Clipping Leviathan's Fingers
Clipping Leviathan's Fingers
How to Put a Permanent Leash on the Federal Government (Step 1: Senate Reform)
America was supposed to be a truly decentralized bottom-up republic designed to defend the rights and liberties of its citizens (and their local communities!) from tyranny in all its forms. To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, what the Founding Fathers created was supposed to be a “government of the people, by the people, for the people.”
Yet the entire 250-year history of the United States is one long slow erosion of that idea as America evolves to become an increasingly top-down, centrally-controlled, quasi-imperial state. America might still have an elected president, but by many measures it has long since become even more burdensome to live under Washington’s current thumb that it was to live under King George III on the eve of the American Revolution.
By contrast, our Canadian parliamentary system has long since been quasi-imperial in the structure of its constitution — and has been from its founding. The colonial governments of British North America that banded together to create the Dominion of Canada — much like Britain itself — were terrified of the “dangerous” republican ideas flourishing in America that sought to turn control of the government over to the people. And so, after losing its thirteen rebellious colonies during the American Revolution, the remainder of British North America set about designing a system that provided some illusion of democracy to its subjects while custom-crafting it to ensure that our “governors” would retain their free hand to shape our country and harness our men and our resources according to their will. Elite rule.
Canada’s seemingly benign constitutional motto “peace, order, and good governance” reflects that top-down vision that keeps the voices of its citizens at arm’s length from the levers of power. From day one, government in Canada has always been a top-down enterprise. For all intents and purposes, Canada is merely the natural home-grown successor state of King George III’s colonial government in both purpose and design.
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It’s easy to criticize both the Canadian and the emerging American top-down systems. But how do you reverse this without giving some “people’s champion” new dictatorial powers to cut through the red tape, only to end up even further down the path towards top-down empire? Or, worse yet, without some great reset that starts with another Tea Party in Boston and ends with all the horrors that followed?
It’s a question that haunts me as we watch what is going on south of our border. Admittedly, it’s emotionally satisfying to watch the flurry of executive orders flowing from President Trump’s executive pen to erase the woke globalist rot of prior eras and root out the suffocating corruption that has infected America’s institutions. As Elon Musk recently pointed out, the federal bloat has grown to over 428 federal agencies… and they are increasing at an average rate of over 2 per year. The revelations coming from DOGE’s audit of USAID — just one of those many agencies — are truly staggering as corruption, propaganda, and infiltration by the Deep State into… well, nearly everything… is exposed on a colossal scale.
In effect, post-WWII "democracy" is finally being exposed by DOGE as essentially being a stage-managed, state-directed illusion. This isn’t anywhere close to the bottom-up republic of yesteryear envisioned by its Founding Fathers.
But Leviathan doesn’t stop growing just because you temporarily clip its fingers — indeed, those doing the clipping are often themselves growing Leviathan’s powers in other ways. The evolution towards imperial empire remains unbroken.
Even if Trump and DOGE succeed in cutting government down to size, as it stands today it only takes a single election and a new flurry of executive orders to erase all that progress. Even if the agencies are trimmed back in number and size, you cannot reset this system back to an earlier stage of the post-WWII liberal era because those who figured out how to game that system to their advantage now know how it can be done. Something new must replace it. Otherwise, it is only a matter of time before the system regrows to become even more bloated than it was before as the passions of the current era fade and are replaced by new voices demanding new powers and new institutions in order to solve new problems.
Without deep constitutional reforms to place new permanent limits on federal power, this is merely a temporary respite. But how can you put a permanent brake on Leviathan’s power that will not be reversed again at a later time by the next president with a different philosophical mindset but wielding the same executive pen?
No regulations in the world, no matter how carefully they are worded, can restrain the relentless expansion of power. Nor is culture sufficient to restrain it because the immediate needs of voters will always take precedence at the voting booth over the long-term thinking and cultural restraint needed to sustain a healthy decentralized republic. At best, both regulation and culture can only slow the inexorable trend towards dictatorial imperial power, but they cannot stop it.
