Think7 Canada

Think7 (T7) is the official engagement group of the Group of Seven (G7) that brings together leading think tanks and research centres worldwide. The aim is to provide evidence-based advice and policy recommendations to the G7 Presidency.

CIGI is organizing the T7 process during Canada’s Presidency of the G7 in 2025.

Call for abstracts is open: We invite experts from G7 and other countries to submit abstracts of policy briefs focused on the main policy areas of the T7 Canada Task Forces. The chairs and co-chairs of the Task Forces will select high-quality abstracts and work with the authors to develop them into Policy Briefs for consideration to be shared with the G7 as background material for the T7 Final Communiqué to be presented to the Canadian Presidency ahead of the G7 Summit.

Learn more here.

Before Google and Meta dominated the digital landscape, the news agencies and technologies of the early twentieth century captured unprecedented influence.

Join hosts Vass Bednar and Paul Samson in conversation with Heidi Tworek, author of the prize-winning book News from Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900–1945, as she explains the historic prevalence, power and manipulation of media and wireless technology in this episode of Policy Prompt.

In this commentary, Wesley Wark and Aaron Shull discuss “the last lap of what has always been a sprint” for Canada’s Public Inquiry into Foreign Interference in Federal Electoral Processes and Democratic Institutions. The commission faced two difficult tasks: a fact-finding mission, and then the “‘policy phase’ — which is to come up with recommendations to improve the capacity of the federal government to ‘detect, deter and counter’ foreign interference.”

Granted “standing” for the policy phase, CIGI had a side seat at the commission table. In this commentary, Wark and Shull write about the three themes that CIGI pressed for adoption in the commission’s final report.

“As the reverberations from Donald Trump’s re-election reshape the global order, we are going to find that many of our institutions, policies and ideas will not provide us with the protection that we had supposed. Chief among these is the belief that when it comes to internet governance, over-aggressive government regulation of US online giants such as Meta and Google is more of a threat to Canadians’ liberty than these companies themselves.”

In this opinion, Blayne Haggart writes that “in a cruel but unsurprising twist of fate, it turns out that strong government regulation was the very thing we needed in order to address not just unchecked corporate power but also undue US influence on our economy and society.”

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.

Andrew Heffernan: “Countering Fossil-Fuelled Climate Disinformation to Save Democracy”

Frederick (Fred) Okello: “Assessing Satellite Internet Potential in Rural Kenya”

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

“With artificial intelligence poised to reshape our economy, is this invisible network ready for the challenge? Digital infrastructure is key to productivity, economic growth and tackling the cost-of-living crisis.”

In this commentary, Michael R. King observes that although Canada’s digital infrastructure is not broken, it needs three critical upgrades, which policy makers have known about for more than a decade: open banking, real-time payments and digital identity. “So why is Canada delaying these vital upgrades?” Without them, King says, “Canada risks falling further behind.”

Dec. 5 – 11:00 a.m. EST (UTC–05:00): Canadian businesses face growing questions about how to ensure the responsible commercialization and use of emerging technologies that are now key drivers of success across all industries.

Join co-hosts Global Affairs Canada and CIGI for a virtual discussion next month that will consider these questions. Moderators Ryerson Neal and Tracey Forrest and speakers Rashad Abelson, Pratt Sureka and Paul Vallée will explore expectations of business for responsible conduct and due diligence in relation to the development and deployment of emerging technologies, among other topics.

Find out more and register here.