The Canadian Left Apes the Americans Yet Again

 

On Monday, the twenty-first of February, even though the border blockades had been removed – they were in the process of being removed at the very moment the Emergency Measures Acts was invoked the week prior – and the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa had been dispersed over the weekend through an ugly display of police state brutality that is utterly out of place in a Commonwealth Realm and has tarnished Canada’s reputation, Captain Airhead nevertheless managed to get enough votes in the House of Commons to confirm his use of the EMA.   Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Conservatives, voted against the confirmation, as did the Lower Canadian separatists, but the Liberals all voted for it as did Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists.  The latter compromised the historical principles of their party to do so.  In 1970 they had been the only party in Parliament to take a principled stand against the War Measures Act when Captain Airhead’s father had invoked it in an actual emergency (bombs, kidnapping, murder, that sort of thing).   In 2022 they propped up the government in using the Emergency Measures Act against a peaceful, working-class, protest, despite warnings from retired members of the NDP old guard, like Svend Robinson, that they were throwing their legacy away in doing so.   

 

 

In the debate leading up to the vote, Captain Airhead and the other ministers of the government were repeatedly asked why they were still taking this to a vote even though the protest was over.   No convincing answer was provided.  The House was told that there was still an emergency, that they would just have to trust the government, and that how they voted would reflect whether they did so trust the government or not.   This was how the Prime Minister and Mr. Dhaliwal cracked the whip on their caucuses to prevent members from breaking ranks.   The implication was that it was a confidence vote, which if the government lost would dissolve Parliament, leading to an immediate new Dominion election – less than half a year after the last one – in which the leaders could punish dissenters by not signing their candidacy papers.

 

 

Two days after having thus given us his rendition of the role of Supreme Chancellor Palpatine from Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, the Prime Minister revoked the Emergency Measures Act.    There was, of course, no more of an emergency on Monday than there was on Wednesday, nor had there ever been an emergency of the type that would justify the invoking of the Emergency Measures Act.    While we cannot know for certain what was going on in the empty space between Captain Airhead’s ears, we can be sure that it was not a sudden epiphany about the importance of respecting constitutional limits on government powers – he would have resigned immediately had that been the case – and that three factors likely had a significant role to play in his turnaround.   One of these is that he had taken a severe beating in the international press.   The second is that the Big Five – Canada’s largest banks – would have explained to the government how that forcing financial institutions to act as the government’s thought police undermines those institutions’ credibility, both domestic and international, and threatens the entire financial superstructure of the country, already weakened by years of reckless government financial policy.   The last, but not least, factor was that the government was losing the debate in the Chamber of Sober Second Thought.   This is not like a bill of legislation which gets sent back to the House if the Senate does not approve.   A vote against confirming the use of the Emergency Measures Act in the Senate, and the indicators all suggested that the Senate would vote against confirmation, would immediately revoke the Act.   Which would make things far more difficult for the Prime Minister in the official inquiry into his actions that must necessarily follow the use of the EMA than a voluntary withdrawal of the power.

 

 

There is a lot that could be said about how this episode provides further demonstration of many of the truths that I have written about over the years.   It demonstrates that democracy is not the same thing as either constitutionally limited government or personal freedom.   The Prime Minister asked the elected House of Commons to approve his inappropriate use of an Act giving him sweeping powers to trample over our freedoms in order to crush a peaceful protest and they did so.   It demonstrates that the Westminster System of Parliament is much more than a democracy.  It is an institution that has proven itself over time to be effective at protecting personal freedom and checking the excesses of government, even democratic government, and its unelected components have as much to do with making it work as the elected House.   It demonstrates that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is absolutely useless as a safeguard of personal rights and freedoms.   The Grit government insisted that its actions under the EMA would be consistent with the Charter.   If allowing the government to freeze bank accounts, a) without a court order and b) without liability or any civil recourse for those whose accounts are so frozen is consistent with the Charter, then the Charter is empty and meaningless.   A government that can do that is a government that recognizes no constitutional limitations. It demonstrates that Liberal Prime Ministers, especially those with the last name Trudeau, see democracy in terms of elected dictatorship.  

 

 

It also demonstrates that the Canadian Left is incapable of independent thought and borrows all of its bad ideas from the United States.

 

 

This has always been the case.   The Liberal Party, which began as the centre-left party that developed out of the pre-Confederation Reform movement, was, before being captured by the harder New Left in the 1960s, the party that envisioned Canada’s destiny in American terms.   It was the party that advocated for North American free trade for a century before the Conservatives under Brian Mulroney sold out their own legacy and signed the US-Canada Free Trade Deal.   It was the party that wanted greater economic, cultural, and political alignment between Canada and the United States.   Liberal theorists such as Goldwin Smith were arguing for formal union between the two countries as early as the 1890s.   The Liberal interpretation of Canadian history retold it as if it were simply a re-run of American history with the same goals accomplished by compromise and negotiation rather than war and bloodshed.   John Wesley Dafoe, a prominent exponent of this interpretation as well as the Liberal propagandist who edited the Winnipeg Free Press for the first half of the twentieth century, entitled his fanciful view of our history Canada: An American Nation.

 

 

This looking to the United States for inspiration did not die out after the Liberal Party swung to the hard left.  When Pierre Trudeau became Prime Minister of Canada in the late 1960s he exponentially expanded the welfare state.   His inspiration for this was Lyndon Johnson’s similar expansion of social programs in the United States.   LBJ had his “Great Society”, PET had his “Just Society”.   The Canadian social security net that  he so expanded had been similarly introduced in the late 1930s based on the model of FDR’s New Deal in the United States and given the same name.     In 1977, the Trudeau Liberals talked Parliament into passing the Canadian Human Rights Act.   This Act had nothing to do with human rights in the ordinary sense of basic rights belonging to all people that need protection against the power of the state.   It gave the state more power -power that government ought never to have - power to police the thoughts and motives of individual Canadians in their personal and business interactions with one another.   It declared "discrimination" to be against the law - not discrimination by the government but by private Canadians - made it a civilly liable offence with criminally punitive consequences, established an investigative body, the Canadian Human Rights Commission to investigate complaints at the public expense and the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal to hear such complaints.   It was a system stacked against the accused, in complete contradiction of the principles the Canadian system of law and justice are based upon, and it became the means whereby the oppressive atmosphere of restricting thought and censoring speech known as political correctness escaped the confines of left-liberal academe where it had developed into the general culture which in turn allowed political correctness in academe to evolve into the more warped version of itself that exists today, wokeness, characterized not so much by self-censorship of thought and speech but by the silencing and destruction of others.   Pierre Trudeau modelled the Canadian Human Rights Act on an American law passed thirteen years earlier - the US Civil Rights Act.  Canada’s constitution is a mixture of the written and unwritten.   In 1982, Pierre Trudeau oversaw the patriation of the principle document of the written part so as to make it amendable by the Canadian Parliament and in the process prefixed to it the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   The Charter, over the course of the last two years has been shown to be useless as a protection of Canadians' basic rights and freedoms from governments, Dominion and provincial, determined not to let those rights and freedoms stand in the way of sweeping public health measures.   Over the past forty years, however, it has proven remarkably effecting at Americanizing our Supreme Court in the sense of empowering it to overturn local laws, customs, and traditions older than Confederation and to secularize public schools (In the last decade or so left-liberal commentators have taken to speaking without irony of Canada's tradition of "separation of church and state" when we have no such tradition, separation of the two being a distinguishing trait of the American tradition).    The Charter, in other words, has all of the negatives and few if any of the positives, of the document Pierre Trudeau looked to for inspiration - the American Bill of Rights.