Almost every empire in history has followed a similar path from a decentralized power acting in service of its people to becoming a centralized behemoth whose people are bent to serve the whims of the state. Rome is the perfect example in which the glory of the post-republican imperial era was largely achieved by stripping away the individual liberty of its citizens to bend them all to the will of the imperial state. By the time the Western Roman Empire collapsed, the very idea of Rome had ceased to be worth defending.
The simple fact is that no matter who rises to power, good or bad, those leaders will seek new powers or expand existing ones to solve the challenges of their own era. And so, in a death by a thousand cuts, the republic is transformed into an imperial system, and Leviathan gradually evolves from being the people’s servant to becoming the people’s master.
And yet, there IS a way to reverse this. And no, it does not require either a Caesar to “save the republic” from its corrupt senators by crowning himself dictator-for-life, nor a repeat of the bloody American Revolution to reset the republic back to year 1. There is a third way.
One of those alternate solutions — and the focus of this particular essay — is contained in the structure of the original American Constitution before subsequent presidents deliberately conspired to “amend” that Constitution with the express goal of removing this natural limit on expanding federal power.
The key lies in the structure of the Senate — not as it is today, but as it was in 1787 when the Founding Fathers signed their names to their new Constitution.
And so, in this essay I want to tackle the #1 reform that Americans must undertake to put a permanent halt on the expansion of federal power and begin the process of reversing it in order to revive the inspirational American idea of a bottom-up decentralized republic that was meant to serve its people. It’s not a complicated fix (quite the opposite actually — it merely requires a repeal of the 17th Amendment), but it does require some historical context to understand why this would have such a profound impact on how government works in America…
Building on that discussion, Senate reform is similarly the #1 “fix” that Canadians must undertake to replace their broken Senate in order to dismantle Ottawa’s quasi-dictatorial parliamentary system of government. However, in the Canadian case the path to reform is fraught with much greater difficulties because, unlike in America, there’s no earlier constitutional precedent to roll back to.
And if Canadians (or any individual province like Alberta) get fed up with Ottawa’s resistance to reform and decide they’d prefer to join the American Republic instead, the #1 most important pre-condition for a negotiated annexation would be to demand that America repeals its 17th Amendment in order to revive the Senate’s structure of 1787, which is the key to protecting the local autonomy of the provinces as they join the American Union. Ironically, while the federal government in Washington might not want this, it is highly likely that many US states would wholeheartedly support that demand in order to claw back their own lost powers that the Founding Fathers once delegated to individual states, but which were stolen from them by the 17th Amendment.
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And so, our story must begin with some historical context…
The Declaration of Independence, signed by America’s thirteen colonies in 1776, and the Revolutionary War that followed as Britain tried unsuccessfully to block their exit from the British Empire, produced a flurry of voluntary collaboration between those thirteen rebellious freedom-loving colonies.
But that unity immediately began to fray as soon as the war ended. The inflation produced by the money printing that was used to pay for the war had the economy on its knees. The war debt were crippling. Local rebellions (like Shay’s Rebellion — an armed uprising in Massachusetts in 1786 and 1787) began to break out everywhere as unemployed soldiers banded together in revolt of the state taxes that were being levied to try to deal with the debt crisis. And off the coast lurked the resentful British navy — yet each of the colonies kept finding excuses to push the costs of naval defense onto the others… mostly by finding excuses not to pay their own share.
The only solution was to create some kind of formal union that could amalgamate debts, raise funds for military defense from its colonies, co-ordinate a joint naval defense, and thereby secure a lasting freedom from both hostile foreign forces without and self-serving domestic forces within.
The problem with creating such a union is that every smaller colony immediately recognized that a system of government in which seats in the legislature are allocated on the basis of population would immediately make the biggest states the masters of the smaller ones and leave the smaller ones essentially voiceless in the affairs of government. If this reminds you of how Canada is structured, you would be exactly right — but more on the Canadian story later.
In essence, why would Delaware (with 1 seat in the House of Representatives) or Rhode Island (with 2) want to join a Union dominated by large states like New York (with 26 seats) or Pennsylvania (with 17)? And why would South Dakota want to join such a Union at a later date knowing full well that its small population would only be eligible for a single seat in Washington? And why would any of the existing members want Texas (38 seats) or California (52 seats) to later join the Union knowing that these populous behemoths would completely control the entire course of the nation’s future purely by virtue of their massive overrepresentation in the House of Representatives?
