Finance Minister Jim Flaherty missed no photo-op last weekend as he hosted the G7 finance ministers in Iqaluit. Watching Flaherty climb onto dog sleds, crawl into igloos and wolf down seal meat, Canadians got little sense of something else he was up to: obstructing worldwide momentum for a tax on financial speculation.

The idea of curbing financial speculation by imposing a tax on financial transactions has been attracting support from reformers ever since it was proposed in the early 1970s by Nobel Prize-winning economist James Tobin.