International Monetary Fund's Managing Director Christine Lagarde addresses a roundtable discussion in Lagos
International Monetary Fund's Managing Director Christine Lagarde addresses a roundtable discussion in Lagos, December 20, 2011. Lagarde is on her first trip to Africa as the Managing Director of the IMF. Reuters

In a sign that Canada's resistance to paying into an IMF bailout fund for Europe might be fading, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said on Thursday the idea would be generally supported if all the Group of 20 nations agreed to pay in more.

Until now, Canada has rejected the idea of contributing to such a fund, saying Europe has enough resources to deal with its debt crisis and stressing the IMF's first responsibility is to poorer nations.

If at the end of the day all the other G20 countries were going to provide more resources to the IMF and let the IMF deal with part of the situation in Europe, then I think there would be support for that overall because of the fear, quite frankly, around the world of a global economic crisis, he told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp.

No one in Flaherty's office responded to requests for further comment.

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