Neo-Manichaeism, Technological “Progress” and the Ethics of War

 

“It is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it.”  -  Robert E. Lee

 

Suppose that you were addressing an academic symposium on the subject of the ethics of war and you opened with the above quotation.   Further suppose that immediately after doing so you invited your audience for their thoughts on these famous words.

 

In all likelihood what you would get, would not be insightful reflection upon what the Confederate general-in-chief had actually said, either in agreement or disagreement, but a round of vitriolic denunciation of the man who said it.    It would begin with the small handful in the room who were informed enough to recognize who Robert E. Lee was, but would quickly spread to the rest as everyone present, whether they be faculty, administration, student or alumnus, began to compete with everyone else to demonstrate their woke, anti-racist, bona fides by being the loudest to express their opinion about  just what a horrible person you had just quoted.   You would be told that you should not have quoted him, because he led the South which fought for slavery which was racist and that therefore he must be condemned and cancelled.   

 

Should you be so suicidal as to attempt to correct the mob you had incited, by informing them that their knowledge was woefully inadequate and that the real story of man they were subjecting to a “Two-Minute Hate” was far more nuanced and interesting than they thought, explaining how he was the career military officer to whom Abraham Lincoln had offered command of the Union forces at the onset of the American republic’s great internecine bloodbath, but who turned it down and resigned rather than raise his sword against his own home state, to which he then offered his services, consequently becoming the strategist who delayed the defeat of the Southern states’ attempt to break away from the American union for complex reasons of which slavery was only one for longer than would have been possible under any other general and you yourself will be condemned as a racist, bigot, white supremacist and all sorts of other nasty names that have long ago been detached from any essential relationship with their lexical meaning and turned into verbal weapons.

 

Now, it may have occurred to you that in the preceding paragraphs I have myself done one of the things I have been mocking the academic woke for doing, that is, sidetracked what was supposed to be a discussion of the ethics of war, the topic of both your academic presentation in the above hypothetical scenario and of this essay, by going on about something else entirely.    The similarity is superficial, I assure you, and, oddly enough, you will find that the scenario is actually more relevant to our topic than the quotation itself.    

 

Indeed, as far as the words themselves go, General Lee’s remark does not contribute much to the discussion of the ethics of war.   The first clause can be taken as support for the assertion that war is an evil.   This, however, is neither a controversial assertion nor an ethical one.   It would be the latter if the indefinite article had been omitted before “evil”, but “an evil” is not the same thing as “evil”.  Evil, sans article, can be used as either an adjective or a noun.   If used as the former it expresses an ethical judgement on that to which the adjective applied.   If used as the latter, it expresses the idea of that which is the opposite of goodness, or, in terms more acceptable to orthodox Christianity, the defect that occurs when the goodness of creation is damaged.   When used with the indefinite article, however, it does not necessarily have these moral and metaphysical connotations but means merely something that is undesirable to those who experience it and its consequences.   Earthquakes, floods, fires, etc., are all “evils” in this sense.   In this sense, saying that war is an evil is stating the obvious.   

 

For the purposes of this essay the most important thing about the general’s saying is when he said it.   I don’t mean that the date – the thirteenth of December, 1862 – or the occasion – the Battle of Fredericksburg – are particularly significant, just the war.

 

Was the War between the American States the last pre-modern war or the first modern war?

 

If you ask historians that question you will find that they are divided on the answer.   If it is not obvious enough already, note that “modern” here is the designation of a kind of warfare not of the age in which a war took place.   1861-1865 was far closer to the end of the Modern Age than the beginning and so it would be absurd to even ask the question with the chronological sense of the term in mind.   The case for the war being the first modern war rests upon it having been fought with more technologically complex arms and means of communication and transportation than previous wars.   The case against it rests upon the even greater gap in technological complexity that exists between this war and the earliest wars of the twentieth century – World War I saw the first use of armoured motorized land vehicles, i.e., tanks, the Italo-Turkish War which preceded World War I by three years was the first war to employ airplanes, etc.

 

Regardless of the answer to the question, it is apparent that General Lee’s words were stated during a war that was transitional between the old kind of horses and swords warfare that had been a part of human life since ancient times and the high tech warfare of the twentieth and twenty first centuries.    Now think about what that means with regards to the quotation.    If General Lee was right to say “war is so terrible” in 1862, how much more true is this in the world of 2022 in which devices that can kill thousands of people at once can be dropped for airborne vehicles or shot from launchers a continent away?

 

Twentieth century technological development by making war so much more of an evil than ever before made the ethics of war more necessary than before.   Ethics is serious thought and discussion about human acts and habitual behaviour considered with regards to their rightness and wrongness.   Every aspect of war has been examined over the course of the long historical ethical discussion of war but it has long been apparent that the chief questions to be considered are two, the question of rightness as it pertains to going to war and the question of rightness as it pertains to conducting warfare.   These are the questions expressed in Latin by the phrases jus ad bellum and jus in bello respectively.   Perversely, at the same time that the development of weapons of mass destruction, rapid delivery systems, and everything that makes it now possible to wipe out entire populations from across the world with the push of a button made the ethics restraining and limiting war more important, these ethics were being subverted.

 

Essentially the complex ethical questions of jus ad bellum and jus in bello have been displaced by an over simplistic question of good and evil.   Not the metaphysical and theological question of good and evil.   It is an ontological question – an ontological question, not the ontological question of good and evil, although those asking it demonstrate by doing so that they have much in common with an ancient sect that answered the latter in a way that would be considered heretical by the standards of orthodox Christianity.  It is the question of who the good guys and who the bad guys are.   Or, more precisely, just the question of who the bad guys are because the sort of people who ask this question always assume that they themselves are the good guys.  Again, the way this question is asked it is a matter of ontology rather than ethics.   The good guys are not judged to be the good guys because of the rightness of the actions, the bad guys are not judged to be the bad guys because of the wrongness of their actions.   The good guys are the good guys because that is who they are.   The bad guys are the bad guys because that is who they are.   Identify the good guys and the bad guys and you don’t have to trouble yourself with the question of whether you are justified in going to war with X.    Of course you are.   You are the good guy, X is the bad guy, therefore you are always right to go to war with X, just as he is always wrong to go to war with you or anyone else.   Similarly, you need not be bothered with the question of how you are to rightly conduct war with X.   Since he is the bad guy, you as the good guy, are justified in taking whatever means are necessary to destroy him, whereas everything he does is by definition a war crime.

 

The sort of thinking described in the above paragraph has been prominently on display in the rhetoric of war promoters in every conflict that Western governments have been involved in since the end of the Cold War.    Think about the terms in which Saddam Hussein was discussed in 1991 and again in 2003.   Or Slobodon Milošević from 1993 to 1999.   Or the Taliban in 2001.   Or Vladimir Putin for the last twenty years but especially at the present moment.   It was never enough to say that we had such and such a grievance against these and were prepared to go to war to obtain redress of that grievance.   In each case the foe was depicted as an avatar – avatar in the Hindu sense of the word, i.e., a manifestation of a divine being rather than the gaming sense of a picture accompanying a profile – of evil.   Only so could we justify to ourselves doing everything in our power to destroy them.   The same sort of thinking was evident in the rhetoric of both sides during the Cold War.   Before that the Allies engaged in this sort of thinking in World War II, at least after the Americans joined.  

 

World War II seems to be where it all began.   Germany at the time was under the control of a man who was undoubtedly evil in the adjectival sense of the word described in the fifth paragraph of this essay.   This made it easier for our leaders to paint him as the avatar, the embodiment, the incarnation of evil, even though one of the Big Three, Joseph Stalin was just as evil and the same kind of evil as Hitler.    The fact that this depiction of our wartime nemesis persists to this day, almost eighty years after his defeat, itself shows that a major change in thinking had taken place from one World War to the next.   Sure, there had been plenty of propagandistic atrocity stories told about the Germans in World War I but people knew better then than to take these as Gospel truth and most of them were debunked soon after the war ended.   By contrast, to this day questioning elements of the accounts of what went on in German-occupied Poland during World War II can land one with a hefty gaol sentence in Europe and potentially destroy one’s career, reputation, and life in general in North America.    The contrast is that much stronger when we take into consideration the facts that it was the Soviets who drove the Nazis out of Poland, Poland remained a Soviet puppet state until late in the 1980s, until then we had to rely to a large extent upon the Soviets or Soviet-controlled sources for much of our information about what had happened in Poland, that the Soviets were never known for their trustworthiness and that the Cold War which began almost immediately after World War II ended hardly provided them with an incentive to be more truthful.   Even more to the point, however, was the fact that after the Casablanca Conference in 1943 the American president at the time, who was even more crippled morally and intellectually than he was physically, announced that the Allies would be seeking “unconditional surrender”.   From a strategic point of view this was a particularly idiotic thing to do as Sir Winston Churchill, whom FDR had not consulted before making this announcement and was forced to go along with it or present the world with the image of a divided alliance, knew full well, because it sent the message to the enemy that he must dig in and fight to the very last because he can expect nothing in the way of mercy if he loses.   From the ethical point of view that concerns us here, it is the sort of demand that one would only make if he saw him and his enemy as fighting not a traditional war but a cosmic and apocalyptic one between good and evil, which is precisely how that maniac with a Messiah complex saw it.   How Sir Winston was able to stomach being forced to cooperate with this man and Stalin for so long is one of the great mysteries of the Second World War. 