  

Now consider the response of the Canadian Left - the Prime Minister and the Liberal Party, Jimmy Dhaliwal and the socialist party, the legacy media public and private - to the Freedom Convoy.    From their initial response as the trucks were heading towards Ottawa, through their commentary on the weeks long demonstrations, and their claims as the Emergency Measures Act was invoked and an ugly, militarized, police force were sent in to trample elderly women with horses, arrest protestors at gun point, beat people with batons and otherwise behave like the lowlife criminal thugs from whose ranks modern police are sadly often recruited, they have regurgitated every bit of the craziness that began afflicting the American Left in the United States' 2016 presidential election. 

In 2016, Democrat candidate Hillary Clinton stuck her foot in her mouth and lost the election by accusing the populist, Middle American, supporters of her opponent, Republican candidate Donald the Orange of being a "basket of deplorables" and threw every imaginable pejorative “ist” and “phobe” at them.    You can hear the echo of that in Captain Airhead's now infamous remarks about the "small fringe minority" with "unacceptable views",    When Clinton lost the election she then blamed her loss on Russian interference.

 

 

This is parenthetical but timely given the international events that have drawn everyone's attention away from Captain Airhead's vile actions, but notice how the same people who back in the Cold War used to accuse anyone who suggested that the Communist regime in the Soviet Union could not be trusted, was working to undermine constitutional government and freedom so as to enslave the world, and had spies everywhere of being paranoid "McCarthyites" started talking the exact same way themselves when the USSR was gone and Russia was Russia again.    Whatever one might think of Vladimir Putin, the present crisis is the result of a little over two decades worth of incredibly bad American policy towards post-Soviet Russia.    Their giving their support to every group wishing to secede from post-Soviet Russia and extending NATO membership to these countries in a period when NATO should have been contracting after the collapse of the Soviet regime and in a way that brought NATO ever closer to Russia’s doorstep – the expansion of NATO’s involvement in Ukraine and vice-versa is the immediate issue - was needlessly insulting and provocative to post-Soviet Russia. Nor was support for the coup about eight years ago in which a Russia-friendly elected Ukrainian government was overthrown in an armed coup that replaced it with a US-NATO puppet government in Kiev and placed de facto control of much of the country in the hands of Banderites (1) exactly helpful.   By doing these things, American governments, usually those led by left-liberal Democrats like Clinton, Obama and Biden, created the conditions that produced the present conflict.  

 

 

Just as Hillary Clinton blamed her loss on the Russians in 2016 - her claims have been long since thoroughly debunked - so a CBC commentator claimed with a straight face that the Russians were behind the Freedom Convoy.    The government in justifying its crackdown on the protesters maintained that the Freedom Convoy was backed by foreign funds, the implication being that a foreign government or some foreign organization hostile to the Canadian government was dumping huge amounts of money into it.   The further implication was that the money was coming from either Russia, some extremist group in the United States, or both.   FINTRAC has since demonstrated these claims to be nonsense.   The money supporting the protest came from good faith donors in Canada and abroad who supported the Convoy’s cause – the end of the public health restrictions and mandates that have severely curtailed basic personal rights and freedoms for the last two years.

 

The remainder of the insane and unsubstantiated allegations hurled against the truckers by the Liberal government, Jimmy Dhaliwal’s socialists, and the legacy media have been completely plagiarized from the American loony Left’s response to the incident that took place in Washington DC on the Feast of Epiphany last year.   As you might recall, that was the date on which Congress was scheduled to confirm the results of the previous year’s presidential election.   That morning, the incumbent president Donald the Orange, who was challenging the results, held a rally of his supporters.   A fraction of his supporters entered the Capitol building and it was treated as if it was an insurrection, an attempt to violently overthrow the American government and overturn the results of the election.   This was an extremely hyperbolic interpretation of what had actually happened – most of the participants, who rather atypical of insurrectionists were generally unarmed, seemed to be there to take selfies as if they were American versions of Captain Airhead.    It arose out of the paranoia about a supposed “far right” threat to American democracy which had been observably growing on the American left ever since the Charlottesville rally of three and a half years prior had drawn their attention to the fact that their ongoing campaign to tear down monuments, vilify admired historical figures, re-write the past in accordance with their present narrow obsessions about race, sex, and gender, and silence anyone who complains about all of this through the thuggish behaviour of Antifa thought enforcers was meeting with resistance and pushback.   As over-the-top as the American Left’s interpretation of the actual events of the sixth of January was, the Canadian Left’s attempt to impose this same interpretation on the Freedom Convoy is that much more removed from reality.   The Freedom Convoy protestors did not enter the Parliament buildings – they parked on the street in front and threw a block party – and clearly stated their intentions, which did not involve overthrowing the government, and they stuck to their single issue of personal, constitutionally protected, freedom.   Captain Airhead and the Canadian Left had far less on which to hang their accusations of insurrection, occupation, ideology-based extremism, and other such drivel against the truckers than Forgettable Joe Whatshisname and the American Left had for their identical charges against the Capitol Hill selfie-takers last year but they still tried to hammer that square peg into the round hole it so obviously did not fit.

 

There are many things that can be attributed to the Canadian Left.   Originality is not one of those things.   They should lay off imitating the Americans.   It never turns out well. 

