People’s Forum to G7: Turn Debt Into Hope

Ahead of the G7 meeting for its 2025 Summit at the scenic resort town of Kananaskis, Canada, a parallel gathering was held at St. Ambrose University, Calgary, thirty miles away.

The People’s Forum, June 12-15, was the product of collaboration between the Calgary Interfaith Council, KAIROS Canada, Peace and Development of Caritas, and many others. Its theme was the message of the 2025 Jubilee Year: “Turn Debt Into Hope!”

Representatives from First Nations, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Bahá’í, Buddhist, Unitarian, and Christian communities spoke to the need for a global jubilee – the cancellation of unjust burdensome debt for the world’s most impoverished countries. Hundreds gathered around that common theme to discuss the urgent need for a jubilee and to strategize for a better world.

Opening the weekend conference was a keynote from Cardinal Pedro Barreto of Peru. Cardinal Barreto has served as the head of the Justice and Peace Section of the Latin American Bishops’ Conference (CELAM) and was vice president of the Pan-Amazonian Ecclesial Network (REPAM). He was also a member of the organizing committee for the Pan-Amazon Synod of Bishops. As a spiritual leader presiding over a part of the world’s largest rainforest, Cardinal Barreto brought a message about the ecological debt owed by developed nations to underdeveloped nations. The growth of wealthy countries since the industrial era has caused a climate and ecological crisis that the whole world must now face. Countries that contributed the least greenhouse gases to the atmosphere are the most likely to suffer from global warming. The imbalance raises moral questions of which nations ought to be indebted and which ought to be credited. Jubilee is not a matter of charity, but rather a matter of justice.

Another speaker, Salome Owuonda of Kenya, spoke of how her country’s outsized debts have crippled the nation’s economy and burdened Kenya’s youth. The tension on the nation’s youth boiled over in 2024 when a proposal to raise taxes in parliament was met with civil unrest that left dozens dead and hundreds wounded. Owuonda is the Executive Director of the Africa Centre for Sustainable and Inclusive Development (Africa CSID), based in Kenya.

Dean Dettloff, Research and Advocacy Officer for Development and Peace — Caritas Canada, spoke in clear terms about the economic justification for debt cancellation and challenged an unfair but popularly held notion: In conversations about a nation’s debt burden, the problem is often couched in terms of the borrowing nation’s irresponsibility. In fact, creditors are also being irresponsible when they lend funds irresponsibly and at onerous interest rates. When creditors decide to lend to an authoritarian leader, who saddles a nation with debt and disappears, those creditors should not profit from their poor decision — especially not at the expense of the mortgaged nation’s future. Predatory lenders and investors who buy such debt, known as Vulture Funds, dismantle nations’ wealth in an arrangement likened to internationally sanctioned pillaging.

In recent decades, and since the Jubilee 2000 campaign cancelled over $100 billion in sovereign debt, privately owned sovereign debt has been on the rise and now accounts for more than half of all outstanding sovereign debt. To prevent a resurgence of a new debt crisis, and to reign in the excesses of predatory private lending to nations, it is not enough to cancel debt for jubilee. Instead, Dettloff explains, a new global framework for sovereign debt is needed, setting out rules for lending and borrowing and creating pathways for remediation.

This conclusion matches that of a recently published report commissioned by the late Pope Francis. The Jubilee Report, the product of a collaboration between the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences and Columbia University, explains: “When debt is owed to private creditors, the absence of an international mechanism for sovereign debt restructuring turns crisis resolution into a power struggle — often resolved in ways that are inefficient, unjust, and harmful to the people most in need of protection. Private creditors use fear of the consequences of default to extract terms that protect their profits while forcing debtor countries into further hardship.”

To intervene between private creditors and national governments, the pontifical Jubilee report explains, an international framework is needed. “The international financial architecture must be redesigned to create sustained access to the financing needed for inclusive growth, climate, and structural transformations, as well as to enable just and efficient debt resolutions.”

The conference concluded with participants collecting signatures for the “Turn Debt into Hope” petition after Sunday services across the city, and a march for debt cancelation culminating at Calgary’s city hall.

Faith in action: Sign the Turn Debt Into Hope petition from Caritas Internationalis. https://turndebtintohope.caritas.org/