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Macleans.ca

Canada’s magazine

The Paul Martin legacy band and travelling liquidity roadshow

It is good to see it being acknowledged that this business of convening the heads of government of, say, 20-ish countries to put out a really big global fire is something Paul Martin has been advocating for a very long time. As a refresher, here’s Martin advocating the leaders’ G-20 in Foreign Affairs magazine in May/June 2005, when he was still prime minister. That article begins with the all-time classic Paul Martin opening line: “In 1995, the peso crisis struck Mexico, and Latin America seemed to teeter on the brink of economic collapse.” Wake up. Wake up! The Mexican peso crisis is a metaphor. He’s not actually going to walk you through it again.