 

(1)   Banderites take their name from Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian nationalist leader who collaborated with the Third Reich in the Second World War.   In other words, they are in actuality the sort of people Captain Airhead and his followers have been falsely accusing the truckers of being.  The Azov Regiment, a unit of the Ukrainian National Guard formed in the 2014 coup, proudly displays its National Socialist ideology in its emblem which prominently features imagery borrowed from the Third Reich.   It is part of the regime that Barack Obama installed in the Ukraine and which is supported today by the same Captain Airhead who thinks that the presence of a single Nazi flag, one almost certainly being used ironically – i.e., to attribute that which the flag symbolizes to Captain Airhead – in a protest is sufficient to condemn the entire protest of thousands as being somehow Nazi and justify his use of excessive government power to crush it.   Captain Airhead’s deputy prime minister, a woman with the ability to appear both vacuous and Machiavellian at the same time, the granddaughter of the editor-in-chief of the Krakivs'ki Visti, a Ukrainian language Nazi propaganda tabloid that ran from 1940 to 1945, and the same woman who about a week ago was giggling to herself in glee at a press conference when asked about the plight of the Canadian families whose bank accounts she had frozen because they supported the truckers protesting for freedom posted to social media the other day, a picture of herself holding a scarf with the colours of the Banderite movement at a demonstration in support of Ukraine.   

Bad Politicians Pass a Bad Bill

As anyone who has followed my writings for any significant length of time will know when I identify my politics and general philosophy as Tory this is not in reference to the Conservative Party.   This is something that I wish to emphasize in light of the disgraceful behaviour of that party in the last couple of weeks.   To me, being a Tory means being loyal to and supporting traditional institutions that have proven themselves over long ages of time.   In the political sense the primary such traditional institution is hereditary royal monarchy.   The second such institution is parliament.   True Toryism means placing these institutions ahead of abstract ideals like democracy, equality, and even freedom although freedom is not just an abstract ideal but also a basic human good, a good which over the long run is better protected by traditional institutions than by political crusades launched in its name as an abstract ideal.   It also means suspicion and skepticism towards the utopian schemes of those who think that either such ideals or what they consider to be "science" should be the basis of a new, re-ordered, engineered society.    It is a confidence in traditional institutions over the long term, rather than the people who make them up in the short term.   This needs to be stressed especially in regards to parliament.   Earthly human institutions, even traditional ones, are not infallible.  They are of necessity made up of people, and therefore fallible due to the flaws in fallen human nature.   Parliaments are made up of politicians, who have more than their fair share of those flaws.

 

The recent actions of our Canadian Parliament alluded to above in reference to the disgraceful behaviour of the Conservative Party illustrate the point.   In passing Bill C-4, a bill which is objectively not only evil but insane, Parliament failed big time.   This was not because of some flaw in the Westminster System as it evolved over time that can be fixed by social and political engineers.   The problem is entirely in the character of the human beings who make up both the House and the Senate.  

 

Bill C-4 is a new version of a bill the Liberals introduced in the last Parliament which failed to pass the Senate in time to become law, itself a re-worked version of an earlier bill that had expired when Parliament was prorogued last summer.   It was introduced on the twenty-ninth of November, passed the House of Commons on the first of December when all parties extradited it, and passed the Senate on the seventh of December.    The bill that had been introduced in the last Parliament had been quite controversial and this new version, rather than remove the objectionable elements, made them worse.   Therefore, for the Conservatives led by Erin O'Toole to help the Grits pass this bill unanimously was for them to abdicate their duties in the role of Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition.   For the Senate to pass the bill so quickly was for them to abdicate their duty as the chamber of "sober second thought".  The Liberals, in this Parliament as in the last, are a minority government.   Even if they were a majority, they ought not to be able to fast-track controversial legislation like this.    Something is very, very, wrong here.

 

Bill C-4 amends the Criminal Code to forbid “causing another person to undergo conversion therapy”, “doing anything for the purpose of removing a child from Canada with the intention that the child undergo conversion therapy outside Canada”, “promoting or advertising conversion therapy” and “receiving a financial or other material benefit from the provision of conversion therapy”.   Now, some explanation may be required here.

 

There are people who, like almost everyone else, were born either biologically male or biologically female but who, unlike most other people, either a) think that they are of the other sex than what their body would indicate, b) think that they are some option other than male or female, c) identify as their biological sex but are sexually attracted to members of their own sex either instead of or in addition to members of the opposite sex, or d) are some combination or minute variation of the above.   Those among these who have politicized their gender/sexual identities – or allowed ideologues of the cultural revolutionary far-left to politicize these for them - and who collectively refer to themselves by an ever-increasing stretch of letters standing for the various labels they identify themselves with and which currently goes something like LGBTTQAEIOUandsometimesY, have demanded that “conversion therapy” be banned. 

 

Now, among those in the aforementioned group who believe their true “gender” to be different from the biological sex they were born with, some seek out reconstructive surgery that would make their bodies, at least in outward appearance, conform to the gender with which they identify.    This is not what is meant by “conversion therapy” and those who have been pushing for the ban on “conversion therapy” would be appalled at the thought of banning this sort of thing.   Indeed, many of them wish to see it available to young children with or without parental approval or consent.

 

No, “conversion therapy” could be said to be the opposite of the above mentioned procedure.   Whereas gender reassignment surgery is cosmetic surgery that makes the appearance of the body conform to the self-image, that makes the physical conform to the psychological, on the assumption that the physical is “wrong” and the psychological “right”, “conversion therapy” is psychological treatment aimed at correcting the psychological so that it conforms to the physical, on the opposite assumption, the assumption that the physical is right and the psychological wrong.

 

Now, among those who support legislation like Bill C-4 that bans “conversion therapy”, there seem to be many who base their support on the assumption that “conversion therapy” entails something like the Ludovico technique that features into Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange and the 1971 Stanley Kubrick film of the same title featuring Malcolm McDowell.   In that story, you might recall, Alex – the character portrayed by McDowell in the film – is the leader of a gang of “ultraviolent” youth that he calls his “droogs”, who, after robbing and beating an eccentric elderly woman, the last in a string of such thuggish acts, is abandoned by his friends, arrested, and charged for the murder of the woman who dies from her wounds.   In prison, he is offered the chance to get out early if he will undergo the experimental Ludovico technique that would make him incapable of reoffending.   The jumps at the opportunity.   The technique involves strapping him in a chair, with his eyes propped open, and forcing him to watch hours of extremely violent film footage, while he is injected with drugs that cause pain and nausea.    He is thereby so conditioned to experience pain and illness at the slightest thought of violence that he cannot even defend himself.   Proponents of Bill C-4 have certainly encouraged people to assume that this is how “conversion therapy” works.   The legislation itself, however, is worded in such a way as to cover a lot more than just this sort of thing.

 

The bill introduces into law a definition of “conversion therapy” as meaning:

 

a practice, treatment, or service that is designed to

(a)    change a person’s sexual orientation to heterosexual;

(b)   change a person’s gender identity to cisgender;

(c)   change a person’s gender expression so that it conforms to the sex assigned to the person at birth;

(d)   repress or reduce non-heterosexual attraction or sexual behaviour;

(e)   repress a person’s non-cisgender gender identity; or

(f)    repress or reduce a person’s gender expression that does not conform to the sex assigned to the person at birth.