Indeed, that is precisely the stumbling block that kept the colonies from binding themselves together as a single federal union — the smaller states recognized they would simply be joining a new system that left them without a voice, not altogether different from what life was like under King George III.
The solution that the Framers stumbled upon is known as “The Great Compromise”.
They recognized that they needed to create an equal but opposite counterbalancing force in Congress to offset the “tyranny of the majority” in the House of Representatives.
They kept the idea of having both the President and the House of Representatives directly elected by the people, with electoral districts apportioned on the basis of population. In that system, each congressman essentially represents “the voice of their local people” in Washington. But to counteract that population-weighted system, the Framers came up with an ingenious solution — the Senate — a second body in Washington that is fully equal in its legislative powers to the House of Representatives (this is in contrast to the British House of Lords or the Canadian Senate, which have significantly reduced legislative powers compared to the House of Commons — they are a deliberative body that can block legislation, but their ability to introduce new legislation is significantly handicapped). In other words, this re-imagined American version of the Senate was a completely different beast.
Furthermore, in this new American version of the Senate, each state was given two senators irregardless of the size of each state. And, unlike the lifetime appointments of the British or Canadian systems, US senators were appointed to 6-year terms. But unlike today, senators were not elected directly by the citizens of each state. Instead, senators were appointed directly by each state’s legislature. At first glance, the difference may look subtle and appear less democratic, but it is anything but.
In those days, senators essentially acted like each state’s appointed ambassadors in Congress. They represented the “voice of each state legislature” in Washington. They were appointed by state legislatures and could thus be directed by their state legislatures on how to vote, because to go against their state legislature meant they would lose their jobs. Indeed, state legislatures were not only responsible for appointing their senators, but they also retained the power to recall their senators if they tried to go rogue. In other words, senators were essentially the direct representatives of their respective state legislatures in Washington, and were kept on a tight leash, so they were therefore highly motivated to only act in the best interests of their state legislatures.
The net effect was that state legislatures had the ability to block any piece of federal legislation if it undermined state interests. The Senate was their tool in Congress by which they could gridlock the federal government even if the fickle passions of the people (as represented by their congressmen) demanded a more powerful federal government to vote themselves goodies or if the executive branch (the president and his cabinet) tried to usurp state authorities to grow their own powers at the expense of the individual states.
The Founding Fathers considered their innovative new Senate to be the “great anchor” of their new Constitution — James Madison went as far as describing their new Senate as a "necessary fence" against the "fickleness and passion" of the voters and their representatives in the House of Representatives.(source)
The net result was that the federal government could only assume new powers (or create new institutions) if the individual states allowed it — which only happened with those few powers that the states were either unwilling or unable to do themselves at a state level — all other powers were jealously guarded at the state level. In other words, apart from national defense, foreign policy, and regulating interstate commerce, the federal government was pretty much powerless to do much else.
And so, by this brilliant update to the structure and design of the Senate, the Founding Fathers kept the federal government in check by balancing self-interested state legislatures against self-interested federal lawmakers in Washington. This natural limit on federal power was created neither by regulation nor by cultural restraint, but by the time-tested principle of pitting one greedy self-interested power base against another so that the never-ending power struggle between them keeps either from outgrowing its bounds.
Jealous states defending their turf against federal encroachment was the single most important mechanism that kept the republic from evolving into an imperial system. The state-appointed Senate served as THE leash on the federal government to prevent it from evolving from servant to master.
That’s why, when Americans pledge their allegiance to their Constitution, they are not just pledging to defend their Bill of Rights (freedom of speech, the right to bear arms, etc.), but they are pledging their allegiance to uphold the very structure of the government itself, which the Founding Fathers had carefully set up to be self-limiting by design.
But all that changed during the Progressive Era when America fell in love with the European idea of Big Government and federally-directed social engineering, and the utopia that could allegedly be built by harnessing the raw power of an unrestrained federal government to its fullest extent. President Woodrow Wilson best expressed the new ethos of that new era when he wrote:
“Administration is everywhere putting its hands to new undertakings. The utility, cheapness, and success of the government's postal service, for instance, point towards the early establishment of governmental control of the telegraph system. Or, even if our government is not to follow the lead of the governments of Europe in buying or building both telegraph and railroad lines, no one can doubt that in some way it must make itself master of masterful corporations. ... The idea of the state and the consequent ideal of its duty are undergoing noteworthy change; ... Seeing every day new things which the state ought to do, the next thing is to see clearly how it ought to do them [my emphasis].”