 

In one last detail of the Second World War we find the technological transformation of warfare itself into an evil of exponentially greater magnitude and the subversion of the traditional ethics of war by the Hollywood formula of good guys versus bad guys coinciding into one.   By the end of the war the Americans had found a way to harness the power of the atom to develop bombs with destructive power that had to be measured in kilotons each of which is the equivalent of a thousand tons of TNT.   Then they used two of them, one on Hiroshima, Japan and the other on Nagasaki, Japan, in August of 1945.   The death toll, almost entirely civilian, was somewhere between one and three hundred thousand.   To date this is the only time nuclear weapons have been used in war.   While some continue to repeat the claim that the death toll would have been higher had they not been used, this is utter nonsense.   After the defeat of Germany Japan began reaching out to General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the Allied forces in the Pacific Theatre, indicating their willingness to surrender and asking no concessions other than the ones they were eventually granted.   Had Roosevelt’s successor Truman followed the advice given him by former American president Herbert Hoover – drop “unconditional surrender”, promise that Emperor Hirohito could keep his throne and would not be dragged before the kind of Soviet-style kangaroo court that the Allies had in mind for the German leaders (see the eighth and final profile in John F. Kennedy and Ted Sorenson’s Profiles in Courage, 1956, for an account of Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft’s brave and lonely opposition to the Nuremberg Trials on the grounds that they abandoned the principles of justice long accepted in the English speaking world, even the United States, for those of the Soviet regime) they could have negotiated peace without becoming the only country to have ever committed the barbarous act of dropping nuclear bombs on cities (see Freedom Betrayed by Herbert Hoover, edited by George H. Nash and published in 2011, long after Hoover’s death).

 

Could this ugly episode have taken place had the development of weapons that could wipe out entire civilian populations not occurred at precisely the moment that those who had developed these weapons had thrown out traditional thinking on the ethics of war and adopted the insane notion, evident in their “unconditional surrender” policy, that because they were the “good guys” they could do whatever they wanted to the “bad guys”?

 

Indeed, it is possible that the development of these weapons is itself the explanation of the abandonment of serious thought about the ethics of war for such a shallow, clownish, Hollywood substitute.   Discussion of the weaponizing of atomic energy had begun before the Manhattan Project or, for that matter, World War II itself and was perhaps the inevitable consequence of atomic research.   It might be worth noting, in this context, the famous 1869 conversation between Marcellin Berthelot, Claude Bernard, and the Goncourt brothers, Edmond and Jules, that the latter recorded in their Journal, in which it was predicted that a century of research in physical and chemical science would bring man to a knowledge of the atom at which point God would come down from heaven, swinging His big set of keys, and telling mankind it is “closing time”.  Modern science had placed mankind on a course that led to the development of weapons of such destructive potential that could not possibly be used in accordance with traditional concepts of justice in war.   Therefore those intent on using them had to replace the latter with something else.  

 

Think about how the World War II paradigm has been applied to all subsequent conflicts.  Adolf Hitler continues to be described in terms similar to those that in traditional Christian eschatology are applied to the Antichrist.   In traditional Christian eschatology, however, the Antichrist, singular, is the final antichrist and the final tyrant, the most evil man to ever walk the face of the earth, a man so fully possessed by the devil that he is basically the incarnation of Satan.   In traditional Christian eschatology there is only one Antichrist, capital A.   His defeat marks the end of history and the Second Coming of Christ.   The point is that if Hitler, evil as he was, was so bad as to warrant this kind of description not only in the propaganda of the day but long after he was gone he would be a historical anomaly.   Yet every foe we have fought since him has been depicted as the “new Hitler”.   Could this be explained by the fact that the genie of nuclear weaponry cannot be put back into its bottle and so this sort of rhetoric has constantly been repeated just in case a “justification” for using it is needed?

 

Today, the Hollywood paradigm of these are the “good guys”, these are the “bad guys”, whatever the former do is right, whatever the latter do is wrong, has been projected even onto conflicts of the past which predated it.    Think about the predictable response of the academic woke to the quotation from Robert E. Lee discussed at the beginning of this essay.   The woke look at the War Between the States from 1861 to 1865 as a war between the “good” North and the “bad” South, basing this entirely upon what they think they know about the aspect of the conflict that pertained to slavery and race.   This was certainly not how the war was viewed at the time, even by the most self-righteous of abolitionists on the Union side.   Nor is this how the conflict was viewed in the period of the generation or so after in which one of the most admirable acts of reconciling a deep societal divide took place as all Americans came to a tacit agreement to honour the heroes of both sides of that war.  That the woke who spend so much of their time in fomenting division between people of different skin colours and ethnic backgrounds see nothing but “racism” and “white supremacy” in such a healing compromise speaks volumes about themselves.

 

How contrary the Hollywood paradigm is to the attitude of the ancients!   Homer’s epic poem the Iliad, composed in the eight century BC, is primarily the story of a falling out that occurred between Agamemnon and Achilles towards the end of the Trojan War.   The Trojan War was the ten year siege of Troy, the capital of the kingdom of Ilium in what is now Turkey, by the Mycenean Greek alliance, that resulted in the total destruction of the city.   Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, was the leader of the Greek side, and Achilles, prince of the Myrmidons, was its greatest hero.  The Ionian poet Homer was himself Greek.   Homer’s poetry was instrumental in shaping the idea of a “Greek” identity that transcended that of the Athenian, Spartan, Cretan, or any of the countless other political identities of the autonomous city-states of which Greece then and for centuries after consisted.   The individual that he most consistently depicts as admirable in his Iliad, however, was not a Greek at all but a Trojan, Hector, the son of Troy’s king Priam, and brother of the far less commendable Paris whose behaviour started the conflict in the first place.   Hector is depicted as the model whom every would-be hero should aspire to emulate.   By contrast Achilles, the protagonist of the story, sits out half of it in a sulky fit then, when he re-enters the battle in a fit of rage over the death of Patrocles, proceeds to desecrate the body of the fallen Hector in a way that brings him a swift rebuke from the gods.   Homer shows him at his best at the very end of the story when he shows clemency to Priam, allows the Trojan king to reclaim the body of his son, and promises to hold back the Greeks until the Trojans have had the time to conduct a proper burial.    Herodotus of Halicarnassus, a fifth century BC Greek who was born and raised in the Persian Empire and became the “Father of History” by writing the account of the wars between the Greeks and the Persians saw no need to demonize the kings of Persia in his history.   Thucydides, who wrote the history of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta later in that same century, a war in which he had been an Athenian general, was more sympathetic to Sparta than his own city.  So was Xenophon, the friend and disciple of Socrates – the only one of these other than Plato whose accounts of their master remain extant – best remembered for his account of his mercenary service under Persian prince Cyrus the Younger, who picked up the history where Thucydides left off.   The Romans were far less generous to their enemies than the Greeks were but they did not demonize them the way the Hollywood-fed West now does.   The greatest enemy that ancient Rome faced in her long rise to empire was Hannibal, the Carthaginian general who from his base in Carthagian-controlled Hispania, marched his massive army of infantry, cavalry, and battle elephants – the pre-modern version of tanks – north to the Rhône valley, before moving south through the Alps to invade Italy where he defeated Rome and her allies in a series of battles taking much of Italy, although ultimately failing to take Rome herself.   Hannibal was the son of Hamilcar Barca, the Carthaginian general Rome had defeated in the first of the Punic Wars.  When Hannibal was nine Hamilcar Barca took him to the temple of Moloch and holding him over the fire made him swear eternal hatred and enmity to Rome.   Yet even he is not depicted by Livy or Polybius in the sort of terms with which we speak of Hitler but was rather spoken of respectfully as a worthy, if mercifully defeated, foe.

 

Some might point to the Old Testament as a counterexample to the above.   While it is true that the Old Testament repeatedly speaks of military defeat as punishment for wickedness this wickedness is understood in terms of the actions of those so punished not the fundamental nature of their being.   This can be seen in the fact that far more often than not it is God’s own people who are on the receiving end of this punishment.   In their initial conquest of the Promised Land, it is true, they are commanded to utterly destroy the seven nations of Canaan and to show no mercy in doing so and this is explicitly tied to specific sins of those nations.   Pretty much everyone else in the region was guilty of these same sins, however, and there was no license given to Old Testament Israel to conquer all of these and similarly wipe them out.   It was not merely a matter of punishing sin.   God did not want His own covenant people to be led away into idolatry, child-sacrifice, and the other abominations of Canaan.   They, of course, failed to follow His instructions and very quickly fell into just these sins leading to the cycle that repeated itself over and over through their history – they fall into idolatry, etc., God raises up a scourge to punish them by military conquest, they repent, God sends them a deliverer, repeat, with the whole process intensifying until the Assyrians and Babylonians not only conquer the Northern and Southern kingdoms respectively, but carry them away out of the land as well.   There is nothing in this that would support God’s people holding the view that the world is divided into “good guys” and “bad guys” with they themselves as God’s people being the “good guys” and everyone else, the nations that they conquered and the nations that conquered them, being the “bad guys”.  

 

When we look at the long ethical discussion of justice as it relates to war from its beginnings in the ancient times just considered through medieval Christian theology right up to the early twentieth century it is apparent that the goal of those engaged in this discussion and hence the purpose of the discussion itself has been to place limits on war so as to minimize the death and destruction it causes.   It is equally apparent that substituting puerile “good guys” versus “bad guys” talk for this discussion has as its purpose the opposite end – that of the removal of such limits as impediments to the use of the new technology of war that makes it easier to wreak more destruction and death from further away.