 

Notice the following about this definition:

 

First, if someone were to create something like the Ludovico technique designed to turn a heterosexual person into a homosexual person, or a cisgender person into a transgender person, it would not meet the definition of “conversion therapy’ introduced in the bill.   Thus, although this sort of legislation has been sold to the public as a ban of a harmful technique akin to brainwashing it is no such thing.   No technique that has been used in “conversion therapy” in the past is banned by this legislation and remains legal under it provided the conversion is in the opposite direction of what the bill forbids.

 

Second, the definition is broad enough to take in any sort of counselling or advice that encourages people to recognize, acknowledge and identify as their birth sex and to live within the limits of traditional sexual ethics.   Indeed, (d) could be interpreted as banning the teaching of traditional sexual ethics altogether.   It would not surprise me if the clowns that now occupy Her Majesty’s bench in most jurisdictions in the Dominion were to interpret it in just this manner.

 

So what we have here is a definition that errs by being too broad and too narrow at the same time.   It is too broad in that it takes in things that government has no business legislating against – traditional sexual ethics and counselling based on the same.  It is too narrow in that it does not ban what the public has been told it bans – coercive and abusive techniques qua coercive and abusive techniques.

 

In its previous incarnations as Bill C-8 (first attempt) and C-6 (second attempt), this legislation met with opposition on precisely the grounds that the definition of “conversion therapy” was too broad and could take in professional and pastoral counselling, pulpit teaching and preaching, and even ordinary conversation in which traditional views of sexual identity and ethics are expressed.   The present bill has done nothing to assuage such concerns and, indeed, is worse than its predecessors in that whereas the earlier bills were attempts to ban “conversion therapy” for children the bill which actually passed Parliament also bans “conversion therapy” for adults.   The earlier versions were bad enough in that given the broad definition of “conversion therapy” they would have made criminals out of parents who seek out help for their children in accordance with their own consciences and beliefs rather than those of the left-wing ideologues in the Liberal Party of Canada.   With the passing of this bill, however, when it comes into effect the state of the law will be such that those who identify their gender as something other than the biological sex with which they were born will have no problem obtaining the kind of “conversion therapy” that consists of physical surgery to make the body conform in appearance to “gender identity”, and should someone for some reason or another want professional help in converting from heterosexuality to homosexuality or from cisgender identity to transgender identity  (1) the law would not prohibit some quack from providing this service even if it involves dangerous, pain-inducing, methods, but those who want help in accepting their biological sex or controlling same-sex desires that they believe it is wrong to act upon will be prevented from finding such help and anyone offering such help, even in the form of conversational counselling, will face criminal punishment for doing so.

 

A bill of this sort is fundamentally and thoroughly rotten legislation that is clearly aimed at imposing “woke” ideology as it pertains to sex and gender on Canadians at the expense of traditional religious and moral beliefs as well as personal freedom of choice.   It ought never to have passed Parliament at all, much less without debate and with unanimous support in both chambers, and with Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the Upper Chamber of “sober second thought” both patting themselves on the back for refusing to do their jobs.    Parliament is an institution that has stood the test of time and proven itself over and over again, but if we keep sending to it the sort of people who currently fill its seats – and I include those on the Opposition bench as well as those in government in this – then cruddy legislation like this will keep making it into law.

 

(1)     A case can be made that what goes under the name “education” today in most schools (other than private and parochial ones) and universities amounts to little more than just this sort of “reverse conversion therapy” inflicted upon unsuspecting youth.

The Senate Should Not Be Condemned For Doing Its Job Right

A couple of weeks ago Jim Warren, a Liberal strategist who worked for Dalton McGuinty in Ontario and who writes a weekly column for the neoconservative Sun newspaper chain explained why he has become a convert to Senate abolitionism. The Grits, over the last century, have been guilty of a great many crimes against the constitution that the Fathers of Confederation drew up for us in the Charlottetown, Quebec, and London Conferences, but unicameralism was not typically one of them. They left that to the socialists in the NDP. The neoconservatives in the Reform Party had advocated reforming the upper chamber to make it more like the American Senate – democratically elected, with each province being equally represented. The sin of the Grits, however, who have held power in the House of Commons more often than any other party, has ordinarily been to treat the seats in the Red Chamber as rewards for Liberal partisanship.

The Conservatives, who are the only other party to have ever formed a federal government, have succumbed to the same temptation when in office and five years ago the media decided to shine its spotlight on the dubious travel and expense claims made by a handful of Senators most of whom had been Conservative appointees. Far more heat than light was generated in the scandal that erupted and rather than just going after individual Senators for abusing their appointment and treating their seat as a means of personal enrichment instead of an office of public service, the media attacked the Conservative government that had appointed the Senators as if the Liberal Party, to which most members of the Canadian media are loyal sycophants, had a squeaky clean record of appointing only upright, honourable, disinterested, and dutiful individuals. Stephen Harper’s method of dealing with the scandal only added fuel to the flames. At any rate, in addition to the Conservative government, the media also made a target out of the Senate as an institution, mostly on the grounds of its being unelected, and there were loud calls for it to be done away with. Here again the media was being disingenuously selective in the facts it reported. Elected members of the House of Commons are no strangers to the temptation to abuse their expense accounts and enrich themselves at the expense of the public treasury. Indeed, I dare say the problem is much worse in the House than in the Senate.

Was it this scandal that drove Mr. Warren into his newfound belief in unicameralism?

No, he wrote that after that “I was prepared to give the Senate one last chance.”

What has happened since then to make him change his mind?

After a brief mention of the ongoing Senate inquiry into the harassment claims against former Senator Don Meredith he devoted several paragraphs to complaining about how the Senate had delayed the passing of Justin Trudeau’s budget bill. Then he wrote the following:

“Perhaps the straw that broke the camel’s back for me is the Senate delaying passage of Bill C-210. This is the private member’s bill of the late Mauril Belanger that changes the lyrics of O Canada to make them gender neutral.”

Now let us think about that for just a moment. Mr. Warren was “prepared to give the Senate one last chance” after the scandal in which Senators were accused of dishonestly claiming inflated housing and travel expenses against the taxpayer-funded public treasury but their delaying passage of a bill is the “straw that broke the camel’s back.” What that translates into is “I am willing to overlook it when you do your job badly, but I refuse to forgive you for doing your job right.”

If Bill C-210 were a bill authorizing the government to take some initiative that needed to happen immediately in order to save thousands of lives then this level of anger over its delay might be understandable. The bill is nothing of the sort. Ironically, Mr. Warren blames the delay of the bill on “pathetic partisan politics” in the Senate when the bill itself is nothing more than an example of playing games with a national symbol in a lame attempt to virtue signal to feminists, one of the interest groups in the Liberal Party’s support base. Think of all the other issues there are out there for Parliament to meddle with. There are probably at least a trillion more important than this one.

