Published in the Western Standard, January 31, 2005, p. 23. (Also available in a pdf scan.)

 

What True North Strong and Free?
by
Pierre Lemieux

 

The Council on Competitiveness, an American organization, just issued another one of those grandiloquent, naive and totally empty reports, this one asking for a “national innovation strategy.” Like a crow on carrion, a BusinessWeek writer swooped down on this intellectual corpse and proposed “a Cabinet-level innovation czar.” Since the U.S. already has a drug czar, an energy czar, an intelligence czar, an AIDS czar, etc., isn’t it time to appoint a top czar, the czar of czars, the Czar? Which brings us to an interesting paradox between the U.S. and Canada. At least during the twentieth century, virtually all types of government intervention started in the U.S. many years, sometimes decades, before being imported into Canada. The U.S. federal income tax was established in 1913, after many unsuccessful attempts; in Canada, it started in 1917. The U.S. Feds introduced unemployment insurance in 1935; the Canadian feds, in 1940. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913; the Bank of Canada, in 1935. Born in 1934, the American Securities and Exchange Commission predated by 11 years its first little Canadian (and provincial) sister. Until about a century ago, even the old English right to keep and bear arms was, in many respects, better honoured in Canada than in the U.S. Controls of so-called “money laundering”—transferring money earned in an activity defined as a crime—was introduced in U.S. law in 1970, and plagiarized here in 1991. In the meantime, tighter surveillance and more severe penalties had been introduced by new U.S. laws, which were imitated by a 2000 law that forced Canadian banks, financial institutions and other businesses and professionals to snitch on customers and file STRs (suspicious transaction reports), the equivalent of the older American SARs (suspicious activity reports). The 2000 Canadian legislation also created a new surveillance bureaucracy, FINTRAC, the little brother of the American FinCEN. The creeping-up of government photo ID started in the U.S. before spilling into Canada. The ubiquitous use of the social security number in the U.S. predated by 10 years or so the proliferation of the social insurance number in Canada. The war on drugs, the snitching on parents who take nude pictures of their children, the catch-all crime of domestic violence, the feminist legislative agenda, the environmental craze (with Kyoto as the only major exception), the corporate governance witch hunt, the prosecution of sexual harassment writ large, the anti-smoking jihad, the anti-fat temperance movement—all these crusades started in the U.S. and were only later embraced by governments in Canada. There are glorious exceptions where Americans remain freer. Taxes are lower in the U.S., and health care is more nationalized in Canada, but this is only since the 1960s. Free speech has resisted much better south of the border. And the right to keep and bear arms has been basically abolished in Canada during the last third of the twentieth century, while it survives in the U.S. Until the 1960s, it is as if Canadian governments had simply forgotten to legislate, to regulate, to control—except for importing tyrannical fads. One explanation of the Canada-U.S. paradox may be that our American friends made the big mistake of trusting their government with protecting their liberty as a sacred and glorifying mission; while in Canada, for a long time, the state was kept humble and impotent. In his book, The State, economist Anthony de Jasay argues that the goals of the minimal state must “lie outside government.” The rulers must enjoy the quasi-aristocratic honours of reigning without controlling. “The very special rationale of being a minimal state,” writes de Jasay, “is to leave few levers for the zealots to get hold of and upset things with if, by the perversity of fate or of the electorate, they manage to become the state.” Now, what is the purpose of having a separate country north of the forty-fifth parallel? Several decades ago, there was a good answer: to protect Canadian liberty. Now that Canadian tyranny has been raised to the American level—and higher in certain areas—this answer makes no sense. Either we quickly restore our traditional liberties, or else Canada has no future. Better break up this country, be absorbed by the U.S., and join the resistance there.