Meta, Amazon and so on have been extracting billions of dollars’ worth of data assets from Canada for years — and they will continue to do so until we get more transparency on data and its value.”

The Digital Policy Hub at CIGI is a collaborative space for emerging scholars and innovative thinkers from the social, natural and applied sciences. Here are the most recent working papers published by Hub fellows from the fall 2024 term.

Maya Povhe: “Temporary Foreign Workers’ Rights and Canadian Media”

Rafael Morales-Guzman: “Understanding Consumer Perceptions of Fintech Banking in Canada”

Follow the links on the Hub webpage to learn more about the Hub scholars and their work.