As for Justin Trudeau’s budget bill, we are talking about an omnibus bill of the sort that the Liberals complained about during the Harper years and claimed that they would do away with, containing a budget with a deficit close to $30 billion. This is not exactly the kind of legislation that deserves to be fast-tracked through Parliament.

Even if these bills were better and more important than they actually are, however, the Senate, in taking its time passing them, would merely be doing its job. Sir John A. MacDonald, a Father of Confederation and the first Prime Minister of Canada, said, when they were putting the constitution together, that the role of the Senate would be to provide a “sober second thought” to the decisions passed in the House. In other words its job would be to do precisely that which Mr. Warren is complaining about – slow down the passing of bills, by taking the time to think critically about them.

The Fathers of Confederation, in adapting the Westminster model of Parliament to the use of the new country they were building, knew and respected its history and traditions, and understood that the role of criticizing, objecting to, and slowing down legislation was just as important – indeed, more important – than the role of writing and passing legislation. Legislation that is quickly written and hastily passed is likely to be bad legislation. Furthermore, it is not good for the Prime Minister to get his way whenever he wants just because he commands a majority in the House.

This is why there are several hurdles that a government bill must pass before it can become law. It is not enough that it be written by a government that commands a majority in the elected House. It must be heard, and Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, traditionally the second largest party in the House, must be given the opportunity to scrutinize it, criticize it, raise objections to it, and basically hold the government accountable to the House and the people they were elected to represent. Having cleared that hurdle, it must then be heard by the Senate, who review it, and if necessary, recommend alterations or delay its passing. Anyone who thinks that this stage of review is unnecessary, needs to read the chapter of Eugene Forsey’s memoirs, A Life on the Fringe, in which he describes his years in the Senate, and all the poorly-written bad laws they had to deal with.

Mr. Warren appears to think that the Official Opposition is sufficient to hold the government accountable, but the Fathers of Confederation thought otherwise. Mr. Warren objects to an “unelected group of people” holding up government bills but, here too, his thought is miles removed from that of the Fathers of Confederation who deliberately built our country as a parliamentary monarchy. He does, however, reveal himself to be, with apologies to John Wayne, a “true Grit”, for the Liberal Party has never liked the roadblocks our parliamentary system places upon the Prime Minister, who as as head of the elected government is seen the voice of the will of the people, getting his way, and have sought to eliminate these obstacles wherever possible and to reduce the Crown, the Senate, and the elected House as a whole, to mere rubber stamps of the Prime Minister’s will.

Where Mr. Warren feels the Senate deserves condemnation, I insist that it deserves praise, and would suggest that if anything, the powers of the Senate to hold up the Prime Minister’s bills ought to be increased. The only thing that really, desperately, needs to be fixed with our Senate is that the Prime Minister controls the appointment process. For the Senate to truly provide the “sober second thought” that Sir John A. MacDonald envisioned, it needs to be independent of the Prime Minister who ought to surrender his right to advise the Crown on the appointment of Senators to some other group that is in no way beholden to the office of the Prime Minister – perhaps the provincial legislatures.

Save The Senate!

As the ongoing trial of disgraced Senator Mike Duffy continues to loom large in the news the media has been treating Canadians to a daily diet of opinion columns and letters to the editor asking why we don’t just get rid of the Senate. For someone with a high regard for the intelligence of either the general populace, the letter writing segment of it, or the class of professional scribblers who earn their bread and butter by composing opinion columns, it must surely be disheartening and disillusioning to realize that so many of those they so admire have displayed, through asking this question, their acceptance of an easily refutable premise. As one who does not hold any of these groups in high regard I do not share this disillusionment – merely a sense of disgust.

Suppose someone were to come forward with evidence that high ranking police officers have been taking bribes, trafficking confiscated narcotics, and otherwise abusing the powers and privileges that come with being charged, in Her Majesty’s name, with the enforcement of the laws of the land? I imagine you are all shocked at the very suggestion of such an unheard of possibility. Once you revive from your faint, snap out of your catatonic state, or otherwise recover from the trauma that has just been inflicted upon your psyche ask yourself if, in the event, perish the thought, that such evidence were to be found, it would be reasonable to argue that because of such corruption, law enforcement agencies therefore ought to be abolished. Perhaps someone reading this who is an anarchist by way of political ideology would say that such an argument is reasonable but if he is a true anarchist he would say that all government agencies including the police are illegitimate regardless of whether we can point to specific examples of corruption or not. Otherwise, I expect, very few would conclude that the abolition of law enforcement is a reasonable response to police corruption.

That point that I wish to make is that you cannot deal with corruption and abuse of office by tearing down institutions and offices once such corruption and abuse is manifest within them. If we were to seriously attempt to do this then very soon we would have no institutions left but corruption would be as much present among us as ever it was before. This is because the source of corruption, as Christians and conservatives have always known although the fact continues to elude liberals, progressives, and socialists to this very day, is not institutions but the human heart. If you tear down an institution because you find corruption in it, you will also find corruption in whatever you erect to take its place because it too must contain the human element. Unless, of course, you are envisioning the replacement of man by machine ala James Cameron.

The Canadian Senate, let it be said, does not do a very good job of representing the principle it is supposed to embody and has not done so in a very long time. If the principle is a true one, however, and important to the balance of Parliament, then an imperfect and badly flawed representation is better than no representation at all. The House of Commons embodies the principle of representative democracy – that we, through the representatives we sent to Parliament, have a say in the laws we live under. The Crown embodies the principle of dignified, prescriptive authority that transcends popular politics. This is the more important of these two principles because governments can only derive power and not authority from winning elections – the power of numbers that comes from having a majority or at least a plurality behind you. A government that has power but not authority is a tyrannical government even if its power is democratic power. In our constitution, the government possesses authority as Ministers of the Crown in whose name they act and power as elected representatives of the people. What then does the Senate represent?

The Senate represents the principle that laws should not be enacted in haste, that reason should govern passion, and that legislation written by the representatives of the people should be reviewed by those representing experience, public spirit, and the wisdom that comes from age before it is allowed to become law. As I said, the Senate does not represent this principle well. Indeed, it would not be going too far to say that it does an abysmally poor job of representing the principle. Nevertheless, the principle is a sound one and it is better that it be represented poorly than that it not be represented at all. Note how the impulse to tear down the institution because of the corruption within it is the very opposite of the principle of not acting in haste and allowing reason to overrule passion. To give in to such an impulse would not bode well for our country.

