"Wolid Win" for Canada

Canada's latest report card has the country looking pretty good. Thanks to the current government, in no small part. We managed to get over the G8 and G20 twin-summits with some degree of success. Despite the best-laid plans of protest groups representing people who will always have a favourite topic representing some kind of political or social failure with which to excoriate the government.

Protest groups are still screaming bloody murder at the way their presence was treated by a restrained combined policing-security force in Toronto. Given the provocations, legitimate protesters given to peaceful assembly and their freedom to speak their minds about anything that bothers them, still feel, even though they were well aware they would be partnering with rabidly violent thugs, that they've been ill done by.

Their saintly behaviour as opposed to their opposites, who did their best to ransack shops, smashing bank and coffee shop windows, trashing and burning police cars, should have set them apart, they feel. Which activities the law-abiding, peaceful, though vociferously angry protesters witnessed, took photos of, deplored or thrilled to.

Affiliated, in part, through association; sullied and defamed and detained. Them's the breaks. And cooling-off time in temporary incarceration the result of a police force taunted and provoked and led around by the nose of deceitful pretense at rights and obligations a tad too much. It would be nicely concluded if, somehow, all those disgusting thugs were identified and made to paid the price for their destructive 'guerrilla' tactics.

That aside, and it was a costly aside, the summits themselves appeared to have produced at least a modicum of successful concessions. The maternal and child-care initiative for the developing world will proceed; perhaps it's to our advantage in a moral sense that Canada will be footing the heftiest portion of that bill. It is an honourable initiative and a needed one.

It would have been surprising if the genial company hadn't agreed to collectively denounce North Korea and Iran. As though words of condemnation equate with action geared to produce some effective results. Canada and the United States and the European Union have gone one further than the UN sanctions, however, and that's all to the good. It's a start.

Deficits, financial reform and structural reform will all be worked out. Not necessarily in full accord among the players, but in something certainly resembling it, with each country having an eye on the balance, and tentatively doing it their own way. National sovereignty is not casually ceded to good international fellowship.

It's nice that the final consensus on Canada's performance as host and temporary leader of the pack went so smoothly. Personal interchanges did result in some worthwhile conclusions, all of which auger well for Canada's future relationships with India and China. It's just as well we didn't hear much from or about Turkey.

The rest is up to, as Prime Minister Harper explained, "peer pressure and market pressure".