 

It is difficult to think of anything that more completely puts the lie to the Modern doctrine of progress than this.   What we call “advancement” and “progress” in the technology of war all consists of making war more lethal and destructive while removing those who wreak this death and destruction further from it.   When wars were fought with swords you had to kill your enemy from within the reach of his own sword.   The fighting therefore was much more fair in the pre-woke sense of the word and the virtues traditionally associated with warfare, most especially courage and strength, were indispensable.   Fighting in such a war was a way to test and prove these virtues in oneself and this is probably what inspired the second part of General Lee’s quotation, the part about us growing too fond of war.   If the terribleness of war from the first part of the quotation means that war is an evil, its value in testing courage, strength, and what used to be called manliness before toxic femininity outlawed that concept which drew so many to it meant that it was not an unmixed evil.   When guns were introduced men could kill their enemies from a distance.   There was still a testing of skill – who had the better aim, who could shoot faster – and courage involved.   It was a step that increased the distance between the soldier and the death he wreaked but two soldiers aiming rifles at each other from across a contested field are still a lot closer to two knights fighting with swords and lances than someone sitting behind a computer somewhere miles away, perhaps half the world away, from the buildings he destroys and the hundreds or potentially thousands of people he kills by the press of a button.   That is the generic “he” by the way.   I have seen those who regard this as “progress” celebrate the fact that it eliminates the “sexism” of war because women are just as capable of sitting behind computer consoles and pressing buttons as men.    That puts a whole new spin on Rudyard Kipling’s “the female of the species is more deadly than the male”.    

 

By making war so much more deadly and destructive and so much more remote from those who start it, technological “progress” has made it virtually impossible to adhere to traditional jus in bello standards, such as minimizing harm to non-combatants.  These are sometimes still offered lip service, of course, but this has increasingly become a joke.   Paradoxically, the very thing that makes it so hard to adhere to these standards also makes it all the more necessary that we do so.   This means that it is that much more important to follow jus ad bellum standards.   We cannot do this so long as we continue to follow the Hollywood neo-Manichaeism that has prevailed since World War II.   The sooner we abandon this modern take on an ancient heresy the better.

 

 

Reflections on a Waste of Time

Dominion Election 2021 has come and gone with the result being the restoration of the status quo ante.   This proves that the Conservatives, Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition in both the previous and the new Parliament, were absolutely correct in saying that this election was a colossal waste of time and money and an unpardonable one at that, having been called so soon after the last one and at a time when the public is still in the grip of an irrational paranoid panic because of a public health scare, going on two year's old, stirred up by the fear pornographers of the mass media noise machine, aided and abetted by the politicians and public health mandarins.   Note that in the place of that last part - everything from "grip" on - the Conservatives would have just said pandemic.   My wording is a more accurate description.

Since this means that  the incumbent Prime Minister, Captain Airhead, who occasionally uses the alias Justin Trudeau, gets to keep the job unless the Liberal Party decides to punish him for risking everything in a foolish and failed, egotistical bid for a majority, it is also evidence of the gross stupidity of a large part of the Canadian electorate.   This demonstrates further a point that I have made many times in the past - the universal franchise ideal of classical liberalism just does not live up to its hype and there is much that can be said on behalf of the pre-liberal wisdom that votes should be weighed and not just counted.

Or rather, to soften the judgement of the previous paragraph somewhat, this is what the results of this election would be saying if the election actually had been what almost everyone - the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, the idiotic clown who leads the socialist party, the media commentariat of all political stripes, and most of the public - thought of it as being, that is to say, the election of the next Prime Minister.   That so many Canadians think of our Dominion elections primarily in terms of who the next Prime Minister will be is one of the many unfortunate consequences of the permeation of our culture with imported American Hollywood pop culture.   Every four years Americans vote on who their next President will be.   In our Dominion elections we do not vote for who the next Prime Minister will be.   We vote for who will represent our local constituency in the lower House of the next Parliament.    A Dominion election is the election of the next Parliament, not the next Prime Minister,   The person invited by the Crown to fill the office of Prime Minister - the person who leads the Cabinet of Ministers who carry out the day-to-day executive administration of the government - is the person who commands the most support in the House.   This is either the leader of a party that has won a majority of seats in the House or, in the absence of a majority, the party leader who can convince one or more parties other than his own to back him, usually, but not necessarily, the leader of the party which won the plurality.

I have from time to time heard some people gripe about this and suggest that we should have a separate ballot in which we vote directly for the Prime Minister.   I very much beg to differ with such people.   This would be objectionable, in my opinion, not just because it would make our system more like that of the United States, although that is good grounds in itself for opposing the proposal.   It would also be a step further towards undermining the way our constitutional system is designed to de-emphasize the office and role of Prime Minister.    The Canadians of the present day are sorely in need of a true appreciation of this aspect of our constitution and a better understanding of how a great many of our country's problems stem from a century's worth of effort on the part of the Liberal Party under leaders from William Lyon Mackenzie King to Captain Airhead to subvert our constitution in this very aspect and turn our country into an elected Prime Ministerial dictatorship.

Before proceeding further with that thought, allow me to address those who might object to my characterization of this as a Liberal project by pointing out that the last Conservative Prime Minister also treated the office in this way.   Stephen Harper grew up a Liberal.   He left that party in his twenty's but never really became a traditional Canadian Tory. He was first elected to Parliament as a member of the Western protest party, the Reform Party of Canada.   The Reform Party, of which this writer was also a member in the 1990s, was first and foremost a populist party.  While it affected a small-c conservatism, support for Canada's historical traditions and constitution was never a large part of what it understood by this word, which is a significant part of the reason this writer walked away from it shortly before the completion of the second stage of its merger with the Progressive Conservatives.   Indeed, what it thought of as conservatism was largely indistinguishable from the original platform and policies of the Liberal Party, and, demonstrating, perhaps, its indifference to Canadian history and tradition, it gave itself the name by which the Liberal Party had gone prior to Confederation.   Harper, who was chosen as leader after the completion of the merger, always seemed to be more of a Mackenzie King Liberal than a Macdonald-Meighen-Diefenbaker Conservative.

Our constitution is sometimes called the Westminster Parliamentary system after the Mother Parliament in the United Kingdom from which we inherited the system and on which ours is modelled.   The centuries of history, the most memorable highlight of which was the Magna Carta, by which the constitution of Alfred the Great, which the Norman kings swore to uphold following William's Conquest, evolved into the original Westminster Parliament in a form we would recognize today, produced a concrete actualization of what the ancient Greeks thought of as the ideal constitution.   The mixed constitution, about which Aristotle and Polybius wrote, the former telling how it had been a much discussed ideal even before his day, was regarded by the ancients as the most stable and just constitution.   The three basic constitution-types - the rule of the one, the few, and the many - each had their strengths and weaknesses, and tended to follow a cyclical pattern in which the best form of each would be corrupted over time into its worst form - aristocracy would be corrupted into oligarchy, for example, to use the terms applied to the good and bad forms of the rule of the few - prompting its replacement, usually through violent and destructive means, with one of the other types.   A mixed constitution, the ancients reasoned, in which each of these simple constitutions was incorporated as an element, would balance the weaknesses of each element with the strengths of the others and so be a more stable and less corruptible whole.    

Our constitution is also sometimes called Crown-in-Parliament or King/Queen-in-Parliament depending upon the sex of the reigning monarch.   This expression can be used for our constitution as a whole, although it is more strictly the term for the legislative branch of government.  In our constitution the powers are both united and separated, the union or fusion being ,appropriately, in the institution of the Crown as this is the institution that embodies the ancient "rule of one".   The monarch, the office in which Sovereignty is vested, is the representative of the unified whole, both of the state and the country, and, accordingly, the office is filled by hereditary succession rather than by partisan politics so the officeholder can be above the inherently divisive latter.   The House of Commons is the element that embodies the ancient rule of the many in our constitution.   It is the Lower House of Parliament but, especially in discussions of this nature, is often called by the name of the whole, just as the union of that whole with the Crown in Crown-in-Parliament can mean either the legislative branch of our constitution, as opposed to the executive Crown-in-Counsel and the Judicial Crown-on-the-Bench, or the entire Westminster constitution.   By calling the whole by this name, the emphasis is placed on the two ancient and time-proven institutions, the monarchy and Parliament.

