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The clown prince of Europe, Silvio Berlusconi, the Group of Eight summit host, may be smarter than he looks. He added five to eight and came up with 13, a pleasing number to him, in spite of its superstitious connotations.

Yes, the Italian event was officially a G8. And yes, the G13 does not officially exist, and may never. But inviting five rising powers - China, India, Brazil, Mexico and South Africa - to the table went some way to save the G8 from irrelevance by making it more inclusive.

How will Canada, the host of the 2010 summit in Muskoka, Ont., fine-tune the G8 to keep it alive and kicking?

In an exclusive interview yesterday with The Globe and Mail at the close of the three-day summit, Prime Minister Stephen Harper suggested he would try to find comfortable ground between the vintage eight-only G8 and Mr. Berlusconi's version, which included 28 heads of government and a dozen heads of international institutions - 40 in total, a 400-per-cent expansion over the core group.

"We will definitely invite other countries, but we haven't quite decided the format," he said about next June's event in Muskoka, Ont. "I think there is room for the G8 and the necessity of an expanded body [but]I think we need to narrow this down to a couple of formats, a G8 and a more inclusive global forum."

In other words, the classic Canadian compromise - not too big, not too small. "There's a trade-off between inclusiveness and dialogue," he said.

"The more exclusive a meeting, the more frank and intimate the exchanges. The broader the meeting, the more difficult that becomes, the more it becomes the reading of pre-scripted speeches."

At first, the prospects for Mr. Berlusconi's G8 looked grim. The address for the Italian G8 was initially a small island off the north coast of Sardinia, all the better to keep the potentially rioting hoards at bay.

He switched the location to L'Aquila, about 100 kilometres northeast of Rome, after the April 6 earthquake that killed 300 people. Holding a summit in a city in ruins presented a whole new set of logistical problems.

Then the scandal-prone Prime Minister found himself buried in another scandal. When news broke of his friendship with an 18-year-old Neapolitan girl, his wife, Veronica Lario, said she would divorce the man who "frequents minors." A variety of pictures of naked and semi-naked women at his Sardinian villa didn't help. The host of the G8 was a party boy who had no business hosting a summit in the middle of a severe economic crisis, his many critics said.

A bigger problem was the G8 itself, which increasingly was being dismissed as a dying forum. Global problems, from economic repair and climate change to tax evasion and food security, required global solutions. The wider G20, whose members include China, India and Brazil, seemed the solution.

Even a couple of G8 leaders agreed the G8 had had its day. "We are seeing that the world is growing together and that the problems we face cannot be solved by the industrialized countries alone," German Chancellor Angela Merkel told the German parliament before the Italian G8. "I think the G20 should be the format that, like an overarching roof, determines the future."

For his part, French president Nicolas Sarkozy said that he and his Brazilian counterpart would push to convert the G8 into a G14 by the French presidency in 2011. "It seems unreasonable to us that the most important international issues are dealt with without Africa, Latin America and China," he said.

Mr. Berlusconi's defence was to send out invitations, and lots of them.

It seems to have worked, even if the size turned the event into something of a circus. "I think involving the G5 was the right move," said Marco Annunziata, the chief economist in London for Italy's UniCredit Group. "It's easy to be ironic on the arithmetic of the various Gs, but the truth is that, going forward, all the important decisions need international co-operation."

John Kirton, the head of the University of Toronto's G8 Research Group, agreed. Mr. Berlusconi's decision to invite outsiders allowed other groups to influence the talks around the G8 core. He thinks a new group may not be formed until 2012, when U.S. President Barack Obama is in election mode and the leadership of China is due to switch over. Those two factors might combine to enlarge the membership at that point.

Not everyone was happy with Mr. Berlusconi's proliferating-Gs format, of course. "We had this G8, G14, G20 - I don't know exactly what to call it - meeting," International Monetary Fund managing director Dominique Strauss-Kahn told reporters.

But Mr. Berlusconi's solution won more praise than scorn. In the end, he seemed to realize that the G8 represents a world order than no longer exists - its power is on the wane. Instead of declaring the G8 irrelevant he, in effect, simply bulked it up.

Mr. Harper will do the same at the G8 in Muskoka. "Obviously we have to develop a wider body that will be more representative," he said at a press conference yesterday.

He just won't inject it with the same volume of steroids that went into the Italian version.

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