The idea of a bottom-up republic — a union of semi-autonomous states — had been replaced by the idea of a top-down master planner. But to achieve that vision, Woodrow Wilson and his progressive peers had to remove the state-appointed Senate as an obstacle to unrestrained federal power. To achieve that vision, he had to violate his oath to uphold the Constitution by conspiring to break the Constitution itself.
In 1913, Woodrow Wilson passed the 17th Amendment (under the guise of fighting against corrupt state legislatures), which changed the Senate from a state-appointed position into a directly-elected position. And so, individual states lost their voices in Washington, leaving them only with the courts to block legislation that encroached onto authorities that had previously belonged to the individual states.
But the Supreme Court invariably sides with the federal government during most court challenges when state rights run up against expanding federal authority because Supreme Court judges are ultimately appointed at the federal level and thus share that progressive vision of a masterful federal government.
Indeed, in order to ensure that courts would rule in favor of that vision of a masterful federal government, Woodrow Wilson also popularized the metaphor of the Constitution as being a “living tree” — explicitly pushing the idea that the Constitution should be re-interpreted to suit each new era.
This is nothing more than a carefully worded metaphor to put a positive spin on judicial activism.
Woodrow Wilson’s concept of the “Living Tree” was in direct opposition to the previous role of the judiciary, which was supposed to interpret the Constitution according to the original intent of the Founding Fathers, and to ensure that any changes made to that original interpretation had been approved by “the people” via legislation that passes through both the House of Representatives AND the Senate.
It was never the intent of the Founding Fathers that progressive judges would re-interpret the Constitution to suit their beliefs, thus making new laws and setting new legal precedents without congressional approval — indeed the very idea of judicial activism is the polar opposite of a self-sustaining decentralized republic in which the people themselves (through their elected representatives) have to make every law under which they must live.
As soon as this progressive idea of the Constitution as a “living tree” crept into the judicial system, progressive “Wilsonian” judges began systematically stripping away the constitutionally-guaranteed authorities granted to individual states by the U.S. Constitution without those changes ever receiving congressional or senatorial approval. A masterful federal government was thus unleashed.
Woodrow Wilson’s 17th Amendment in 1913 uncorked America’s runaway federal expansion and centralization. The explosion of federal agencies that DOGE is confronting today were all built on the back of that fateful amendment.
The creation of the Federal Reserve banking system followed only months after the 17th Amendment passed. The introduction of federal income taxes followed soon after. And with the federal government now empowered to collect taxes to fund its own ambitious nation-building projects instead of having to rely on meagre import tariffs (or money from individual states) to fund its previously limited operations, the federal government finally had access to all the money it needed to roll out an impressive and ever-expanding list of federal institutions. The accelerating transformation from decentralized republic to centralized imperial empire was underway.
The following graph from my book Plunderers of the Earth shows how federal debts exploded after 1913 to pay for America’s expanding federal footprint in the immediate aftermath of the 17th Amendment.
A directly elected Senate is entirely unsuited for blocking the expansion of federal power because the people, voting to protect their interests, have neither the time nor the expertise to comb through every piece of legislation to spot where it might step on state authorities. That’s why state legislatures also needed their own voice in Washington.
But the 17th Amendment silenced the voices of state legislatures in Washington. Instead, the Senate was transformed into little more than a second House of Representatives that replicates the “voice of the people” in Congress, except with a different voting structure to elect them.
The switch from state-appointed to directly-elected senators also served to unleash a tsunami of corruption in Washington. Previously there were 50 corrupt state legislatures, all at odds with one another, who each appointed their own senators to do their bidding in Washington. But they were all competing with one another to serve their own state’s bidding — that competition served as a check on corruption at the federal level as each state watched the others like a hawk to avoid another state taking advantage of the federal system to gain advantages at the expense of their peers.
