Summits |  Meetings |  Publications |  Research |  Search |  Home |  About the G7 Research Group

Analytical Studies > Analysis on the 2025 Kananaskis Summit
G7 Summits > 2025 Kananaskis Summit > Road to the 2025 Kananaskis Summit

Expectations for the Banff Meeting of G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors

John Kirton, G7 Research Group
May 16, 2025

From May 20 to 22, 2025 G7 finance ministers and central bank governors will gather at Banff, Alberta. It is a significant event in several ways.

It is their first scheduled, public, in-person, stand-alone meeting during Canada’s year at G7 host. It follows one on February 27 in Cape Town, South Africa, held on the margins of the G20 ministerial meeting and chaired by Canadian finance minister Dominic Leblanc and central bank governor Tiff Macklem; it issued no communiqué. Another, virtual meeting, on March 17, chaired by Canada’s new finance minister, François-Philippe Champagne, who will chair again at Banff, discussed global trade, competitiveness, economic growth and other key global issues.

The Banff meeting is the only finance ministerial one before the Kananaskis Summit on June 15–17. It will do much to prepare and preview what G7 leaders will do there. It takes place after US president Donald Trump said he would attend the summit, but may not attend the G20’s Johannesburg one in November. Thus, his Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, who had skipped the Capetown one, and Jerome Powell, governor of the Federal Reserve, are very likely to attend Banff. And because pre-summit ministerial meetings raise G7 governments’ implementation of the commitments their leaders make at the summit itself, the Banff meeting should help ensure that the decisions made at Kananaskis will be delivered in the year ahead.

The three-day Banff meeting should have full attendance from the finance ministers and central bank governors of all G7 members, including the European Union, and their invited guests: the heads of the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Bank and the Financial Stability Board for the entire meeting, as well as Ukraine’s finance minister and the president of the Financial Action Task Force for the sessions of most relevance to them.

They will address a full-strength agenda, covering prosperity, security and partnerships. It includes the global economy, economic resilience and security, Ukraine, financial crime and artificial intelligence (see Appendix A). The commitments may be similar in number but different in the breadth and balance to the 51 commitments made at the last full-fledged G7 finance meeting in Washington DC on October 25, 2024 (see Appendix B).

Prosperity

Its focus will be on the prosperity priority of trade and investment, as participants try to contain and even de-escalate the trade war launched by Trump against his fellow G7 members. First in line was Canada as the G7 host, heavily targeted by Trump and highly dependent for its prosperity on exports and imported inputs with the US. Japan and the EU members have been hit too, and the United Kingdom wants more than the limited relief Trump has just given it.

Macroeconomic policy comes next, as Trump’s tariffs flow from his belief that bilateral trade deficits on good with his partners show the US is subsidizing them and can be balanced by imposing high tariffs on them. Its fiscal policy component includes coming to a common understanding of the state of the global economy, the impact of their existing and projected big fiscal deficits on their desired non-inflationary growth goals, their ability to finance their promised tax cuts, new spending on defence and infrastructure and soaring government debts, the costs of a tariff war –induced slowdown or recession or other shocks, and the market reaction to all of the above.

Its monetary policy component involves the cumulative impacts of policy interest rate changes among G7 members, with Trump’s demands that Powell lower the US ones to match the other G7 ones. Its exchange rate components could involve discussions about the impact of a declining or stronger US dollar, exchange rate intervention or even a potential Mar-a-Lago Accord like the Plaza Accord of 1985, and the status of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency.

Financial regulation discussions will include prospective changes in bank regulation, especially relaxing the requirement for the biggest, tier one banks to reduce the supplementary leverage ratio of the capital they must hold, as the US is pressing to do. The largest eight US banks must keep capital of five percent of their leverage, while their European, Japanese and Canadian counterparts need only 3.5 to 4.25 percent.

Prosperity now includes a major concern with economic security, supply chain security, energy security and critical minerals security, against the recognized and real threats from Russia, China and a protectionist, isolationist Trump, as well as climate change, natural disasters, biodiversity loss, the next health pandemic and unregulated, runaway artificial intelligence.

Security

The security agenda will start with support for Ukraine, as it did at the last major G7 finance ministers meeting on October 25, 2025, where seven commitments were made of the total 51 produced there.

Now the focus is on imposing capital controls and tariffs on Russia and using the EU’s €200 billion in foreign Russian assets, if the EU cannot secure the required unanimity to extend the existing sanctions beyond their scheduled expiry at the end of July. The focus is also on banning new Russian gas and spot market contracts this year with a full phase-out by 2027, and imposing tariffs on Russian enriched uranium.

The Middle East will come next, building on the three commitments made made last October. They were to support the UNIFIL peacekeeping force, deliver humanitarian assistance in the Middle East and “plan for early recovery in Gaza, when the situation allows.” The focus is now on delivering food and medicines to the starving civilians in Gaza.

Partnerships

Partnerships start with those among the G7 or the “G6” without the US to counter these interconnected threats. They extend to those with outside countries, in the democratic Global South and beyond.

Outside the G7, the focus is now on having the multilateral development banks mobilize private capital. Also likely is a major modification or elimination of the four commitments made last October to help replenish the International Development Association “to eradicate poverty on a liveable planet,” to strongly support an expanded donor base, to help replenish the African Development Fund in 2025, and to support the Alliance for Green Infrastructure in Africa for the energy transition, infrastructure gap and climate resilience. Ministers might also discuss the Partnership for Global Infrastructure Investment created at the G7 summit in Elmau, Germany, in June 2022.

Bilateral Meetings

The three-day meeting at Banff provides plenty of time for many bilateral discussions among G7 members. Media and market attention will be on encounters between the US and its partners on tariffs and trade, and Bessent’s next deal after the ones he helped initiate with the UK and China. Japanese finance minister Kato Katsunobu plans to meet Bessent to discuss exemptions from higher US tariffs and Trump’s accusation that Japan was lowing the yen to support Japanese exports and deepen Japan’s trade deficit with the US.

But other discussions could foster freer trade and economic partnerships between all the other members seeking diversification and insurance against Trump’s protectionist moves. For Canada the test will be finally getting full free trade with the European Union and United Kingdom, with only Canada’s supply-managed poultry and dairy products still in its protectionist prison.

[back to top]

Appendix A: Agenda of Banff Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting, May 2025 ↩

Source: Department of Finance Canada, Media advisory, May 14, 2025

9:00 a.m. – 9:15 a.m.

The Minister and Governor will officially open the G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors’ Meeting.

9:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m.

The Minister and Governor will co-chair sessions on the global economy, economic resilience and security, and the situation in Ukraine, among others.

Thursday, May 22

8:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
The Minister and Governor will co-chair sessions on financial crime and artificial intelligence, among others.

[back to top]

Appendix B: Commitments of the G7 Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, October 25, 2024 ↩

[back to top]

—	This Information System is provided by the University of Toronto Libraries and the G7 Research Group at the University of Toronto.
	Please send comments to: g7@utoronto.ca This page was last updated May 16, 2025.

All contents copyright © 2025. University of Toronto unless otherwise stated. All rights reserved.