Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc and a high-ranking Vietnamese delegation left Hanoi in the evening of June 7 for Quebec to attend the expanded Group of Seven (G7) Summit  and visit Canada from June 8-10 at the invitation of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Prime Minister Nguyen Xuan Phuc 

Accompanying the PM are Minister, Chairman of the Government Office Mai Tien Dung, Minister of Science and Technology Chu Ngoc Anh, Minister of Home Affairs Le Vinh Tan, Minister, Chairman of the Government Committee for Ethnic Affairs Do Van Chien, and Auditor General Ho Duc Phoc, among others.

The expanded G7 Summit will be held in Charlevoix, Quebec, on June 8 and 9 with the participation of leaders of the world’s seven advanced economies, namely Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US, and several guests, including Vietnam.

The agenda of this year’s summit focuses on gender equality and women empowerment, investment in inclusive growth, preparations to adapt to job placements in future, cooperation to respond to climate change and protect oceans, and the building of a more peaceful and safer world.

The G7 is an informal grouping of seven of the world’s advanced economies consisting of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US. It was established in 1975 under the US’ initiative with six members. Canada joined the grouping in 1976.

The G7 Summit offers an opportunity for G7 leaders, ministers and policy makers to come together each year to build consensus and set trends around some of today’s most challenging global issues.

Vietnam and Canada established diplomatic ties in 1973 and began the exchange of high-ranking delegations since 1994. During a visit by Vietnam’s Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Pham Binh Minh in September 2014, the foreign ministers of Vietnam and Canada signed a Letter of Intent on consolidating and boosting bilateral relations. In September 2016, when Canadian Foreign Minister Stephane Dion visited Vietnam, the two sides agreed to promote cooperation in seven fields mentioned in the Letter of Intent, with a focus on trade-investment and education-training.

On the occasion of Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s official visit to Vietnam in November 2017, the two countries issued a joint statement on the establishment of their comprehensive partnership, which set forth basic principles for bilateral relations along with orientations and measures to foster bilateral partnership in the seven fields of politics-diplomacy, trade-investment, development cooperation, defence-security, culture-education, science-technology, and people-to-people exchange.

Vietnam is currently Canada’s biggest trade partner in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations with bilateral trade reaching nearly 5 billion USD in 2017. Canada ranks 14th among 112 nations and territories investing in Vietnam with 149 projects worth a total of 4.1 billion USD.

Recently, Canada announced official development assistance (ODA) for a project to develop cooperatives in Vietnam, another to help the country respond to climate change and two others on food safety.

Bilateral cooperation in education and training is enjoying strong growth, with the number of Vietnamese students in Canada rising twofold in the past 10 years to 12,000, the largest among ASEAN countries.-VNA