A state-appointed Senate had also served to keep both corporate corruption and the influence of federal political parties in check because in order to affect how senators voted, conspirators had to infiltrate 50 separate state legislatures to influence all of their votes. Conspiring with the senators themselves didn’t bear as much fruit because senators could ill-afford to vote against the interests of their state legislatures without losing their jobs. Thus, lobbyists had to work much harder to influence how senators voted.
But once the leash was severed by the 17th Amendment, senators were only accountable to their voters, not to their state legislatures. What remained was a single body of 100 senators who could all be lobbied in a single location — Washington. With an unaware and uninformed public voting them in, and with state legislatures having no means to hold senators to account, it created the perfect storm for senators to speak out of both sides of their mouths as they woo their voters with one hand while holding out their other hand to the highest bidder.
And so, perhaps more than any other thing that has undermined the Founding Fathers’ original vision of a decentralized bottom-up republic, it is arguably the 17th Amendment that is most to blame for the explosion of corrupt and ever-expanding federal power.
But the solution to this problem is literally written into the Constitution. It is simply waiting to be rediscovered. Repeal the 17th Amendment, and the first and most important step towards reviving the decentralized state-controlled republic will have been taken.
If President Trump and DOGE dismantle all these corrupt federal institutions and then follow up with a repeal of the 17th Amendment, it would go a very long way towards slamming the door on these institutions to prevent them from ever being re-built as the individual states regain their leash by which to rein in expanding federal authority.
And it would equally send a very loud and long-overdue signal that President Trump is there to use his presidential powers to dismantle power itself, and not merely to use Leviathan to reshape America according to his vision.
The greatest enemy of the republic is power itself.
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Fixing Canada is not so easy because there’s no decentralized constitution to roll back to. From Day One, the Canadian Senate has been a tool of the governing elites and not a tool of the people. Fixing this requires a brand-new constitution.
Most readers are well aware of just how ridiculously broken the Canadian Senate is, with an unequal distribution of senators in each province (and heavily weighted towards Ontario and Quebec), with senators being appointed directly by the Prime Minister (they are not elected by voters, nor are they appointed by provincial legislatures), and with senators serving continuously until age 75 without any means to recall them.
How do citizens hold such senators to account? How do provinces ensure that their senators represent their interests in Ottawa and not the interests of federal political parties, lobbyists, or other third parties? And how do small provinces prevent themselves from being completely dominated by the interests of the largest provinces?
Indeed, they don’t.
By design, the Canadian Senate is completely beyond the reach of both the voting public and the provincial legislatures that they allegedly represent, which is why Canada’s Senate all to often merely serves a rubber stamp for the quasi-dictatorial powers of our Prime Minister or the whims of the cliquey Laurentian Elite. In short, in no way, shape, or form could anyone mistake Canada’s Senate as a brake on Ottawa’s power.
As it stands today, 90 of Canada’s 105 senators were appointed by Justin Trudeau. And he has the opportunity to appoint another 10 senators before he steps down in March. His ideology and that of his party is baked into the Canadian system for decades to come — it is an unaccountable body that can block any piece of legislation that goes against their ideological beliefs no matter who is elected to lead Canada’s government.
Once again, the only remedy remaining to the provinces is to turn to the courts to defend their interests against federal overreach. But once again, the Supreme Court is appointed directly by the Prime Minister and is thus more likely to enable rather than to restrain federal overreach. Unlike in the USA where the president can only nominate judges, but Congress has to sign off on those nominations through the highly public confirmation process, in Canada there is no formal process legislated for the appointment of these justices (source). This is raw unaccountable power concentrated in the hands of our Prime Minister.
Even today, 7 of 9 Supreme Court judges in Canada have been appointed by Trudeau. There’s zero chance that they would stand against the Liberal Party’s federalist vision of Canada — indeed, the past 9 years have been a masterclass in watching how the courts either rule in favor of federal overreach, or deflect, defer, and frustrate every serious attempt to hold the government to account through the courts.
And even when there’s a temporary win via the courts, unlike America’s laws against double jeopardy (prosecuting a person twice for the same office), Canada’s appeals process allows the government to challenge every decision over and over again to get what they want. Our judicial system is custom-built for judicial activism, for lawfare, and to drive defendants into bankruptcy long before the federal government’s powers can be meaningfully put to the test. If Woodrow Wilson’s idea of judicial activism was a new idea in America in 1913, Canada’s judiciary has been a tool of the federal government right from the very start.
