This summer, we came to the cottage to discover the Great Quebec Ordure Revolt in flood tide. The garbage bureaucrats, fearful of offending Mother Gaia by further garbage burials, had closed all municipal dumps in the province, and residents were now given 26 clear (and very official) plastic bin-bags, which were to last each family a year in disposing of non-recyclable and non-composted garbage. This madness had, of course, immediately created an underground garbage economy, in which the official garbage bags became a kind of unofficial tender and local ordure entrepreneurs offered, for a fee, to truck your garbage over to slightly-less-insane Ontario, just across the Ottawa River.

Perhaps Fukuyama was wrong, however, and history will recommence in Canada: say, with Vladimir Putin's Russia challenging Canadian sovereignty in the melting Arctic. That, but perhaps only something like that, might concentrate the corporate mind of Canada's post-historical elite and put paid to la guerre des ordures. Meanwhile, I do have some extra, official bags...