Placing the emphasis on these institutions means that it is not placed on the office of Prime Minister.   This is important because the office of Prime Minister, at the head of the Cabinet of executive Ministers, is one of great power.   The power attached to the office creates the necessity that the officeholder be held accountable for his exercise of that power and that the role of the office be one of humility.    To meet the first need, the Prime Minister is supposed to be strictly accountable to Parliament.   This is why there is an official role for the largest non-governing party as Opposition.   The Opposition's job is to question and challenge the Prime Minister, to hold his feet to the fire and make him give account to the House of Commons for his actions.   One of the roles of the other House of Parliament, the Senate, which is the element corresponding to the ancient rule of the few in our constitution, is to hold the Prime Minister accountable in a different manner, by deliberating on the legislation that passes the House, giving it "sober, second thought", and sending it back to the House if problems are found with it.    If the Prime Minister's relationship with Parliament is supposed to keep him accountable, his relationship with the Crown is supposed to keep him humble.    It is the Queen who as hereditary monarch, above factional politics, represents Canada as a unified whole, and the Governor General who represents the Queen.   While the Prime Minister exercises the executive powers of government, he does so in the name of the Sovereign, and he is supposed to do so in an attitude of humility as the "first servant" suggested by his official title.   This role calls for a kind of modesty that is conspicuously lacking in the present holder of this office, who more than any of his predecessors has rejected the accountability and humility of his office.   A short time before the last Parliament was dissolved he actually took the Speaker of the House to court to challenge a House ruling that he would have to provide Parliament with un-redacted documents about the firing of two researchers from the virology lab in Winnipeg.   This blatant repudiation of full accountability to Parliament ought to have disqualified him and his party from even running in the election.   As for humility, he has treated his office as one of  such shameless self-aggrandizement and self-promotion as to make the Kims of North Korea seem meek and unassuming by comparison.    Upon winning a second minority government, after arrogantly assuming that he would be handed a majority, he claimed absurdly that the electorate had given him a "clear mandate" which utter nonsense indicates that he has become victim to the delusions of his own propaganda.

He would never have been able to get away with any of this if Canadians had a true appreciation for our constitution and its principles.    Making the office of Prime Minister one that is directly elected, and our elections, therefore, even more like American presidential elections, would only make this worse.

There is another change to our system that has been proposed, indeed, far more often than the one discussed above.    Many would like to see us abandon what is absurdly called first-past-the-post for proportional representation as the means of filling the House with elected Members.   This is a change that the current Prime Minister had promised to make when he was first elected with a majority government in 2015.   He did not do so.   Had he done so, he would not be Prime Minister today, because the Conservatives won the popular vote this year as well as in 2019.   Proportional representation would have meant a Conservative government as the result of both elections.    Another difference that proportional representation would have brought about is that Maxime Bernier's populist-libertarian-nationalist party, the People's Party of Canada would have had members elected, at least in this Dominion election.   They received over five percent of the popular vote, double that of the self-destructing Greens who were able to elect two Members, including their leader emeritus although not their new leader.   This sounds like I am making an argument for proportional representation.   A Conservative government, led by Andrew Scheer in 2019, or even by Erin O'Toole this year, despite the latter's gross sell-out to the left, would have been preferable to the Trudeau Liberals.   The presence of the People's Party is desperately needed in Parliament where all currently sitting parties are skewed to the far left and to the idea that every problem requires government action as a solution.   Having said that, while the outcome of proportional representation would have been better in these regards in 2019 and again in 2021, the present system is still the better one.   The current system is based on the idea that the people of a local constituency, being a community or group of communities with particular interests, vote for the person who will represent that constituency in Parliament.   The person elected as Member is supposed to be responsible primarily to the constituency, and to speak on their behalf including all those who voted against him as well as those who voted for him..   In other words, the individual Member is supposed to act towards his constituents in the opposite way to how Liberal governments have acted towards rural areas and especially the prairie provinces, since at least the first Trudeau premiership, that is to say, in a manner that looks a lot like punishing them for voting against their party.   This is a good ideal and standard to guide elected Members.   By contrast, proportional representation would give us a House filled by people who represent only their party, its ideology, and the percentage of the electorate who voted for them.   That is hardly a desirable improvement.   The so-called first-past-the-post is by far the saner and more civilized way of doing things, even if it gives us results that for other reasons we would not prefer.

As stated in the previous paragraph, the ideas of Bernier's People's Party, ludicrously called "far right" by the CBC and its echo chambers in the private media, are desperately needed in Parliament right now.   In his column just before the election, Ken Waddell, who publishes my hometown newspaper the Rivers Banner as well as his own hometown newspaper the Neepawa Banner, and who was at one time considered for the leadership of our provincial Progressive Conservatives, said the following in this regards:

I have often encouraged people in the NDP or Green party to get involved with the Liberals or the Conservatives and bring their ideas forward. The Greens and NDP are not likely ever going to form government. Even less so will the Maverick Party, the Peoples’ Party of Canada or the Christian Heritage Party. They have a narrow list of policies. It would be better if they got involved, truly involved, with one of the two main parties and worked to bring their ideas to the forefront. A lot of good talent in the splinter parties is wasted on tilting at windmills instead of actually bringing about good policies. It’s too bad, really, as there are some good people and good ideas outside of the Liberal and Conservative parties, but the ideas will never see the light of day hidden in the splinter groups. God bless those who toil for the smaller parties, but I think their time and talents are being wasted.

I remember when Charley Reese of the Orlando Sentinel used to make this argument about third parties other than the Republicans and Democrats in the United States.   The argument was much stronger in that context because the American system is designed to be a two-party system, stacked against anyone other than the Republicans or Democrats..   Our system is not designed that way as seen in the number of times there have been minority governments that can only govern when propped up by one or more parties other than either itself or its main rival which is in Opposition.    There is, however, another problem with Mr. Waddell's suggestion here.   While the Greens and NDP might be able to get away with putting their ideas forward  as Liberals since the latter have largely incorporated the agendas of the former, nobody would be able to do as he suggests with the ideas of the Maverick, People's, or Christian Heritage Parties in either the Liberals or the Conservatives.    Both of these parties strictly police their members to keep just these very ideas out.   The Conservative Party, under the present leadership, is in some ways worse than the Liberals in this regards.   Whether we are talking about social conservatism of  the type associated with the Christian Heritage Party or libertarian opposition to public health tyranny such as the People's Party has been promoting, Erin O'Toole has expelled Members over these ideas and severely whipped those allowed to remain in caucus so as to make them afraid to speak their minds.  The present Liberal and Conservative leaders both govern their own parties the way the Liberals have for a century now wanted the country run, as an elected dictatorship.    For this reason, the option proposed by Mr. Waddell is simply not available.

Don't Pull Down the Post!

I never thought former Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau was as smart as his journalist and academic groupies made him out to be. There is a huge difference between an intellectual and being intelligent and Trudeau was the former rather than the latter. Compared to his son, however, Trudeau the Elder was a genius, albeit an evil one.

Since taking over his father’s old role as leader of the Liberal Party Justin Trudeau has had a habit of sticking his foot in his mouth and otherwise talking and acting like a complete moron. This week, however, he outdid himself with his 32 point plan to “restore democracy” in Canada. While some of the points have merit, most, like the goal of greater gender parity are utter foolishness, and the one which we will be concentrating on here is absolute insanity.

Before turning to that point, however, it must be said that it is not democracy that needs to be restored in Canada so much as freedom. Democracy and freedom are not the same thing nor do they necessarily go together. The idea that democracy and freedom go together like a knife and fork is an idea that has strong roots in the American tradition but which Canadians have traditionally rejected since the days of the American Revolution when the Loyalists chose to remain loyal to the Crown rather than jump on the republican bandwagon. Alexis de Tocqueville warned our American friends, after his visit to the United States in the nineteenth century, that democracy can potentially be the basis of the greatest tyranny of all, the “tyranny of the majority” as the history of his own country’s democratic revolution, begun fifteen years after that of the Americans ended, so well illustrates. Far superior to the modern ideal of democracy, is the classical ideal of the mixed constitution, as explained by Aristotle and Polybius, in which the three basic simple forms of government – monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy – are combined and balanced. That, of course, is exactly what our traditional form of government, the Westminster system consisting of the monarchy, Senate, and elected House of Commons embodies, and it is this system that historically and traditionally went together with and safeguarded freedom and justice in Canada.

The point of Trudeau’s plan to “restore democracy” that has attracted the most attention is his announced intention to abolish “first past the post” by the next election. It is this point to which we will now turn to show that when Ezra Levant dubbed Justin Trudeau the “shiny pony” a few years ago, it was an unfair slur on ponies everywhere.

First past the post is an expression borrowed from horse racing for our traditional way of determining the outcome of elections. The House of Commons is made up of the representatives of constituencies or ridings. In each constituency when the general election is called – or if for some reason there is a by-election for that particular riding – many candidates are allowed to run against each other for the right to sit in the House as that area’s representative. They may run as representatives of a party or independents. Sometimes the outcome of the election is a majority in which one candidate receives over half of the votes. Other times the outcome of the election is a plurality in which the vote is so divided that no one candidate receives over half. In this case, the candidate who receives the highest number of votes, wins the election.

So what are the objections to this?

Well, one common objection is that by awarding the election to the person with the highest number of votes the system is going against the wishes of the majority of voters who voted for someone other than the winner. While this objection seems to have merit upon first hearing it, you must realize that in a plurality election this would be the case regardless of which of the candidates is determined to be the winner. Proposed alternatives, such as multiple round elections until a clear majority is achieved or ranking the candidates on the ballot in order of preference rather than picking one would have the effect of making elections more expensive, more complicated, and with more factors for the unscrupulous to manipulate, without really eliminating the objection seeing as the person who wins the final round will still be someone the majority voted against in the first round and a ranked preference ballot can still return a winner who did not receive a majority of first preference votes and who therefore is still technically someone the majority voted against, all in order to fix a system that isn’t really broke, on the grounds of an objection that ultimately reduces to the idea that an election should be determined by its negative outcome, the most votes against, rather than its positive outcome, the most votes for.