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While America’s original Senate was once designed as the key tool to restrain federal power, the Canadian Senate was the key building block to cementing the quasi-dictatorial powers of the federal government into the Canadian constitution from the very start.
Fear of American expansion and annexation (and the fact that Britain was tired of paying for Canada’s defense) were among the reasons why Britain’s Canadian colonies decided to unite as a single federal union (Confederation) in 1867.
But to understand the full extent of Canada’s quasi-dictatorial federal powers and the true purpose of the Canadian Senate, we need to look a little deeper beneath the surface at the problems boiling within these colonies at the time of Confederation, which Canada solved by empowering a powerful top-down system of government.
Already in 1841, Upper Canada (Ontario) and Lower Canada (Quebec) were amalgamated into a single colony (the Province of Canada) in order to neutralize the growing political power of Quebec’s rapidly growing French-speaking population. In the early years, rapid state-directed English-speaking immigration from England and Scotland (particularly to Montreal), had enabled Britain to subordinate Quebec’s French-speaking population in the Canadian legislature. But in Catholic Quebec, the Church put an inordinate amount of pressure on its Catholic population to have extremely large families (13 or 14 children per woman was extremely common while small families or childless women faced enormous social shaming for not “doing their part”). The Catholic Church was on a mission to out-breed Protestantism in Quebec.
The net result was that Quebec’s English population was at risk of losing its grip over Lower Canada. Amalgamating Upper Canada and Lower Canada in 1841, and then adding in the Maritime colonies in 1867 put control over Canada firmly back in the hands of English speakers (like Sir John A. MacDonald) and French allies who shared their vision of a masterful, federally-dominated, Laurentian-controlled Canadian Dominion (like Sir Wilfrid Laurier or, later, Pierre Elliott Trudeau).
The Senate was structured accordingly to cement that federalist Eastern-controlled vision of Canada into the new 1867 constitution. Ontario and Quebec were assigned equal numbers of senators (24 each), irregardless of population size. And the founding Maritime provinces were treated as a third block in the Senate with an equal number of senators (12 each assigned to Nova Scotia and New Brunswick (reduced to 10 each today)). The net result was that the nationalist anti-federal francophone voice was guaranteed to be outnumbered in Parliament.
And by ensuring that the Prime Minister was given the exclusive authority to appoint senators (for life until 1965; until age 75 after 1965), it ensured that the federalist top-down vision of government was naturally baked into the Senate, thus neutralizing the kind of bottom-up control that American states had to block any federal plans that steamrolled individual states.
The original conferences to discuss Confederation included not just Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, but also Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island (P.E.I. even hosted the famous Charlottetown Conference in 1864 where the colonies began their first official steps to create a new political union).
Yet as the details of Confederation emerged, protests against Confederation broke out in every colony/province except Ontario. In the end, both Newfoundland and P.E.I. bailed out of Confederation — and once again the reasons for their exits speak volumes about the nature and purpose of Canadian Confederation.
One of the carrots dangled in front of the colonies is that the heavily indebted colonies would be able to offload their debts to the federal government. (In that era, building canals and railroads on the government dime was all the rage, and so the Canadian provinces were all on the brink of a major financial crisis.)
Only Newfoundland hadn’t saddled itself with massive debts. But it also had not passed legislation for direct taxation — Newfoundland didn’t collect any such taxes and local circumstances would have made it very difficult to start collecting them. So the rest of the Canadian delegates suggested that the federal government would transfer an annual grant to Newfoundland each year to meet its provincial expenses in exchange for transferring all of its Crown lands and mineral rights to the federal government!?!
At that point, Newfoundland had the foresight to bail from this predatory arrangement. It remained an independent colony until 1949 when it was finally roped into Confederation in a highly contentious referendum following the crippling economic struggles of the Great Depression and the Second World War. When it finally joined in 1949, it brought an end to Newfoundland’s economic isolation and finally gave Newfoundland access to Canada’s federal investments — which Canada had strategically withheld as long as Newfoundland remained outside of Confederation. Canada has never been shy to wield both carrot and stick to get its way.
