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The fragile government in Libya was undermined by extremists. There was a hugely destructive war in Gaza with Israel bombing and invading. Numbers of civilian buildings suspected of sheltering missiles were razed. It will take 20 years to rebuild. The on-going war in Syria, protracted by disagreement between the US and Russia on desirable outcome, has caused displacements passing 3 million people. A new well-armed and financed fanatical Islamic army proclaimed a caliphate and set about taking towns and attacking minorities in Northern Iraq. Non islamic minorities had lived for centuries under the more benign rule of the former Ottoman Islamic empire. In an earlier article this year I noted that the violence in Ukraine signalled the inability of the elaborate OSCE diplomatic system to manage the post cold-war conflicts in the greater Europe. By the end of August this was underscored by the recognition that there was a formal Russian army incursion into Ukraine to help people referred to as “separatists.” By the end of August there were also Russian calls for talks about more seccession of territory to Russia to protect Russian-friendly people there. This is reminiscent of the argument used by Hitler who invaded to protect Germans in new countries forged after the 1914-18 war around Germany. The horrors described in central Africa by Samantha Nutt's book a year ago no doubt continue but this summer an epidemic of Ebola virus developed in Liberia. It was hard not to worry about the fragility of the world and the international civilization as I had experienced it. Nuclear weapons remain in great numbers. There are fanatics who can get money and weapons. A major nuclear incident remains a possibility which would punch a hole in the current human civilization. There are bored and angry young men described in Judt's work which I wrote about. They can be inspired to fight and can be willing to die for a bunch of politically promoted fairy stories often called “religion.” Such fears were fuelled by my early summer reading of Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe went to War in 2014 (Harper Perennial 2014). Clark shows how major powers with information and developed diplomacy ended up in a disastrous war. Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Belknap 2014) shows some of the cost of war to the European economies. Europe, in particular France and the UK, had been well endowed with 50% of the globe's capital before the war. That disappeared. The capital and economic level of activity was not restored until close to the end of the 21st century. Empires, centuries old, disappeared during and after that war with huge consequences for the political life of those in central Europe and the Middle East. The Russian, Austrian, Ottoman empires ended and Germany became a republic. The history made it seem possible for something like that to happen again to the relatively tranquil post war Western world I grew up with and have been living in. Following my depressing reading and the miserable summer of wars, the European Union, whose development amazed and impressed me, seemed a very fragile arrangement. It has struggled to reach compromise agreements to respond to faster-moving groups with clear aims - nuclear armed Russia and the well armed youthful Islamic zealots with religious slogans. Yet there is only so much an individual can do ... Then two unexpected small positive shifts took place at the end of summer in the ho-hum land of the beaver. First, the recently elected Premiers of Quebec and Ontario announced they would work together as a team for Central Canada. And they announced an intent to cooperate around energy. Ontario wants an arrangement to buy Hydro Electric electricity from Quebec. This was a surprise for me because I had signed a petition along these lines in church only this spring and I'm not used to positive results! Moreover, Christopher Ragan wrote a positive piece in the business pages of the Globe and Mail Augest 26th under a headline: “Quebec Ontario electricity trade is smart, but not simple.” Quebec has a great deal of low-cost hydroelectricity available to export, and its current U.S. markets are becoming less interested in purchasing long-distance hydro power because of their own development of low-price shale gas. At the same time, Ontario’s economy continues to grow but has few options for increasing its electricity capacity at costs anywhere close to Quebec’s. So the idea of Ontario buying electricity from Quebec is obviously sensible. Ragan then notes the counter arguments to support the Ontario nuclear industry and protectionism: “... It will be argued that Ontario has built a world-class nuclear industry and that refurbishing existing nuclear plants and building new ones is necessary to keep this expertise at home.” Moving into buying Quebec hydro power would challenge the old post war set-up of Ontario’s selling reactors as a means of using Canadian uranium and leaving clients with nuclear waste disposal problems. And the reply letters to the Globe about Ragan managed to get in some digs at the cost of Ontario encouraging renewable power sources without mentioning the large cost of subsidizing nuclear power. For the Premiers to agree to try for this was a great first step. Then this newly forged Quebec-Ontario alliance changed the outcome at the Premiers' annual meeting. Jane Taber and Shawn McCarthy reported in the Globe and Mail 29 August. “At the closing session of their annual conference on Prince Edward Island, premiers released the outline of the Canadian Energy Strategy, which every one of them, including Quebec, has endorsed.” The Premiers' new level of responsibility comes with a realism about the differing provincial needs: “Mr. Couillard [Quebec] had indicated he would support the strategy only if climate change and clean energy were included. At the closing news conference, he thanked his colleagues for their collaboration, noting they 'made the essential link between environment and energy strategy'.” “Ms. Wynne [Ontario] acknowledged there will be tensions between those provinces that want to focus on achieving progress on climate change, and western provinces that are eager to expand oil exports. 'I think that is tension that will continue to exist but the reason it is important to have a Canadian energy strategy is that we’ve got to manage that tension – it exists and we’ve got to deal with the realities of the oil sands, and we’ve got to deal with the realities of transporting that fuel, and we’ve got to deal with the realities of climate change,' she told The Globe.” Finally, Labour Day turned out to be warm at the cottage coop and I went for a swim in the lake. It may have been a miserable cold summer of international disasters, but there are still little windows for hope.
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