Another common objection is that under this system the percentage of seats awarded to a party in the House of Commons is not the same as the percentage of the popular vote that party received. The popular vote is the accumulated vote of all voters in all ridings across the country. A small party, with voters scattered across the country, may win one or no seats, while receiving a comparably larger percentage of the popular vote. The Green Party, for example, won only the seat of its leader Elizabeth May in the 2011 election, although it received just under four percent of the popular vote. In the previous election it won no seats although it received just under seven percent of the popular vote. Supporters of the Green Party and other fringe parties regard this as being unfair and call for a system of proportional representation, in which the makeup of the assembly by party percentage is representative of the popular vote. That proportional representation would have the obvious effect of making the House of Commons even more ideological and partisan than it already is, and that this would not be a good thing, never seems to occur to such people.

What all of this shows is that while we are hardly in need of having the democratic element of our government fixed by a man who like his father is an admirer of Chinese Communist dictatorship, we are in urgent need of having our educational system, especially when it comes to the teaching of civics, repaired. The popular vote is a meaningless abstraction. When an election is called, it is not the ideological or partisan make up of the House of Commons for which people are supposed to be voting. They are supposed to be voting for the representative of their constituency. Thus, it makes no sense for a person to say “I’m not represented in Parliament because my party didn’t win a seat”. You are represented in the House of Commons as someone living in a constituency and not as a supporter of a party or a subscriber to an ideology – and this is a good thing. Your representative is the Member for your riding, whether you voted for him or not. Even though I can’t stand the jackass and his bloody socialist party, I know full well that Pat Martin is my representative in the House of Commons, because he is the Member for the constituency in which I live, as much as I find that fact intolerable.

Our Members of Parliament need this basic civics lesson as well. When a party puts forward a candidate in an election, he is running for the right to represent his constituency in Parliament on behalf of his party. This means that he is supposed to represent his party to his constituency in the election, but his constituency in the House if he wins. In other words, when campaigning for the votes of a riding, he is supposed to explain that he belongs to such and such a party which stands for such and such a platform. When sitting in the House as a Member, he is supposed to speak on behalf of the people who live in his constituency, including those who did not vote for him, work on their behalf, and protect their interests.

Of course the way the system works in practice does not always or perhaps even often resemble the way it is supposed to work but it would be no improvement to remove the reminder, once every so many years, that our politicians are supposed to be working on behalf of their constituency and tell them that they will now be sitting in Parliament only as representatives of their party and ideology. It is sheer madness to think otherwise.

Justin Trudeau, you can stick that in your joint and smoke it.

Senate Reform

The Dominion of Canada was established as a country in 1867. We refer to this event as Confederation because, like the American republic and like the short-lived Confederate States of America founded by the seceding Southern states in 1861, Canada was founded as a federal country, a union of smaller regions with their own governments, under a central government. The founding fathers of the United States had been divided over the question of whether their new country was to be a federal alliance of sovereign states under a weak central government or as a unitary nation under a strong federal government. This division persisted and led to the division of the country almost a century later and to the war fought between the North and the South. The Confederation of the North American provinces of the British Empire into the Dominion of Canada took place in the immediate aftermath of the American Civil War and the Fathers of Confederation were determined to learn from the example of our American neighbors. The federal government established by the British North America Act was a strong central government. It was a Parliament modeled after the Parliament in London, consisting of the monarch, represented by a vice-roy, and an upper and lower house. The lower house, like its equivalent in London, is called the House of Commons, and is composed of representatives who are each elected to represent a constituency. The leader of the party with the largest number of seats in the House of Commons is ordinarily named Prime Minister and asked by the vice-roy to select a cabinet of ministers and to form an executive government for Her Majesty. The upper house of the Canadian Parliament is called the Senate.

Do not let the name fool you. The Canadian Senate is not modeled after the upper house of the American republic, although, as we shall see, there are those who think that it ought to be. It is modeled after the British senate, the House of Lords, but adapted to fit the Canadian situation. Canadian senators are appointed by the monarch or her representative , upon the recommendation of the government, to what is essentially a life peerage minus the title. Or at least it used to be. Since 1965 senators have been forced to retire their seats when they reach the age of 75, but otherwise, the Senate remains a House of Lord, minus the titles, minus the seats for bishops, and minus hereditary peers.

Of the three parts of our Parliament, the Senate is probably that which is least respected and least understood. The lack of respect for this institution comes from the fact that appointment to the Senate is perceived to be largely a matter of political patronage and cronyism, a reward for service to the political party in power rather than to the country. There is, unfortunately, a great deal of truth in this perception. When the Liberal Party is in power vacant seats in the Senate tend to be filled by Liberal Party supporters and when the Conservative Party is in power it is their adherents who are sent to the Red Chamber. The lack of respect for the Senate generated by this perception, however true or false it may be, in turn contributes to the lack of understanding of the role and significance of the Senate. Why do we have a Senate? What good does the Senate do? Is it good for anything except providing large salaries from the public treasury for friends of the Prime Minister? These are all questions that are commonly asked by those who call for the Senate to be abolished or reformed.

For reform of any sort to be salutary, however, it must start with understanding rather than ignorance. The reforms proposed by those who ask the kind of questions mentioned above usually display ignorance. The reforms are typically in the direction of a more democratic Senate, one whose members are elected rather than appointed. Even those who believe Senate reform to be a waste of time and call instead for its abolition do so with the goal of making Parliament more democratic, for if the upper house were abolished that would leave only the democratically elected lower house. Yet the problem of appointments being awarded for support of a party rather than service to the country is largely caused by the appointment process being under the control of the Prime Minister and this in turn is the result of the popular modern idea that all real government power must be in the hands of officials elected by the people. While governors of all sorts have a tendency to bestow public honours, appointments, and funds upon their friends rather than those who might deserve them more this tendency is exacerbated among democratic politicians.

To understand the role our Senate is supposed to play we must understand the principle it is supposed to represent and the ideal that is supposed to inspire it. To understand these things we need an appreciation of how our Parliament embodies the ancient concept of a mixed government. This concept goes back to the philosophers of ancient Athens. Plato and Aristotle recognized three simple forms of government – the rule of the one, the rule of the few and the rule of the many. These simple forms could be either good or bad depending upon whether the ruler(s) governed for his/their own sake or for the good of the whole society. If government was in the hands of one person, the philosophers called him a king if he ruled for the public good and a tyrant if he ruled for his own sake. When government is in the hands of the few, it can be either aristocracy, the rule of the best, or oligarchy, the rule of a selfish clique. Government of the many, is, at its best, democracy, and at its worst, ochlocracy or mob rule. Each of these forms, Aristotle argued, was unstable and there is a historical cycle in which states move from one form to another. A better and more stable constitution, he theorized, would be one which combined two or more of the good forms. (1)

This is exactly what the parliamentary government, evolved in Britain, and inherited by Canada, is. It combines all three simple constitutions. It includes a sovereign monarch, an aristocratic upper house, and a democratic lower house. The advantages of a mixed government are many. One, is that the strengths of a king are not identical to those of an aristocracy or a democracy, nor are those of the latter identical to each other. A constitution that includes all three, however, combines the strengths of each. These strengths augment each other, while tending to counteract the weaknesses of each form. A mixed constitution also tends to be much more stable than any of the simple constitutions because if one of its elements starts to be perverted into its bad form, there are two others to provide a check. For a similar reason, the framers of the American republic separated the executive, legislative, and judiciary branches of their government.

The Senate, therefore, exists to be the aristocratic part of our government. There are two objections to this assertion which might immediately come to mind.

The first is that while the Fathers of Confederation used the British House of Lords as the model for our Senate they left out all the aristocratic elements – hereditary seats, titles of nobility, etc. This is true, but it misses the point. All of these things are the external trappings of a particular form of aristocracy, that developed in agrarian Europe under feudalism. They are not the defining, essential, characteristics of an aristocracy.

The second objection is that if we think of aristocracy, not in terms of landed estates, hereditary privileges and lofty titles, but in terms of the ideal expressed in the term, “the rule of the best”, then does this not seem an absurd label to apply to our Senate?

The answer to the second objection is that while it would be absurd in the extreme to describe the current Canadian Senate as being literally an aristocracy, it is not so absurd to say that the Senate occupies the aristocratic position in our constitution and that its purpose, however well or poorly it may actually fulfill that purpose, is to embody the aristocratic ideal.

Before elaborating on that there is a point I would like to make about realism and idealism. Realism and idealism are not rival belief systems but are rather different ways of approaching ethics, politics, history, and the world. The realist prefers to think about and discuss things as they are. The idealist prefers to think about and discuss things as they ought to be. Like Aristotle’s basic constitutions, realism and idealism each come with a good and a bad form. Realism at its best is a willingness to take reality as it is, a mixture of the good and the bad, and to work with it. The worst form of idealism is the polar opposite of this, an instance that reality be forced to conform to one’s vision of how things ought to be. There is a better form of idealism, however, in which we look to ideals, not as a blueprint for the reconstruction of reality, but as a source of inspiration as we strive to excel. Just as the worst form of idealism is the polar opposite of the best form of realism, so the worst form of realism is the opposite of the better kind of idealism. Realism at its worst, is the drive to debunk, a refusal to allow to oneself or to the others, the comfort and inspiration that can be derived from ideals. The “ideals” of the worst kind of idealists are not true ideals because they are inevitably a flawed vision of what ought to be which, when put into practice, do not improve reality but make it worse. The “reality” of the worst kind of realists is not true reality because it fails to recognize or respect the need for ideals and inspiration that is a basic component of human nature.

