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OTTAWA, Ont.: Canada has won a key battle to block a global bank tax from being applied uniformly on all members of the Group of 20 countries.

Finance ministers meeting in South Korea on Saturday said in a communique that each country will be free to choose its own way to deal with the issue.

The tax is favoured by several large European countries and the United States as a way to create a fund that would be dipped into if ever systemically important financial institutions faced failure in the future.

But Canada has been arguing that Canadian banks should not be subject to the bank tax since they did not fail during the financial crisis and did not require government money to remain solvent.

At a concluding press conference, Finance Minister Jim Flaherty said each country will choose its own approach.

The communique, released Saturday morning, agrees on the general principle that taxpayers' money should never again have to be used to bail out so-called too-big-to-fail institutions.

But it also recognizes that different countries face different circumstances.

``Recognizing that there is a range of policy approaches, we agreed to develop principles reflecting the need to protect taxpayers, reduce risks from the financial system, protect the flow of credit in good times and bad, taking into account individual country's circumstances and options, and helping to promote (a) level playing field,'' the communique states.

The reference to a level playing field suggests that each country must put into place its own mechanism to deal with future crises.

Canada has favoured creation of a rainy-day fund that each bank would retain on its books and dip into in the event it faced bankruptcy.

Under the Canadian proposal, called ``embedded contingency capital,'' banks would issue bonds that could be converted into equal-value equity upon the order of a federal regulator, thereby re-capitalizing the bank.