While much of the chatter around the G20 summit has focused on fake lakes, billion-dollar budgets and burning police cars, the greater reality is that Stephen Harper guided the leaders of the world's largest and most influential economies to an accord – call it the Toronto Consensus – that surprised even the leaders themselves.
“Honestly, this is more than I expected,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel acknowledged. The major economies have agreed to act in concert to cut their deficits in half by 2013, and then to stabilize or reduce their debts as a percentage of GDP by 2016.
The most that had originally been expected from the weekend was some kind of process toward a hoped-for agreement in Seoul this November. Instead, we have that agreement.
This is a signal achievement for the Prime Minister, who set those targets and lobbied hard for other nations to embrace them.
It didn't hurt that President Barack Obama had set a similar bar for the United States to clear, and that many European nations are already switching from stimulus spending to deficit reduction.
And clearly fear as much as amity drove the consensus. The greatest incentive for agreement at G20 meetings is the punishment that the markets would inflict if bond holders and stock traders decided that the major economies weren't able or willing to work together to prevent calamity.
In that respect, the Greek debt crisis couldn't have come at a better time for Mr. Harper, by offering a stark warning of what happens to governments that spend profligately, ignore deficits and pile on debt.
While President Nicholas Sarkozy of France said the deficit-reduction targets were “voluntary by country,” Mr. Harper was closer to the mark when he responded that there will be “not just peer pressure, there will be market pressure to fulfill them.”
All nations will not achieve those goals. Debt-ridden Japan has effectively been given a pass, and nobody really cares what China does about its deficit. We all just want Chinese consumers to spend.
But that's not what matters. The Toronto Consensus, if successfully implemented, could prevent a second global recession brought on by nations defaulting on their debt. The most important task the G20 leaders set themselves, they met.
For many, that's not nearly as important as the fake lake.
The Conservatives bungled the logistics of this summit. Bungles may have been inevitable: After all, the Huntsville G8 summit was well advanced when leaders agreed last autumn to add a G20 to it as well.
Armchair logisticians proposed different alternatives to the Huntsville/Toronto split: Consolidate everything in Muskoka; consolidate everything in Toronto, but somewhere other than downtown; move the whole thing elsewhere.
Regardless, the billion-dollar price tag raised eyebrows around the world. The best efforts by police could not prevent masked thugs from torching police cars and smashing windows. Parts of downtown Toronto were a garbage-and-glass-strewn mess Saturday night.
Opposition politicians – and those who just don't like Mr. Harper very much – will continue to lament these blemishes. Otherwise, they would have to acknowledge what the Prime Minister has accomplished over the weekend, both at the G20 and at the G8, where Mr. Harper secured an agreement to increase funding for maternal and child health.
A strange synergy has developed between this Conservative government and the rest of the G20. In the fall of 2008, during the federal election, Mr. Harper insisted that the financial crisis was a passing thing, even as banks failed, credit froze, and depression loomed.
Once he and Finance Minister Jim Flaherty recognized how dangerously offside Canada was, they moved to embrace stimulus spending – using the G20's imprimatur to justify their about-face.
Now Mr. Harper has succeeded in convincing his peers that the time is right for other governments to follow Canada in shifting to deficit-cutting. And, once again, he has an internationally certified mandate to chop government programs and search for additional revenue.
Not everything hoped for on the weekend was achieved. Though China has promised to allow its currency to appreciate slightly, to make it easier for other countries to sell into its market, the Asian giant demanded that nothing about that promise be included in the communiqué.
But the final document also made no commitment on a bank tax. The Europeans are free to pursue this if they want; more skeptical governments can rely on regulation, another Canadian win.
Canada is at the high-water mark in summit diplomacy. Our influence will begin to wane tomorrow, as South Korea takes the lead in shaping the agenda for November's meeting.
Concrete rules on forcing banks to improve the quantity and quality of their capital reserves must be decided by then. But that's South Korea's problem, now.
Sunday's communiqué suggests the G20 will become an annual, rather the current semi-annual, event starting next year. If so, it will be two decades before Canada hosts it again.
But when it was on our watch, Canada performed admirably. Mr. Harper – aided by a Finance Department that has become the elite of the federal public service – leveraged Canada's economic credibility and his role as chairman of the summit to navigate a significant agreement in development aid and a major accord on global fiscal policy.
It takes more than a little bile not to offer such an accomplishment a nod.