The constitution of parliamentary monarchy which we inherited from Great Britain and which the Fathers of Confederation adapted to our own country’s needs is a double blessing to Canada, in that it is both a mixed constitution and one that is backed by the prescriptive authority of a tradition much older than our country. The presence of an institution in the aristocratic position in our constitution is an important part of that blessing. It would be better if that institution more closely resembled the aristocratic ideal but by filling the position the Senate still performs one of the most important roles of an aristocracy in a mixed constitution, i.e., that of providing a check and balance to democracy.

William Gairdner illustrated this aspect of the mixed constitution by referring to the inner struggle between the emotions and reason in the human soul. The passions war against each other, “with the cool head of reason making the best choice after the heat of emotion has passed.” Therefore:

Putting these two concepts together in a single parliament was meant to provide us with something better than mere democratic impulsivity: the warring factions of “the People.” In other words, the whole purpose of having an upper house is that it is intentionally not controlled by the same partisan emotional politicking that stirs the people below: the commoners. And there is no doubt the metaphor of the human being does suggest that raw emotions are more animal, more common, grip us with passion and deceive us, and therefore are lower in value than calm deliberation and reason. That is why under this theory, the Senate most definitely ought not to be an elected body. The democratic voice of the people should still be heard, of course, but it should be a voice filtered, checked, and disciplined by cooler heads above the fray. (2)

This concept, of an upper house that injects calmness and reason into the political process, as opposed to the emotions and appetites released in democracy, points to the lexical meaning of the word “senate”. The first institution to be called by this name was, of course, the Roman Senate. The Roman Senate, which developed into the legislative body of the Roman Republic, began as a council of advisors to the Roman kings consisting of the patriarchs of the Roman gentes (large extended kinship units). The idea of such a council was not original with Rome but was derived from an older tradition, one probably as old as human society itself. That tradition, as well as the age of many of the patriarchs who made up the Senate, was suggested by that body’s title. The word “senate” is derived from the Latin word for “old man”. That a community should be either led by its elders, or by leaders who act on the advice of the community’s elders, is an ancient tradition. The reason for the tradition is that wisdom, which is the ability to consistently make right decisions and the habit of governing one’s emotions with one’s reason, is learned from experience and therefore associated with age. The traits of being rash, impetuous, and easily swayed by emotion, are more often associated with youth.

The very word “senate”, then, would seem to contain an ideal – the ideal of government by wisdom, or at least government advised by wisdom. This ideal happens to correspond very nicely with the ideal attached to the aristocratic position in a mixed constitution, the ideal of emotion and will governed by reason. This correspondence would seem to be itself ideal because this is the position our Senate happens to fill.

The problem, as many of you are no doubt itching to point out, is that a strong case can be made that neither ideal is well reflected in the Senate as it actually is. Now, as was pointed out above, having a senate to fill the aristocratic position in our constitution is in itself beneficial even if the upper house does not display its ideals very well. It stands to reason, however, that it would be even more beneficial if the Senate did live up to the ideals it is supposed to represent. This would seem to suggest that Senate reform of some sort might be appropriate and it also provides us with insight into what such reform, if it is to be salubrious to the nation’s health, ought to accomplish. The right kind of Senate reform will be reform which helps the Senate to better reflect the ideals it embodies.

We also see, in this, a major problem with existing proposals for Senate reform. The same problem exists with many of the reforms proposed, and in some cases actually enacted, for the House of Lords in the United Kingdom over the last century, especially those of the bill most recently proposed. The problem is that these proposals consist of reforms that would actually move the Senate further away from the ideals it represents and make it more democratic.

In Canada, the most discussed proposal for reforming the Senate, has been the Triple-E model. The three e’s stand for Equal, Elected, and Effective. Those who wish to see this reform accomplished believe that the provinces should each be equally represented in the Senate, that the Senators should be chosen by popular election, and that the powers of the upper house should be enhanced to make it more effective as a legislating body. What all of this amounts to is a proposal that we replace our Senate with one which is modeled after the American Senate.

There are many problems with that proposal. It is not that the American Senate is a bad institution. It is an institution, however, which is designed to function within the context of the American republican constitution, a constitution which in turn was designed to fit the United States of America. Just as the Canadian Senate would not suit the American constitution so the American Senate would not function near as well were it to be transplanted into the Canadian parliamentary constitution. The constitution of the American republic was designed to incorporate the need for local representation, state representation, and representation of the people as a whole. The House of Representatives consists of Congressman whose job it is to represent their local district, the Senate consists of Senators who represent the state which elected them, and the President, who is elected by a general vote that is mediated by the College of Electors, has the job of representing the people as a whole. The role of the American Senator as the federal representative of his state arises out of the fact that the American federal republic was conceived of as a union of states which each possessed sovereignty prior to their entry into the union. This fact is reflected in the very name of the American republic – the United States of America. A state is a sovereign political unit.

The relationship of the provinces to the federal government in the Dominion of Canada is completely different and always has been. A province is not a sovereign state, and the provinces of Canada were never conceived of as having possessed, prior to Confederation, the sovereignty which the American states hypothetically possessed (3) prior to their union into the American republic. The role of a Canadian Senator, therefore, does not and cannot include the role, of representing in the federal government, a political unit that was sovereign prior to the establishment of the federal government.

Now so far in our discussion, we have addressed the proposal for an American-style Senate and given reasons why this kind of a Senate would not suit Canada. We have not yet addressed the issues that led to the proposal. A constitutional argument against a Triple-E Senate is not an argument that these issues should be ignored or dismissed, although it is an argument that a different solution ought to be sought.

The call for a Triple-E Senate began in the western provinces, particularly the province of Alberta. These provinces believed that they were being treated unfairly by the federal government. Far too often this belief was correct. This was especially true when the Liberal Party was in power and particularly during the premiership of Pierre Eliot Trudeau who combined his mistreatment of the western provinces with insufferable arrogance and a heavy-handed manner. His National Energy Program was the catalyst for the western populist demand for a Triple-E Senate.

There is a great deal of irony in the fact that the resentment of and opposition to the N.E. P. that gave birth to the demand for a Triple-E Senate was combined with populist rhetoric borrowed from American civil mythology, contempt for Canada and her constitution, and a desire to make Canada more closely resemble the United States. The N.E.P. was not constitutional by the terms of the British North America Act (4), the Trudeau government which was responsible for the N.E.P. was completely disrespectful of Canada’s traditions and did a tremendous amount of violence to our constitution, and the idea of making Canada more “American” has historically been part of the agenda of the Liberal Party. Furthermore, the rightly despised Trudeau was a huge believer in Rousseau’s concept of the sovereign volonté générale of the nation, a foundational concept of modern absolute democracy, (5) and an elected Senate would be a step in the direction of that very kind of democracy. The irony reaches its peak, however, in the fact that the demand for a Triple-E Senate in Canada has come largely from groups considered to be on the right (6), despite the fact that contempt for the traditions and constitution of one’s country and a desire for more democracy are fundamentally anti-conservative ideas. In the United Kingdom, the calls for reforming the House of Lords to conform to modern democratic ideals usually have come from the Labour Party on the left, although the most recent proposal was put forward by a Conservative Party that seems to have lost its way.(7)

Clearly the issue of fair representation for all regions and provinces in the federal government is an important one. The solution, however, must be consistent with a respect for Canada’s traditions and her constitution. The Triple-E Senate is not that, and is therefore not the proper solution to this problem.

Nor is it the answer to the question of how the Senate could be reformed in such a way as to help it better embody the ideals it represents. It is not the answer to this question both because it would inject a foreign element that is better suited to another constitution, i.e., the American republican constitution, and because it would turn one of the elements of our constitution that is supposed to balance and check democracy into a democratic element. Not only would this undermine the whole point of having a mixed constitution it could potentially undermine the democratic element in that constitution. William Gairdner explains:

Now let’s suppose that this impetuous democratic thrust is successful in Canada. What could the result be? One result, I fear, is what might be called a “conflict of legitimacy,” under which, if both houses are elected, each can make a justifiable case that it is thereby the only true (the truest?) representative of the people’s will. For if we do end up voting for both, which one could we say was, after all, indeed the truest? For make no mistake, in a struggle over a piece of legislation crucial to this nation’s future, we could very well end up with just such a conflict of legitimacy, expressed or implied. That is the very structure of such an arrangement in which both houses claim to represent the people directly. (8)

If this hasn’t been a huge problem in the United States, where both houses and the president are elected, it is because of the fact, already mentioned, that it is well understood in the American republican constitution, that the representatives, senators, and president are not elected to represent the same people in the same way.

If the purpose of Senate reform is to help the Senate better reflect its ideals and serve its purpose in our constitution, then the place to look for inspiration for that reform, would be to the institution our Senate was modeled after – the British House of Lords.

Before making any specific proposals I should point out what I do not mean by saying this. I do not mean that we should make seats in the Senate hereditary or that we should attach a graded scale of honorifics such as Duke, Marquess or Earl to those positions. I do not say so because I think there is anything wrong with either hereditary seats, ranks, or titles. I am glad that our Head of State is someone who has inherited her position and that she possesses several titles. The hereditary principle, which reflects a basic truth about human nature and society, i.e., that the family is prior to the individual, is not very well appreciated in our modern liberal era, nor is the hierarchical principle much appreciated in the age of equality, which is a pity because these principles are at least as valuable as those few still honoured in the day and age in which we live. All that notwithstanding, hereditary seats, ranks, and titles, were left out of our Senate, even though it was modeled on the House of Lords, by the Fathers of Confederation for a reason. To understand that reason we need to understand the reason these things were present in the House of Lords in the first place.

