The result was old age pensions, medicare, the Canada Assistance Plan, national standards, unemployment (not ‘employment’) insurance. The list goes on.
That time extended from the end of the Second World War to the arrival of neo-conservatism in 1979-80, the era of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. The Trilateral Commission, funded by the fabulously wealthy Rockefellers, had decided the western world had “an excess of democracy” — the citizenry was too powerful, too demanding, and had to be put back in its place through a dramatic downsizing of government.
Today, that downsizing gathers speed as the world enters a new age of corporate government delivered by so-called “free trade” agreements. Pioneered by the Mulroney Conservatives’ North American Free Trade Agreement, this new class of trade deals is neither free, nor really about trade — the agenda is about “investor rights” clauses giving corporations the right to sue governments for billions if they dare defy market forces to serve their citizens.
American anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist expressed the sentiment exactly. He doesn’t want to abolish government, he said. “My goal is to cut government in half in twenty-five years, to get it down to the size we can drown it in the bathtub.” Norquist’s sentiments are more or less those of the New Right around the globe.
The result is the highest level of inequality since the Great Depression and a phenomenon known as the one per cent versus the 99 per cent. In Canada today, the richest one per cent make almost $180,000 more than they did in 1982, adjusted for inflation, while the bottom 90 per cent saw income gains of a meagre $1,700. In B.C., the bottom 90 per cent actually makes less than they did in 1982.
In Canada, democracy’s withering — the attack on pensions, medicare, national standards, unemployment insurance — is propelled by an assault on the powers of the national government by what Canada’s parliamentary sage, Eugene Forsey, once described as the “province worshippers,” otherwise known as Canada’s political Right.
The Right’s destruction of the Canadian nation has been propelled by the calamitous colonial legacy bequeathed by the Law Lords of the British Privy Council.
Here’s how Forsey — former senator, constitutional scholar and life-long Canadian patriot — put it in a letter published in the Montreal Gazette in 1979:
“… (T)he voice of the province-worshipper is loud in the land … If the province-worshippers have their way, there will be no real Canada, just a boneless wonder. The province worshippers are reactionaries. They would turn back the clock 100 years or more. They would make us again a group of colonies, American colonies this time, with a life poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
Forsey’s dystopic prediction for the nation he cherished has come to pass — and then some. Constitutional scholars trace the beginning of the end to the era prior to 1936, when final appeals from Canadian courts on legal and constitutional issues went to the Law Lords of the British Privy Council, the men Forsey called “the wicked stepfathers of Confederation.”
Three law lords in particular — Judah P. Benjamin, the former attorney general, secretary of war and then secretary of state in the highly-decentralized, states’-rights Confederate government of Jefferson Davis, and two Scottish devolutionists, Lord Watson and Lord Haldane — turned the British North America Act of 1867 on its head.
All the residual constitutional powers Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald intended to go to Ottawa were sharply curtailed while the provinces’ powers were expanded enormously by the Law Lords’ broad interpretation of the property and civil rights clauses.
The Law Lords also declined to read into the Canadian constitution anything like the U.S. interstate commerce clause, the clause that a long succession of U.S. presidents have used to support a significant expansion in the role of the central government.
Economist Hugh Mackenzie of the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives puts it succinctly: “The framers of the Canadian constitution set out to create a centralized federation and got what is probably the most decentralized federation in the world. The framers of the U.S. constitution set out to create a decentralized federation and ended up with a centralized federation … The founders set out to be centralized, but messed up. Then the world changed and the things they thought were important turned out not to be that important and the things they thought weren’t important turned out to be very important.”
The Great Depression produced a crisis in Canada. The Law Lords struck down virtually every attempt by the Progressive Conservative government of R.B. Bennett to forge a Canadian New Deal along the lines of the one created by U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt. Ottawa’s plan to introduce old age pensions, unemployment insurance and a general national relief program modelled on the the American New Deal were all struck down.
“As a result,” Mackenzie continues, “in the 1930s we had provincial governments that had all the power but were virtually bankrupt and the federal government with no power but solvent. We were rescued by the war.” And also by the federal government’s decision to remove the British Privy Council as Canada’s constitutional court of last resort, replacing it with the Supreme Court of Canada.
Near-bankruptcy at the provincial level created an opening for Ottawa, Mackenzie continues. “And in the first 40 years or so after the war, the federal government used what came to be known as its spending power to get around the limits of the constitution … The federal government could offer to spend and the provinces were free to accept the money or not, and the constitution would not be offended.”
The spending power was never put into the constitution as old age pensions and unemployment insurance were. But equalization, the national program designed to ensure all Canadians have access to “reasonably comparable levels of public services at reasonably comparable levels of taxation”, was entrenched in the 1982 Constitution’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Needless to say, equalization doesn’t sit well with the Canadian Right. Both it and the federal spending power are burrs under the Right’s saddle because they believe it — and the spending power — are largely responsible for the postwar expansion of the Canadian state. By bowing to — or more accurately, using — the decentralist demands of Quebec and the West, recent federal governments, both Liberal and Conservative, have essentially killed the spending power, Mackenzie says.
“Without equalization, those working to reduce the size of government in Canada would have another weapon … Ending equalization would be a second rachet effect — the first being tax cuts and deficits — to use in their campaign to cut back public services,” he continues.
“Equalization is really the last frontier.”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Frances Russell
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