If abolishing the Senate is a bad idea, and it is, the Upper Chamber is badly in need of reforms. I would suggest the following reforms as being particularly appropriate and necessary: 1) that the advisory role to the Crown on appointment to the Senate be taken from the Prime Minister’s Office and placed in the hands of a committee that itself is independent of the Prime Minister’s Office - perhaps consisting of representatives of the provinces, 2) that we increase the minimum age of Senators from thirty to perhaps forty-five or fifty, 3) that we either scrap salaries for Senators altogether or reduce them to something that is a mere honorarium while 4) updating the Constitutional property requirements for Senators to reflect a century and a half of inflation. (1)

These proposed reforms, which unlike the Triple-E alternative advocated by the old Reform Party, seek to be respectful and true to the tradition upon which our Parliament is founded, would go far towards ensuring that the Senate is filled by public spirited individuals with the wisdom of experience rather than cronies of the Prime Minister looking for a cushy position with a large salary and expense account. This would lessen greatly the biggest problem with the Senate as it currently stands while helping it to much better represent its principle in Parliament.

Of course, these proposals would be anathema to someone like Warren Kinsella who in his Toronto Sun column last weekend argued that the Senators were hastening the demise of the Senate by their own words and actions and gave as his chief example of this, Nancy Ruth’s remarks about the quality of airline food given in answer to the auditor general’s question about why she had charged a different breakfast to her expense account. Kinsella spoke of her “arrogance” and her “appalling condescension and contempt”, an interesting choice of pejoratives coming from someone who often tells Canadians what they think or feel as if those who thought or felt differently from him were not “Canadian”, examples of which can be found in the very same article. Kinsella led into this by providing details about the Senator’s background in the Jackman family, using her wealth against her to paint a portrait of patrician pride. Thus I infer that he would not approve of my proposal that only those of independent means be allowed to sit in the Senate.

Reading Warren Kinsella’s column solidified more than ever my conviction that the Senate must be retained and that the reforms which I have proposed would be for the best. After all, which is the more reasonable response to a rich Senator complaining about how airline breakfasts “are pretty awful”? To tell the Senator that she can pay for her breakfast out of her own independent means or to insist that the Upper House of Parliament be abolished altogether?

(1) For a more detailed exposition of these proposals see: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.ca/2012/08/senate-reform.html

Three Cheers For the Supreme Court

Those who sit as judges in Her Majesty’s courts perform a role that calls not only for an extensive knowledge of the law but for the virtues of justice and prudence and above all else for wisdom. The higher the court and the more final its decision the more vital it is that that its member judges possess these qualities. It is of the utmost importance, therefore, that the Chief Justice of Canada and the eight Puisne Judges who with the Chief Justice make up the highest court in the land, be models of Solomonic wisdom.

I have not always been impressed by the decisions that our courts have issued. Indeed, decision after decision to give the perpetrators of serious crimes a slap on the wrist while allowing frivolous and expensive lawsuits by people whose feelings have been hurt or, even worse, who wish to use the courts to harass their ideological opponents, have often left the impression that the path to appointment to the bench starts in the monkey cage at the zoo.

This was not the case with the ruling the Supreme Court handed the Prime Minister’s Office last Friday. Asked to review the constitutionality of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals for reforming the Senate, the Supreme Court told him that any such reforms would require the consent of the provinces. To make major reforms he would need the consent of a majority of the promises, to abolish it outright would require unanimous consent.

In issuing this ruling, the Supreme Court did its job and did it superbly. It did not create new law by fiat, but reminded the Prime Minister – and the Opposition Leader who has been beating drums for Senate abolition – of what they should have already known, namely, that Canada has a constitution, with a formula for amendment, and that there are no shortcuts to amendment because changing the constitution is a far more serious process than changing the law and is not something to be done on the quick. This is something that Stephen Harper, of all people, should have known because he is leader of the Conservative Party, and respect for the constitution and an unwillingness to allow it to be changed at a whim is a fundamental Tory principle.

It is not a question of whether Senate reform is in itself desirable or whether or not the specific reforms proposed by Prime Minister Harper are good or bad. That the Senate is in need of serious reform has been obvious for decades. The need is there but it is not urgent, despite the recent media hype over how certain Senators have abused their expense accounts. The Prime Minister’s proposals were for Senators to be elected to office and for term limits to be set for them. While I can understand why he thinks these are good ideas they are not the kind of reforms I would like to see. I think that the Senate should remain an appointed body but that control over who the Governor General appoints should be removed from the Prime Minister’s Office and put in the hands of an appointment committee composed of representatives of the provincial governments. I would like to see the property ownership requirements for Senators be updated to reflect the inflation that has taken place since 1867 and their salaries either eliminated or reduced to an honorarium. Rather than impose a term limit on Senators, I would prefer to see the minimum age for Senate appointment raised to about fifty. I think these reforms are more appropriate for Canada than the Triple-E model that the Reform Party favoured but I would not want to see them brought in without provincial consent either. The constitutional amendment formula must be respected because to fail to respect that process is to fail to respect the constitution itself.

The proposals for Senate reform that I just suggested differ from the Triple-E model that the Reform Party advocated and which is the basis of Prime Minister Harper’s proposals in that they are not based upon the assumption that making the Senate better means making it more democratic. The equation of good government with democracy is a very modern and very erroneous idea which lies beneath both the desire for an elected Senate on the part of the supposedly right-wing support base of the old Reform Party and the desire to abolish the Senate on the part of the left-wing NDP. The reforms that I would prefer to see are based upon respect for Canada’s parliamentary monarchy form of government and the tradition from which we obtained that form of government. They take into consideration both the current problems with the Senate, the role the Senate was intended by the Fathers of Confederation to play in government, and offer suggestions as to how to get fix as much as is possible the former and help the Senate to perform the latter that are consistent with the history and tradition of our constitution.

The problem with the Senate is that it is used by whichever party happens to be in power in the lower House as a means of rewarding people who have served the party by providing them with a cushy position that comes with a large salary and fat expense account and a minimal amount of responsibility. When Canada’s Fathers established the Senate, modifying the House of Lords in the British parliamentary model to fit the Canadian situation, they intended for it to serve as a sort of brake on those in power in the lower House. The Senate would review the legislation they passed and provide a “sober second thought” so that the party which commanded a majority in the lower House could not simply rush through legislation that might ultimately be to the detriment of the country. Needless to say, the Senate cannot very well perform this function if it is constantly being stacked by the government to which it is supposed to act as a brake.

Removing control of appointments to the Senate from the Prime Minister’s Office would prevent the Prime Minister from being able to stack the Senate and use it as a rubber stamp on whatever he wants thus enabling it to serve its original function better. Updating the property requirements for Senators and removing the perks of the position would help insure that Senate seats are filled by public minded and spirited people rather than those hoping to grow fat off the public purse. Raising the minimum age for Senators would help make sure that the Senate does provide the needed “sober second thought” because wisdom, contrary to the folly of the youth-worshipping zeitgeist, comes with age.