Britain’s constitution was not something that was drawn up by a committee in accordance with their best understanding of political science. The House of Lords was not placed in the British Parliament because someone had read Aristotle, Polybius and Cicero and concluded that Britain needed an aristocratic element to balance a mixed constitution. The British parliament gradually evolved over a long period of history and the established House of Lords within that parliament developed out of the historical power exercised by Britain’s feudal aristocracy. In other words the political institution – the House of Lords – was built upon the foundation of a social class – the feudal aristocracy. A country’s established political structure is not the same thing as its social structure but the two do not and ought not to exist in isolation from each other either. Since Britain’s senate was historically drawn from its feudal aristocracy it is natural that the outward trappings of the political institution would correspond with those of the social class.

Canada is not a country with a feudal history – at least not in the same way that Great Britain is. Our history enabled us to inherit and benefit from the political institutions of British parliamentary monarchy but our social structure developed in a different way from Britain’s. When it came time to establish our country and its Parliament, our social structure was not topped by the same kind of titled feudal aristocracy that had originally formed the House of Lords in Britain. We would have had to have created such a class overnight in order to draw upon it to fill our upper house with titled, hereditary, lords. Such a class, however, is not something that you can artificially engineer, especially in an industrial era.

I do not mean, of course, that we did not have a ruling class, in which our upper social and economic classes overlapped with our political leadership. That such a class will exist is inevitable in all societies. As Gaetano Mosca put it:

In all societies—from societies that are very meagerly developed and have barely attained the dawnings of civilization, down to the most advanced and powerful societies—two classes of people appear—a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism. (9)

The nature of Mosca’s “political class” or “ruling class”, however, will vary from country to country depending upon the nature of its social and political structures. The ruling class that developed here was different from that which developed in Britain and so the Fathers of Confederation, when adapting the House of Lords to the Canadian situation, left out those elements which arose naturally from the kind of ruling class Britain had, a class which could not be artificially replicated here.

So if I am not suggesting that we make Mike Duffy into a Duke, what kind of reforms do I think might be reasonable based upon the example of the House of Lords?

The first two suggestions need to be considered together because they are interrelated. The first would be to eliminate the salaries of Senators, and the second would be to update and increase the property requirements for Senators. Such reforms look for inspiration to the body our Senate was modeled after – members of the House of Lords are of independent means and do not receive salaries, although they have expensive accounts. They would also serve the same practical purpose of elevating the character and increasing the public-mindedness of the Senators. One of the most widely recognized problems with our Senate is that appointment to it is treated as a cushy reward for the Prime Minister’s friends. If we really wish to do something about this, in a way that is consistent with the tradition our constitution is derived from, the way to go about it is to eliminate pecuniary reward for the job of Senator. For this to be practical it would require that the Senators have sufficient alternative means of living.

The Fathers of Confederation had this in mind when they designed our Senate. It is for this reason that they set property requirements for Senators. The fourth requirement under Section 23 of the British North America Act was that “His Real and Personal Property shall be together worth Four thousand Dollars over and above his Debts and Liabilities.” That requirement has not been amended out of the constitution and still stands as originally written. (10) The base salary of a Senator, however, is now thirty three times that amount, $132, 300. (11) This combination, of a property qualification from the nineteenth century that has not been updated to reflect inflation and a salary that is much higher than most people make, accomplishes the exact opposite of the goal of finding statesmen who will govern with the long term interest of the public in mind rather than the lining of their own pocketbooks. It would be far more conducive to that goal to eliminate the salary or at the very least reduce it to a pittance and to increase the property qualification so that prospective Senators must own enough income-generating property to live off of comfortably while serving in the Senate.

Now there is a number of related objections that many people have to this kind of proposal or at least to the second part of it. Property requirements, they say, are elitist and exclusionary. They discriminate against the poor and to increase those requirements would be to increase that discrimination. To require that Senators have enough income-generating property to live off of without a salary would reserve the entire upper house for the rich, creating a plutocracy.

Those who raise such objections make an awful lot of assumptions in doing so. For these objections to have any sort of validity, for example, we would have to accept that there is something wrong with elitism, exclusion, and discrimination. Perhaps there is, but that is a moral position that is more often asserted than argued. Arguments could be made to the contrary, but even if we were to concede the point and agree that these assumptions are valid, we are left with the question of whether the negatives identified in these objections outweigh the positives of the proposals. Is it more important that positions of power be distributed “fairly” between the rich and the poor or that those positions be filled with people who will consider the position a responsibility to be undertaken for the good of the res publica rather than a cushy reward for past service to a party or an opportunity to enrich oneself at the public expense?

Surely the sane answer is that the latter is more important than the former. Plutocracy, in which wealth and power are joined, is as inevitable as the rule of the elite. These things have always been present, are present in all societies, and always will be present. Human societies cannot be organized so as to eliminate these things and those that have attempted to eliminate these things have only made them more pronounced. Think of the example of Communism. Communism was committed to establishing a classless society in which all men were equal, held all things in common, contributed to the best of their ability, and received according to their need. What it ended up establishing was a police state, governed by the Communist Party elite, while the masses lived in slavery and utter poverty.

That plutocracy and the rule of elites cannot be eliminated from human society is a truth formally recognized in modern times by Machiavellian realists and informally recognized throughout the history of Western civilization in traditions which sought to instill a sense of public responsibility in rich and powerful elites. This is one of many areas where ancient tradition displays a greater wisdom than modern rationalism. Rather than try to eliminate that which cannot be eliminated in the pursuit of an unreachable utopian dream, ancient tradition took reality, in which wealth and power go together like a hand in a glove, and sought to make the best of it by tying both wealth and power to service and responsibility. Ancient tradition has lost most of its influence as modern rationalism has reshaped the Western world and one of the casualties has been the association of service and responsibility with wealth and power. The twentieth century saw a struggle between two modern ideologies, that of liberalism which sought to place wealth and power on the foundation of the merit of the individual and that of socialism which defined wealth and power as social evils to be eliminated. Needless to say, such an ideological climate was not a healthy one for instilling a sense of noblesse oblige among the wealthy and powerful, all the more so seeing as both liberalism and socialism are hostile to the family and to the church, especially a strong and stable ecclesiastical establishment, the very institutions which served to instill a sense of duty in the old elites.

The proposal, to eliminate salaries for Senators and increase the constitutional property requirements so that only those with an independent living can serve in the Senate, would contribute significantly towards lessening one of the largest complaints against the Senate and towards the goal of filling the Senate with public-minded statesmen, and this outweighs the objection that such a proposal would be discriminatory. There is a practical objection, however, that if such a reform were accomplished we might not be able to find anybody to fill the seats in the Senate! This would suggest that if the proposal is to succeed it would need to be accompanied with a cultural revival of the ancient tradition of diluting plutocracy with a sense of civic duty and obligation.

A third suggestion for Senate reform would be to remove the appointment process from the control of the Prime Minister’s office. Senators are appointed by the Queen through her representative the Governor General. The choice of who is appointed, however, belongs to the Prime Minister. This should not be. Not only does this contribute to the problem of Prime Minister’s treating Senate seats as gifts to their friends and rewards for service to their party it is fundamentally at odds with the role the Senate is supposed to play in the Parliament. How can the Senate be an effective balance to the democratic House of Commons, an effective check against abuses in that House, if the government elected in the House controls who goes into the Senate?

Clearly the Crown needs to get advice as to who to appoint to the Senate from a different source than the Prime Minister and his cabinet, or the House of Commons in general. Where then, should this advice come from? Who should the advisors be?

The model of the House of Lords will not provide us much help here, I’m sorry to say. It was originally filled with people who had inherited their titles and seats, or whom the monarch had newly raised to the nobility by giving a hereditary title and seat as a reward for public service, usually of a military nature. Due to meddling by liberal and socialist governments, the House of Lords is now filled more with life peers than hereditary peers and the life peers are appointed through pretty much the same process as our Senators. None of this, I might add, has improved the quality of the House of Lords. (12)

For this proposal to work, the Governor General will require an advisory committee for the selecting of Senators. It is easier to say who should not be on that committee than to say who should be on it. The committee itself must not contain anyone from the Prime Minister’s Office, the cabinet, or the House of Commons, or anyone chosen by any of those bodies. This leaves a number of options available. It might be considered a conflict of interest to have the Senate itself contribute anyone to the selection committee but it would not be as big of a conflict as already exists in having the government in the lower house do the choosing. The reasons I gave earlier for why the direct election of Senators to represent the provinces would not work in our constitution the way the direct election of senators to represent the states works in the American constitution would not rule out having the provincial governments contribute or choose members for the selection committee. If each province were asked to contribute two members to the committee, with the stipulation that one must be from the party in power in the province and the second from the provincial opposition, this might even minimize partisan bias in the choice of Senators.

It is not so important how the selection committee be filled as it is that the Prime Minister and his government should have no say over the process.