There are lessons here for any province thinking of going it alone to escape from Ottawa’s grasp today — a landlocked sovereign Alberta trapped between Canada and the United States, without a voice in either Congress or Parliament, would likely be relentlessly squeezed until it submitted to the authority of one or the other of its two larger neighbors.
Prince Edward Island also bailed out of Confederation in 1867 because it recognized that the tiny province with its tiny population would essentially be left without a voice in any federal decision-making. The Ontario- and Quebec-controlled federal government would be able to do whatever they wanted with the little island, controlling their resources and their men, without any meaningful voice in Parliament to prevent it. It’s the same dilemma faced by the smaller founding colonies of the American Union on the eve of signing their Constitution, which the Founding Fathers solved with the Great Compromise of a state-appointed Senate. But Canada did no such thing because it wanted quasi-dictatorial federal control.
However, Prince Edward Island didn’t manage to hold out for long. By 1873 it was so overwhelmed by its public debts and on the verge of bankruptcy that it reluctantly submitted to Confederation. It had no choice. And it has been an afterthought in federal legislation ever since.
Manitoba joined Confederation in 1869. Actually, it didn’t join — unlike the others, it was summarily added to Confederation in a treaty between Britain and Canada without ever asking the settlers in Manitoba what they wanted. It took the violence of Louis Riel’s infamous Red River Rebellion in 1869 before Ottawa was even willing to grant Manitoba a voice in the Senate and in the House of Commons (in 1870). Before the rebellion, the Ottawa intended to administer Manitoba with a governor appointed by the federal government.
As a side note, Ottawa even had the cheek to send land surveyors to the colony to divide up the land for Eastern investors — they surveyed right across existing settlers’ land divisions (divided according to the French seigneurial system, which Ottawa refused to honor) and even through the town itself, so it was pretty clear that Ottawa and their Eastern investor friends were on the cusp of dispossessing the Red River settlers to use the fertile lands for their own purposes. The rebellion led to settlers getting their land titles secured and receiving token political representation in Ottawa. But the story repeated itself in Saskatchewan, leading to the Northwest Rebellion, again led by Louis Riel. In the end, both provinces got token political representation. And Louis Riel was hanged.
Even today, the entire group of four Western Canadian provinces are treated as a single regional block in the Senate, with only 6 senators each for a total of 24 — compared to Ontario and Quebec who get 24 each, or Nova Scotia or New Brunswick who still have 10 each despite having a mere fraction of the populations of the larger western provinces.
Combine that with the allocation of members of parliament by population (121 from Ontario, 78 from Quebec, but only 104 from all four western provinces combined), and you quickly recognize why Western Canada is, in reality, little more than an exploitative colonial project run for the benefit Eastern Canada and plundered via the practice of “equalization payments”, with the whole parasitic colonial relationship cleverly disguised as a democracy. This cartoon, from 1915, says it all, and is as valid today as it was back then.
While Senate reform clearly must be a core part of the reforms needed to dismantle overbearing federal power in Canada, it clearly isn’t enough on its own. To fix this requires Canada to transform itself into a proper decentralized, state-led, bottom-up republic.
It needs a complete overhaul of the Senate, with state-appointed senators, two per state, with 6-year terms. It needs a complete overhaul of the process to nominate and confirm judges. It needs a separately-elected president. It needs to ditch the monarchy (whose Governor General is also currently merely appointed by the Prime Minister), which has evolved into a rubber stamp on Prime Ministerial power. It needs equalization payments to stop. It needs strict clearly-defined constitutional limits on power, clearly-allocated divisions of power to make the federal government the servant rather than the master of provincial governments, and inalienable rights that can no longer be erased on a whim whenever our government invokes section 1 of our Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In short, Canada needs its own version of the Constitution that America’s Founding Fathers created in 1787. Anything less will continue to produce discontent in the West at being relentlessly milked by the East, anger in Quebec about having its francophone culture eroded, frustration in the Maritimes at being left to languish as a Canadian backwater in federal decision-making, and anger throughout the country as various individuals and groups are steamrolled for the benefit of Ottawa’s latest nation-building exercises.
