Gerald Ford, who died this week at age 93, never visited Canada during the short time he was U.S. president, but he did Canada a major favour on the international scene.

In 1975, the West was facing an economic crisis caused by inflation and rising oil prices. French President Valéry Giscard d’Estaing started a meeting for leaders to discuss the problem informally.

He invited the heads of a group called the G5 for talks, then added non-member Italy. But he was adamant that Canada be excluded, according to an an article by Thomas Axworthy in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau fought back, and had some support from the leaders in Britain and Germany.

“But Canada’s key friend was President Gerald Ford of the United States,” Axworthy’s article said. Ford was “irate” about Canada’s exclusion, and even considered refusing to attend.

However, the president had a better plan. Just as France had invited Italy in 1975, he invited Canada to the 1976 summit in Puerto Rico.

“Once invited, President Ford concluded, you would not be excluded in the future,” the article said. Canada became a member of the G7 as the group came to be called. It became the G8 when Russia joined in 1997.

Ford visited Canada often

Ford served as president for 895 days. He was a congressman from Michigan from 1949 to 1973, when he replaced Spiro Agnew as vice-president. In August 1974 he took over as president from the disgraced Richard Nixon.

Proximity mattered, said history Prof. Robert Bothwell of the University of Toronto.

“He only lived, what, 100 miles [160 kilometres] from the border and he visited southern Ontario very often,’ he said. “And then as a congressman, he’d worked with Canadian parliamentarians and found a lot of common ground.”

Ford also supported international solutions to issues.

“We live in an interdependent world and, therefore, must work together to resolve common economic problems,” he said in a 1974 speech.