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Hats off to the Bank of England's governor, Mervyn King, who found the time to go for a ride on a dog sled during the weekend's summit of G7 finance ministers, which Canada hosted in the remote Arctic city of Iqaluit. Here's a picture of Merv, who's tucked up nice and warm and looks like he's having a whale of a time. He declared the experience "wonderful".
Ministers at the summit agreed to forgive Haiti's debts, following the Caribbean country's devastating earthquake. And they pledged to continue working together on co-ordinated economic stimulus packages to fight the impact of the recession.
But as I reported earlier in the week, the summit's Arctic location meant that the ministers present, including Britain's Alistair Darling, the US treasury minister Timothy Geithner and France's Christine Lagarde, faced a tricky diplomatic challenge on issue of seal hunting, which would be somewhat peripheral to their portfolios in other circumstances.
The European Union has banned commercially hunted seal and, although hunting by indigenous communities was exempt from the prohibition, it's a delicate topic. None of the visiting ministers chose to attend a feast on Saturday night, laid on by the local Inuit community, at which raw seal was on the menu. Canada's Jim Flaherty was left to chow down on some seal meat alone.
And when a local reporter asked the European ministers about seal hunting at a closing press conference, there was a deafening silence. Canada's Globe and Mail reports that there was a five second silence as Darling and his colleagues avoided everybody's eye.
"Don't all go at once," prompted the reporter.
A further five second silence ensued according to this transcript, before Flaherty came to the rescue of his visitors: "Listen, you know, the European Union makes a specific exception with respect to the Inuit people who for thousands of years have relied on the seal as part of their survival and that is the view of the European Union and its certainly our view in Canada."
Incidentally, Darling was the only one at the press conference who appeared to be wearing a suit. Everyone else kept warm in woolly jumpers, including a particularly attractive snowflake design sported by Flaherty, and a rather startling orange number worn by Japan's finance minister. There's a video clip here.
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