All of these reforms would be superior to just making the Senate more democratic. The ancients recognized that just as there are good kings and bad kings, and an elite may be either a wise and public spirited aristocracy or an arrogant and selfish oligarchy, so democracy can be both good and bad as well. Therefore, they reasoned, the best constitutional arrangement would include a king, an aristocracy, and a form of democracy so that each of these elements of government would check the tendency towards the bad in the others and bring out the tendency towards the good. This is, of course, what we have in the parliamentary monarchy system that we inherited and adapted from Britain. The desire to democratize the non-democratic elements misses the point altogether and replaces the wisdom of the ancients with the folly of the modern.

Reforms that respect the constitution and the tradition on which it is based are democratic in another sense of the word, the best sense of the word, that of which G. K. Chesterton wrote when he said that he wanted a democracy that does not exclude members of a society from the franchise on the grounds that they are no longer among the living. It is tradition to which he was referring, the only kind of democracy that can give a vote to all members of a society, the dead and the unborn as well as the living. In this sense of the word democracy, the will of the people is not to be equated with whatever the majority of the populace can be persuaded to say they want at any given moment. This concept of democracy suits our constitution well for in it, the task of representing the people as an organic whole, including past and future generations as well as the present, is assigned to an office that is above elections and the political process, the office of the Queen.

The Supreme Court, by insisting that any government wishing to make significant changes to the structure of the Senate must follow the amendment procedure in the constitution, has declared that the government must respect the constitution and the tradition upon which it is built. Critics of their decision may complain that the Court is standing in the way of the will of the people and of democratic reform, but it is in keeping with the Chestertonian “democracy of the dead” which is the best form of democracy and perhaps the only one truly worthy of honour.

So three cheers and kudos to the Supreme Court. This time, at least, they did their job well.

2013 in Retrospect

In the decades after the Second World War, the governments of the West adopted a number of policies that were bad enough on their own but taken together were disastrous for their countries. One of those policies was the anti-natalist social engineering, such as the development of cheap artificial birth control, abortion on demand, and the reduction of marriage to a contract easily broken and without penalty, that has driven Western fertility rates down below population replacement level. Another was liberal immigration, in which immigrants from non-Western countries have been admitted at rates that are unprecedentedly high and at times when domestic unemployment rates have also been high, in order to replace the children Western people are not having due to the previous set of policies. A third policy is multiculturalism in which the government decides that the country will change to adapt to the new immigrants rather than requiring that they change to adapt to their new country. Finally, there is the policy of squelching opposition to these policies by means that range from the relatively mild means of name-calling, i.e. labeling opponents of the policies as “racists” to the more draconian measures of anti-discrimination, “hate propaganda” and other so-called “human rights” laws. (1)

Those brave souls who have dared to speak out against this insane abuse of Western peoples by their own liberal, democratic, governments, have often found themselves occupying the role of Cassandra, the Trojan princess who, having spurned the advances of Apollo after he gave her the gift of prophetic sight, was cursed to go unheeded and ignored by those who needed the truths she uttered, but thought her mad for uttering them.

This year saw the sapphire and ruby anniversaries of two such Cassandra moments. The twentieth of April was the forty-fifth anniversary of Enoch Powell’s famous Birmingham address warning about the consequences of immigration that is still remembered and talked about as his “Rivers of Blood” speech. (2) This year was also the fortieth anniversary of the original French publication of Jean Raspail’s prophetic, dystopic, novel, The Camp of the Saints, which depicts a Western world, weakened by liberalism, unable to summon up the conviction necessary to preserve its own existence when faced with an invasion by those armed only with their own poverty and need. (3)

Less impressively, this year was also the eleventh or steel anniversary of the publication of the book in which Diane Francis presented arguments against Canada’s liberal immigration policies, the incompetency with which they are administered, and the failure of a refugee system that has made us the laughing stock of the world. (4) Written in the aftermath of 9-11, in this book the National Post editor and columnist made valid arguments on the basis of economic and national security concerns, while doing her very best to ignore completely the heart of the problem with liberal immigration, as I described it in my first paragraph. I mention this only because this year Francis has provided us with a much stronger argument for limits and restrictions on immigration.

Harper Collins has just released her new book, Merger of the Century. (5) In this book she argues, on the basis of the perceived economic advantage to both countries, that Canada and the United States should become one country. By doing so, she has by her personal example, given us an excellent argument for being more careful about whom we let into the country. Diane Francis is American born. She immigrated to Canada in the 1960s, so that her British born husband could avoid being drafted to fight in the Vietnam War. Now, she has written a book length argument for a union that would in practice mean the swallowing up of her adopted country by her country of birth. The kind of immigrant that comes to Canada to advocate our take over by the United States is exactly the kind of immigrant we do not need. This is especially the case when they add insult to injury by making the proposal at a time when the United States is under the extreme mismanagement of a buffoon like Barack Obama.

This, incidentally, is an excellent reason for maintaining the law that requires newcomers to swear an oath of loyalty to our head of state, Queen Elizabeth II, and her heirs in order to obtain citizenship. Earlier this year, three malcontents sued the government in an attempt to get this requirement overturned, claiming that it was unconstitutional and violated their human rights. (6) Thankfully the judge that heard that case had the common sense, a commodity extremely rare these days, especially on the judicial bench, to rule against them. (7)

That common sense, unfortunately, is not shared by the man who, equally unfortunately, represents the constituency in which I dwell as our Member of Parliament. That man is Pat Martin for whom, I can thankfully say, I have never voted and, unless I am suddenly stricken by some form of insanity, never shall vote. Earlier this year, even before the court case referred to above had made the news, Martin had declared his desire for legislation that would remove the oath from our citizenship requirements. He was quoted as saying “It’s just so fundamentally wrong. These people are from all over the world — Paraguay and the Congo and the Philippines and Vietnam. Why are they swearing loyalty to some colonial vestigial appendage from the House of Windsor? It’s bizarre really.” (8) While this goes back to what I was saying earlier about the insanity of multiculturalism, in which a country decides to change its institutions and ways to accommodate new immigrants rather than require them to adapt to its institutions and ways, it apparently never occurred to Martin that these people from all over the world knew full well that in moving to Canada they were moving to a constitutional monarchy within the British Commonwealth and by so moving here indicated that this was not a problem to them and perhaps that it was part of what attracted them to the country in the first place. Martin, as the National Post article from which I took that quotation indicates, ultimately wants more than just to scrap the citizenship oath, he wants to sever Canada’s ties to the monarchy. This, and the utterly disrespectful language he used in speaking of that institution, is utterly inappropriate for a member of Her Majesty’s “Loyal” Opposition.