And any reform undertaken in Canada has to somehow pass through the elitist, federally-controlled House, Senate, and Supreme Court, all of which are stacked to the brim with individuals who believe in the idea of a masterful federal government. This is a tough mountain to climb. So far, despite countless attempts over our 157-year history to try to put meaningful limits on Ottawa’s power or to transform Canada into a constitutional republic, no-one has made a dent. The most we’ve accomplished is to add an age-limit to lifetime Senate appointments. Appeasement with crumbs.
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At its core, America wasn’t founded around the idea of a single uniform culture. It was founded on the idea of diverse colonies rallying together — voluntarily — to defend their individual and local freedoms. If this American idea about liberty is to survive, the Republic must re-invigorate its bottom-up roots.
The constitutional limits required to achieve this are all there to be rediscovered — and resurrected — such as through the repeal of the 17th Amendment. America stands at the fork in the road. From a legislative perspective, the solution is simple. The only question is whether there is a will to take this simple step. It comes down to a simple philosophical choice: do the American people want to preserve their republic, or do they want to complete the transition to empire? The legal foundations for either choice have already been prepared. Do nothing, and you get empire. Repeal the 17th, and the most difficult step to revive a republic founded on the American idea of liberty will be accomplished.
Canada has a more difficult road to hew. In order to reform itself, it must evolve a brand-new idea about the purpose of Confederation itself. The federalist idea that Canada was founded upon did not emerge from the people themselves, but was a construct of its ruling classes. The purpose of Confederation was never about serving the people, defending individuals from the majority, or preserving the autonomy of local communities. If Canada is truly to become a nation in service of its people, an entirely new idea of Canada’s purpose must emerge from the hearts and minds of the people themselves.
And so, the most difficult question about Canada’s future, which is hardest to answer, is whether Canada would survive for long as a single independent bottom-up republic without Ottawa’s nation-building to hold it together? Or would the relentless north-south economic opportunities offered by our southern neighbors eventually pull us all into the American union?
Without Ottawa’s nation-building, would little P.E.I., francophone Quebec, distant resource-rich Alberta and British Columbia, agricultural juggernauts Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and even Newfoundland, which always arrives a half-hour early at every party, actually have more natural economic and cultural ties to America than they do to one another, and would thus be better served by acquiring statehood in our larger neighboring republic?
No-one really knows until we remove Ottawa’s thumb and put the idea to the test.
And maybe that’s the point. Maybe a country that tries to artificially force its citizens into a box isn’t a country at all.
Maybe the best outcomes for the people themselves emerge organically when people (and small sovereign provinces/states) are left to make decisions that are best for themselves, out of reach of central federal planners, with the freedom to voluntarily join themselves in a bottom-up republican constitution that truly preserves their autonomy within that larger national family.
If Canada refuses to reform its constitution — and its Senate — maybe even America’s current flawed and unreformed republic offers a better future, as I have argued in previous essays (see here, here, and here).
And if Canada’s deteriorating state of affairs leads to annexation (voluntarily or otherwise), at least we know the most important pre-condition we need to negotiate (Senate reform) to preserve our freedom within their Republic and to try to put a stop to America’s own evolution towards suffocating imperialism. We’ve already been (for over 157 years) what they are evolving to become, so perhaps they will heed our warnings.
But if America doesn’t take the off-ramp away from imperialism, and if by some miracle Canada is somehow able to circumnavigate all the political hurdles that our colonial founders placed between the government and its people to nevertheless transform ourselves into a truly bottom-up decentralized constitutional republic that gives each province the tools to make the federal government their servant instead of their master, perhaps Canada would become a country worth fighting for after all — not because we all share the same culture from coast to coast to coast, but precisely because we don’t.
Because, as America’s Founding Fathers understood all too well, the only way to preserve those unique cultural, economic, and geographic differences, and the only way to defend ourselves, both individually and as local communities, against tyranny in all its many forms, is to wrap ourselves within the envelope of a truly bottom-up freedom-loving republic, and to fiercely defend that republic against all the federalist impulses that seek to transform it into something else.
And that, for the first time in Canada’s history, would be an idea worth defending that might be embraced by us all
Source: Julius Ruechel