These reforms – elimination of salary, increase of the property requirement, and removal of the Prime Minister’s control over the appointment process – would go a long way towards minimizing the current problems with the Senate while remaining within our own constitutional tradition. There are other reforms that are worth considering. We might want to consider getting rid of the mandatory retirement at age 75 which Lester Pearson introduced. Pearson’s ideas were generally bad ones and this is no exception. Wisdom comes with age, and if a Senator is still in control of his faculties and willing to serve past the age of 75, we are fools to deprive ourselves of the benefit of his accumulated experience. Obviously if his mind starts to go and he starts introducing declarations of war against countries we’ve never heard of, there will need to be a procedure in place whereby he can be easily, quickly, and forcibly removed. Otherwise it would make more sense to increase the minimum age of Senators, which is currently set at thirty, than to have a maximum age. The Senate is, in the words of Sir John A. MacDonald, supposed to give a “sober, second thought” to legislation arising out of the democratic chamber, and this requires the wisdom of age.

The proposal to increase the property requirements for Senators would require an amendment of section 23, parts 3 and 4, of the Constitution Act. Perhaps while we are at it we should also consider amending section 23 to increase the number of qualifications. How about a requirement that a Senator be someone who has served Her Majesty and his country in the Canadian Armed Forces? Or, rather than have that as an absolute requirement, perhaps it would be better to include it in a list of ways in which someone may have served the public in the past, and make it a requirement that a Senator meet at least two or three of the requirements on this list. This would narrow the field of potential Senators, make it more difficult for those doing the appointing to just pick their friends, and would tie the appointment to past service to the country.

We will never have a perfect Senate. It might be possible for us to have a better Senate, however, one which better reflects the ideals it embodies. If we are to improve our Senate, it must be in a way that is consistent with our constitution and tradition, otherwise it is not worth doing.

(1) This is a simplification, of course. Plato, in The Republic, has Socrates describe five basic forms of government, the one he recommends which is constitutional or republican government by “philosopher kings” and which could fit either aristocracy or royalty in Aristotle’s classification, and four lesser or in some cases bad forms of government – timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny. In The Statesman, however, the character of the Stranger from Eleas identifies the basic regimes as the rule of the one, the few, and the many, and says that each can be better or worse depending upon whether they recognize the rule of law over themselves. He, however, contrasts all six of these with an ideal regime, which is essentially that of a benevolent dictatorship. Aristotle picks up this six-fold classification in both his Nicomachean Ethics and his Politics. His terminology varies – in the Ethics he uses democracy for both the good and the bad form of the rule of the many, but in Politics he uses democracy for the bad form and calls the good form “politeia”, needlessly confusing things by do so, as this is also the generic term for constitution. After Aristotle this terminology was revised so that “democracy” referred to the good form of rule of the many and “ochlocracy” – “rule of the mob or the crowd” – referred to the bad form. In the Ethics, Aristotle identified the rule of a king as the best of the basic good forms of government and democracy as the worst. In Politics he identified politeia as the best of the basic constitutions. The reason for the difference in ranking in the two works is that he applied different criteria – in Ethics he ranked the constitutions based upon how closely the good form resembled the bad form, in Politics he ranked the constitutions according to their stability. It was in Politics that he introduced the suggestion of a mixed constitution as a better alternative to the six basic constitutions, a rather different alternative than that suggested by Plato’s Eleatic Stranger, although there are hints of the idea of the mixed constitution in Plato’s dialogues, particularly in his concept of the city in The Republic. Out of all of this, the concept of the six-fold division of simple constitutions and the ideal of the mixed constitution, have been the most persistent. Polybius, the second century BC Greek historian, incorporated Aristotle’s cyclical view of the history of constitutions and his ideal of the mixed constitution into his Histories, which are often published in English under the title The Rise of the Roman Empire. Polybius believed that the Roman Republic, as he knew it at the time he wrote, embodied the mixed constitution, a view shared by first century BC Roman conservative senator, Marcus Tullius Cicero. The mixed constitution was an ideal that a number of Christian thinkers, including St. Thomas Aquinas, believed in, and it strongly influenced the early modern political theories of Niccolò Machiavelli and Charles de Montesquieu.

(2) William D. Gairdner, Oh, Oh, Canada! A Voice from the Conservative Resistance (BPS Books: Toronto, 2008), pp. 112-113. This book is a collection of topical essays. The one from which the quotations is taken is entitled “An Elected Senate? Be Careful”.

(3) I say “hypothetically possessed” because the period in which they were supposed to have possessed this sovereignty is historically murky. The states were colonies of the British Empire who declared their independence in rebellion against Britain. While they each signed their own declaration of independence, their secession is generally dated to their collective Declaration of Independence. The pre-union sovereignty of the states is rather akin to the pre-social “state of nature” in Lockean liberal social contract theory or the order of the decrees of God in Calvinistic theology, i.e., a logical antecedence that is required to make the theory work rather than an actual temporal antecedence.

(4) It might be considered constitutional under part 2 of Section 92A of the Constitution Act as it currently stands, but Section 92A was added by Section 50 of the Constitution Act of 1982, two years after the Trudeau government introduced the National Energy Program.

(5) As opposed to either classical Athenian democracy or constitutional democracy in which democracy is diluted by other principles.

(6) The right-wing Alberta Report magazine, founded and edited by the Byfields, championed the cause of the Triple-E Senate, which became part of the platform of the Reform Party of Canada. The Reform Party of Canada was founded in the late 1980’s as a western populist (“the West wants in”) and small-c conservative (which in this case meant a combination of economic liberalism and social conservatism) party. The need for such a party arose out of the fact that the actual Conservative Party at the time seemed to be doing nothing to challenge the leftward drift of the nation and was merely echoing the policies of the Liberal Party of Canada. The Reform Party merged with much of the Progressive Conservative Party in 2000 to form the Canadian Alliance, which formally merged with what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party in Canada in 2003 to form the current Conservative Party. I have been a traditional Canadian conservative for as long as I can remember, but I joined the Reform Party in college because I believed in its small-c conservative principles. I remained a member after it became the Canadian Alliance but let my membership drop shortly before the final merger into the present Conservative Party. I suspected that the merger would combine the worst of the two parties (the anti-patriotic tendencies of the Reform Party and the nanny state tendencies of the Progressive Conservatives) rather than the best of the two parties (traditional royalist and patriotic Toryism and the social conservatism and classical liberalism of the Reform Party). Whether or not that judgement was correct is a subject that would probably require a whole other essay.

(7) In The Socialist Myth (Cassell & Company Ltd.: London, 1971) Peregrine Worsthorne, then deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, subsequently promoted to full editor, since knighted and retired, argued that the Labour Party victory in 1964 was no threat to the established order because of the inherent flaws in socialist ideology, namely that in order to achieve power the Labour Party would have to become that which socialist ideology professes to oppose, i.e., the establishment, Her Majesty’s legitimate government, and that to run the kind of state the Labour Party wished to run, would require the cooperation of the ruling class. In Democracy Needs Aristocracy, (Harper Perennial: London, 2005), first published in 2004 under the title In Defence of Aristocracy, Worsthorne, who since his first book had been promoted to full editor, retired, and knighted, tells the interesting story of how the Labour Party, placed in the position the Conservative Party was placed in by the Attlee government after World War II, basically accepted the reforms of the Thatcher years and conceded defeat. New Labour, under Tony Blair, became “a pro-capitalist party, and therefore unable to continue beating the economic equality drum, interested only in equalizing social status (abolishing the monarchy, the House of Lords, hereditary privilege, Oxford elitism, fox-hunting, etc.) and no longer committed to equalizing wealth” (p. 105). This, however, “altered the balance of power in British politics” because the removal of the threat of socialism undermined the alliance between the bourgeois capitalists and the Old Tories in the Conservative Party, so that “we now have a modernizing, classless political consensus consisting of a non-socialist New Labour Party and a pro-capitalist New Conservative Party, neither of which is much concerned to conserve the historic institutions.” (p. 105-106) Worsthorne wrote this at a time when the Labour Party was trying to eliminate the last hereditary peerages from the British senate. Since then the Conservatives have returned to power and this year proposed a bill which would have made the British senate a primarily elected body. The bill has subsequently been defeated due to opposition within the Conservative Party. The fact that this bill originated within the Conservative Party leadership, despite it being antithetical to Tory values, is probably due to the history Worsthorne has summarized, although David Cameron is not often thought to belong to the Thatcherite wing of the party. Interestingly, Worsthorne’s book was not written in opposition to the proposed reforms to the House of Lords, as its title might suggest. The aristocracy that Worsthorne defends is not a political establishment but a social class and the ideal of wedding wealth and power to public service that is associated with that class.

(8) Gairdner, op. cit., p. 114.

(9) Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class, (McGraw-Hill Book Company: New York, 1939), p. 50. This is a translation, by Hannah D. Kahn, edited by Arthur Livingston, of Mosca’s Elementi di Scienza Politics originally published in 1896 (the official date, a footnote on page xxxvi of Livingston’s introduction says that it actually came out in late 1895).

(10) http://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/Const/page-2.html

(11) http://www.parl.gc.ca/ParlInfo/Lists/Salaries.aspx?Section=b571082f-7b2d-4d6a-b30a-b6025a9cbb98

(12) Peter Hitchens recently remarked that “A House of Lords that is appointed, or one that is ‘elected’ via our corrupt and intolerant party machines, will be just another chamber of backstairs-crawlers.” http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2173749/Well-House-Toadies--fake-fight-ends.html#ixzz23nNWDy6p