A year after the world's governments agreed to tackle the global financial collapse with a coordinated program of big-budget stimulus spending, their top ministers are arriving in the Canadian Arctic Friday in a desperate bid to keep that unity from falling apart.

Detailed interviews with the British and French finance ministers in Paris and London this week reveal that they and their Canadian, U.S., and German colleagues are headed into Iqaluit for a G7 finance ministers' summit with different and often contradictory proposals to regulate finance and prevent another downturn.

“We're all people of good will, but we need to be very careful … because what works with one set of banks or one country does not necessarily work with another set of banks or another country,” Christine Lagarde, the French Finance Minister, said in an interview at her Paris office.

Alistair Darling, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, warned that this could be the last chance to come up with a new bank-regulation system before the G8 and G20 summits of world leaders this summer, also in Canada, and that there is a wide distance between nations on how to proceed.

“I hope the seven of us this weekend can agree on the urgency of actually implementing changes, and persuading the rest of our G20 colleagues that this is a problem that has not gone away, it needs to be sorted out,” he said in an interview at the British Treasury. “But there are issues where we're going to need some further debate.”