Of course, the monarchy is not the only Canadian institution that has come under attack from that supposedly loyal Opposition this year. Martin was expressing his own private views which are not officially endorsed by his party, the New Democrats. It is, however, the official policy of the New Democratic Party to support the abolition of the Senate, the upper house in the Canadian Parliament, and Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair made a major nuisance of himself this past fall by going across the country trying to win support for such abolition.

In doing so he was seeking to capitalize on the public exposure of the misdoings of now-suspended Conservative Senators Mike Duffy and Pamela Wallin, both of whom seemed to be in the news more often this year over their alleged abuse of their Senate expense accounts than in their entire previous careers as broadcasters. Whatever the facts may be in the Duffy and Wallin cases, Mulcair, in using these cases to build support for the abolition of the Senate displayed the same astonishing lack of perspective and comparative judgement that he showed when he opposed allowing Canadian born, Canadian raised, Lord Conrad Black back into Canada because of his conviction in the United States for a financial crime while at the same time campaigning for the return to Canada of Omar Khadr, who, while born here, had been raised in Pakistan, and had been captured by the Americans in Afghanistan where he had taken up arms against Canada and her allies. Khadr’s claims upon Canada are far less substantial and more nominal than those of Lord Black, and his crimes far more serious, but such considerations appear to be of no consequence to Thomas Mulcair. Similarly, to make the financial misdoings of particular Senators a cause for abolishing the Senate itself, which as an institution is one of the three fundamental elements of our traditional parliamentary monarchy, is to grotesquely miscalculate the difference between the importance of maintaining our constitutional institutions and that of punishing the abuse of office. You do not throw out a time-honoured, traditional institution because one or two members of that institution have done wrong. Not if you have any sense of perspective.

If I know the NDP at all I suspect that Diane Francis’ new book is not likely to be well received among their membership. While this in and of itself speaks well for the socialist party, which is not something that can be said very often, it raises a curious question. Presumably, the objection which New Democrats would have to being absorbed by the United States is that Canada and everything that makes Canada Canadian would therein be lost, which is an excellent objection. How do the members of the NDP square their Canadian nationalism with their party’s hostility to Canada’s history, heritage, traditions, and most of its institutions?

An even bigger question is raised by those members of the Conservative Party who have indicated their support for the NDP’s call for Senate abolition. (9) The Conservative Party is supposed to be the party of continuity, tradition, and national institutions. Conservative thought is supposed to be rooted in classical political philosophy and medieval Christian political theology as mediated and interpreted in the traditions that have come down to us today. Classical political philosophy favoured a constitution in which the principles of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy were mixed and balanced, such as the parliamentary monarchy system that evolved in Great Britain and became part of our Canadian heritage. How can a conscientious Conservative support the abolition of an essential element of that constitution? (10)

Of course the Conservative Party of today is not the Conservative Party of yesterday. This year is the tenth anniversary of the merger which formed the present Conservative Party, uniting what was left of the Progressive Conservative Party (11) with the Canadian Alliance which had been formed out of a previous merger of most of the PC Party and the western populist Reform Party. When the merger took place, I, who had left the old Conservative Party to join the Reform Party in the 1990s out of disgust with the direction the old Party had gone under Brian Mulroney, declined to join the new party on the grounds that it was most likely going to combine the worst of both parties rather than the best of both parties. In other words it was likely to combine the anti-patriotism often present in the Reform Party and her frequent desire to abandon Canadian traditions and institutions for American ones with the Progressive Conservative Party’s refusal to take seriously the grievances of the western provinces against central Canada and her willingness to rubber stamp the intrusive progressive social engineering of the other parties. It should have combined the old Tory Party’s Canadian nationalism and respect for Canada’s traditions and institutions with the Reform Party’s support for pro-business policies and traditional social mores.

Ten years later, I think my prediction has largely been born out, although Harper’s Conservatives have on occasion surprised me. This summer, for example, they finally got their act together and passed the bill which will abolish Section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act one year from the day it received royal assent. (12) Of course they should have abolished the entire Canadian Human Rights Act while they were at it. Passed into law by the Trudeau Liberals back in 1977, the only thing this vile piece of legislation does is allow Canadians who are members of groups deemed to be “vulnerable” and therefore needing protection, to accuse other Canadians of discriminating against them and sue them for it. It was and is a disgusting act of social engineering designed to program people so that they will think in ways that the progressive movement and the government approves and not to think in ways of which they disapprove. Thankfully, the death warrant for its worst clause has been signed. The Harper government continues, however, to support, on various pretexts, legislation for policing the internet that might, in the long run, prove even more dangerous in the hands of progressive social engineers than Section 13 was.

There is probably more that I will later wish that I included in this year’s recap but I am going to end it here on that admittedly less than positive note. This will be my last essay for this year, as I am going to be busy with Christmas celebrations in the next couple of weeks and wish to reserve the rest of my time for reading rather than writing. I wish you all a Merry Christmas and if the Lord tarries will resume posting early in the New Year.

(1) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2011/02/suicide-cult.html

(2) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/04/enoch-was-right.html

(3) http://archive.org/stream/CampOfTheSaints/Camp_of_the_Saints_djvu.txt

(4) Diane Francis, Immigration: The Economic Case, (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2002).

(5) Diane Francis, Merger of the Century: Why Canada and America Should Become One Country, (New York and Toronto: HarperCollins Publishers Ltd., 2013).

(6) http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-do-we-put-up-with-it.html

(7) http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/oath-to-queen-a-reasonable-form-of-compelled-speech-judge-rules/article14449686/

(8) http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/04/18/its-just-so-fundamentally-wrong-ndp-mp-pat-martin-wants-queen-dropped-from-citizenship-oath/

(9) http://www2.macleans.ca/2013/10/15/idea-of-senate-abolition-gaining-momentum-inside-conservative-caucus/

(10) There is a clear need for the institution to undergo some sort of reform. My proposals for a form of Senate reform that does not do violence to Canada’s traditions and constitution can be found here: http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2012/08/senate-reform.html I also recommend two articles that a blogger who goes under the internet handle “Alberta Royalist” recently contributed as a guest blogger at the excellent MadMonarchist blog: “The Problem With the Canadian Senate”, http://madmonarchist.blogspot.ca/2013/12/guest-article-problem-with-canadian.html and “A Case For a Canadian House of Lords” http://madmonarchist.blogspot.ca/2013/12/guest-article-case-for-canadian-house.html.

(11) “Progressive Conservative” is a contradiction in terms, but this contradiction, unfortunately, is the title under which the party which formed Canada’s first national government was known before it merged into the current Conservative Party. At the provincial level it is still called by this contradictory title.

(12) http://www.thronealtarliberty.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-long-awaited-day-has-come-at-last.html

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