A G7 leader stood in Jeddah and put Türkiye at the center of any Middle East settlement. And he meant it as a working assessment, the kind of thing a government acts on.
"Two of the most influential countries with respect to potential solutions are Saudi Arabia and Türkiye," Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told reporters, naming the two governments he had just visited. Anadolu Ajansı carried the remarks from his news conference in the Saudi port city.
The framing is the story. Carney was answering a question about why his government has dropped the public criticism of Riyadh that colored ties under the previous administration. His reply doubled as a verdict on where regional weight actually sits, and Ankara made the short list.
He built the whole answer around engagement over grandstanding. "We need to engage with these countries. We need to be speaking with them. We need to work with them," he said, adding that talking to a government does not mean Ottawa signs off on everything it does.
Then the sharper line. "I do see that lecturing countries from afar is an ineffective strategy," Carney said. "It's satisfying, but it's ineffective. Engagement can be effective. It doesn't mean it's always effective. Doesn't mean it's decisive, but it can be effective." He said Canada cares about human rights, self-determination, and the territorial integrity of nations, and that quiet dialogue serves those better than a podium.
Worth keeping in view: this is Carney's assessment, not a fact of record. It carries weight because of who said it and where. He had just come off the NATO summit in Ankara, and the Saudi leg was the first visit by a Canadian prime minister to the kingdom in 26 years. A leader diversifying away from Washington, by his own admission, chose Türkiye and Saudi Arabia as the anchors of that pivot.
Ankara barely had to lift a finger for the endorsement. Carney said he raised outstanding issues with President Erdoğan during the Ankara stop and credited the face-to-face for an outcome he said Ottawa could not have reached from a distance. He would not spell out what was resolved.
The Türkiye visit was busy on its own terms. On 7 July, Erdoğan and Carney agreed to open free-trade talks on the summit's margins, with a first round targeted for late 2026, as we reported in Türkiye and Canada open free-trade talks. The "most influential" line landed two days later, on the same trip.
Carney was blunt about the driver behind all of it. "We're over-reliant" on the United States, he said. "Every Canadian has very strongly recognized that, and we're looking to diversify." For Ankara, being named a place to diversify toward is its own kind of standing.