International protocol also evolves. We get a lot of our international guidelines from the United Nations, such as, for example, concerning flags. When there's a summit, how do we display flags? UN convention will tell us that it's by alphabetical order in English, unless it's a Francophonie summit. So there are some general guidelines.
As you know, summiteering has become quite the art and is out there a lot, so there are a lot of groups that get together when they put together some of these summits. They have developed some sorts of protocols, and you see these a lot in international meetings. When you're watching on television, you'll always recognize the same type of format—how the flags are displayed, where people are seated, and all of these kinds of protocols.
The fundamentals are always the same because everything comes back to the fact that it's based on precedence. If, at a G-20 summit, you have heads of state and then heads of government, the heads of state will go first, depending on when they were either elected or named to their positions. It's the same thing here in Canada when we have an event—for parliamentarians, who was elected first; who is a member of cabinet, and so on and so forth. These principles always are applied at different levels.
International protocols are very similar. They were all developed many years ago at the Geneva Convention talks, when Europe was deciding on all of their after-war splits. When ambassadors came together, they had to figure out an order. This has been passed along to different offices of protocol, and we have just applied them differently.