Host country Canada Cities Toronto, Ontario Precedes 15th G7 summit | Dates June 19–20, 1988 Follows 13th G7 summit | |
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Venue(s) Metro Toronto Convention Centre | ||
The 14th G7 Summit was held in Toronto, Ontario, Canada between June 19 and 21, 1988. The venue for the summit meetings was the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in central Toronto.
Contents
The Group of Seven (G7) was an unofficial forum which brought together the heads of the richest industrialized countries: France, West Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada (since 1976) and the President of the European Commission (starting officially in 1981). The summits were not meant to be linked formally with wider international institutions; and in fact, a mild rebellion against the stiff formality of other international meetings was a part of the genesis of cooperation between France's President Giscard d'Estaing and West Germany's Chancellor Helmut Schmidt as they conceived the first Group of Six (G6) summit in 1975.
Unlike the relatively low key summit at Château Montebello in 1981, the Toronto summit was held under tight security with involvement of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and Metro Toronto Police.
Canada was the first member of the G7/G8 to host both this kind of Summit and an Olympic Games in the same calendar year. In February, Calgary, Alberta, hosted the 1988 Winter Olympics. Canada would do this again 22 years when they hosted the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, British Columbia and then the G8 Summit in Huntsville, Ontario.
Leaders at the summit
The G7 is an unofficial annual forum for the leaders of Canada, the European Commission, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States.
The 14th G7 summit was the first summit for Italian Prime Minister Ciriaco De Mita and was the last summit for U.S. President Ronald Reagan. It was also the first and only summit for Japanese Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita.
Core G7 participants
These summit participants are the current "core members" of the international forum:
Issues
The summit was intended as a venue for resolving differences among its members. As a practical matter, the summit was also conceived as an opportunity for its members to give each other mutual encouragement in the face of difficult economic decisions. Issues which were discussed at this summit included: