The security walls, a steady stream of leaders disembarking at the airport, and Torontonians with jobs in the downtown core either working at home or not working at all.

Welcome to the joys of hosting the fourth G20 summit.

In a G20 scare, members of the hazardous material team inspects some of the contents of car belonging to a man arrested by police in Toronto on Thursday June 24, 2010. (Chris Young/Canadian Press)

The idea of a G20 gathering of developed and developing world economies originated with Canada. So it is fitting that we should be among the first to be a host.

But as the world leaders arrive for their weekend of meetings, they are effectively on standby, waiting while the leaders of the big boys' club — the G8 — does its thing in the cottage country splendour of Ontario's Muskoka.

What's more, despite what many people are currently saying, it is not at all clear that there is a long-term future for the G20.

Still, what is on display in Toronto seems a big jump from what then Liberal finance minister Paul Martin proposed to the then U.S. treasury secretary Lawrence Summers in 1999.

Growth industry

Martin and Summers envisioned a G20 of finance ministers and central bank governors that would build upon the meetings of their G8 counterparts.

Those finance meetings had grown out of the annual leaders' summits, which began as the G5 in 1975, expanded to the G7 in 1976 and then became the G8 in 1997, when Russia was added.

When Martin became prime minister four years later, he tried to expand the idea of the G20 from finance ministers to government leaders. But there was no uptake from the other G8 leaders, so the idea seemed to die.

At the time, U.S. President George W. Bush was the most reluctant of the G8 leaders to create a new grouping.

How ironic then that it was Bush who took the Martin proposal off the shelf in the autumn of 2008 after the Great Recession brought the global economy to a screeching halt.

From that first G20 meeting in Washington 20 months ago, the G20 has proved to be one of the few economic growth industries during an international slowdown.

Cracks in the front

Since that initial Washington gathering, the G20 has met in London and Pittsburgh and will convene again later this year in South Korea.

His Excellency Dr. Goodluck Ebele Jonathan, President and Grand Commander of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, arrives in Toronto on June 23, 2010 to attend the G8 and G20 summits. (Dave Chan/Canadian Press)

In the process, there has been considerable talk about how the G20 has become the high table for what passes these days for global governance.

But it is far from clear that that is going to be the ongoing situation.

It took the worst economic meltdown since the Depression to get the G20 up and running.

But with many of these economies now on the uptick, there are cracks appearing in what was once a united recession-fighting front.

Once the recession passes, you have to ask, will there be enough commonality of interest to keep this group together?

Pass the collection plate

For instance, a leaked version of the final communique, which is to be released Sunday at the conclusion of the Toronto gathering, commits the group to work on development aid to poorer countries.

The G8 has been talking about this kind of thing for a number of years. And while not as much has been done as has been promised, at least there has been some follow through.

That is because, with the exception of Russia, the G8 members are mature democracies with mature economies. (And when energy prices are high, even Russia has money to commit to development aid.)

But those additional countries that make up the G20 are a different story.

China, India and Brazil are emerging economic giants. But despite their new-found power and prosperity, each has huge populations that still live in abject poverty.

China has shown a big interest in Africa of late, but only when that means it can acquire the resources it needs for its industrial machine.

To think that China, along with India or Brazil, would be involved in traditional forms of aid to Africa, or anywhere else for that matter, is a bit of a stretch.

'Too many meetings'

Of course, the Canadian godfather of the G20 thinks otherwise.

At a forum organized by the German Friedrich Ebert Foundation and the Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, Paul Martin argued that the G20 should be the major forum to address many of the world's most pressing issues.

Climate change and food shortages were two of the problems he said the G20 would be ideal to take on.

But another big, important forum, the UN, is far along in its post-Kyoto round of international negotiations.

And while the Copenhagen talks last fall were a big disappointment, the UN climate change torch is being picked up again in Mexico City in December, one month after the next G20 summit in South Korea.

Which may represent another problem for the longevity of the G20.

When Martin first pushed his idea of a leaders' G20 to George W. Bush, the U.S. president reportedly dismissed it this way: "I already go to too many meetings."

For the G20 to become truly influential on a broader scale, the leaders will probably have to limit their meetings to once a year.

Meanwhile, other ministers and cabinet secretaries and the like will have to be delegated to meet in their areas of expertise and do the spadework. That's an exponential amount of bureaucratic time.

The argument has become that the G8 is too small while the G20 is the right size for today's world.

In theory, that could be true. But many G20 nations don't have the bureaucracy or treasury to take on a full range of international problems, while other emerging nations, many of them successful, are already playing prominent rules in the UN and the European Union.

Toronto, this last weekend in June, may be seeing the dawning of the new world order.

Or maybe not. To grow, the G20 will have to begin occupying the space that other organizations have already staked out. And these organizations are unlikely to just get out of the way.