There is only one area in which you might want to think about modifying your position.

Many studies (the Spicer Commission is a notable one) reveal that there is no market among Canadians for further increasing the power of provincial governments. Almost every day we read about some group or another crying for national standards to replace the balkanized ballsup that currently prevails.

Mr. Manning, in your book, The New Canada, p.130, you stated the truth – “Of the three levels of politicians in this country – municipal, provincial and federal – it is usually the municipal ones who are closest to ordinary citizens.”

Arguing that the Constitution assigns healthcare, social services and education to the provinces discounts the realities of the 1860′s.

Hospitals and charities were mostly wards of churches and/or private bodies. Doctors were still bleeding patients, arguing about the cause of sepsis and sawing off bones using booze as an anesthetic. Florence Nightingale’s concept of nursing was scarcely a decade old.

A few self-taught or home-schooled young men attended the few universities that were also church-sponsored.

The idea of community supported, universal health care, welfare and education – that has been delivered so badly by the provinces – was only a notion in the minds of a few advanced liberal thinkers. It took another half century for that notion to achieve widespread acceptance in public and government circles.

Those three – hospitals, charities and schools – were not considered important enough to be considered Dominion responsibilities in 1867. But times have long since changed! They now constitute most of the provincial and territorial spending.

Aren’t the healthcare workers in Edmonton and Edmundston dealing with the same kinds of situations? Aren’t they dealing with local situations? And couldn’t they be just as effective operating to national standards as provincial ones?

Who knows better than the local municipal/church/ SallyAnn/ KofC.’s, etc. workers the people who are in real need of support? When I ran in ’93, I got the biggest cheers when I asked, “Who would you rather have running things – Hazel McCallion or those toads in Queen’s Park?”

In Vol.II, you praise Alberta for its enlightened approach to education. But it wasn’t Alberta, it was Edmonton’s school superintendent Emery Dosdall who showed the way. Calgary followed somewhat and slowly and those two cities weight the Alberta results! It was a municipal initiative, not provincial. Why can’t all the rest of Canada’s K-12 students enjoy the same benefits of local school board initiatives?

There’s only one taxpayer. To swap dollars and/or tax points between jurisdictions just adds bureaucratic handling charges.

Instead of adding another level of governance (cost) – a Council of Federations manufacturing MOU’s – we need fewer levels of government.

And we will never eliminate interprovincial trade barriers until we eliminate provinces.

I earnestly ask you to read the attached and consider whether the need for better governance in our beloved Canada merits the major initiative of a Citizens Constituent Assembly to write a new constitution. Given a chance, Canadians would choose a constitution on the National/Municipal model. They would also choose all the democratic reforms you so eloquently propose.

Nothing will change until we the people control what our governments do and control the people in positions of authority in our governments.

Charles W. Conn, Mississauga. July 2008.

At the top of the wish list of any Canadian government would have to be that all the rabidly quarrelsome, obstructionist, robber-baron provincial governments could somehow be made to magically disappear overnight.

And the majority of the people of Canada have, for years, been clearly stating they are Canadians first, not Provincials, and that they want all Canadians to be treated equally in a strong, united nation. (Most notably, the Spicer Commission Report.)

It might be instructive to recall what the great King Henry II of England did in the latter part of the 12th century.

Britain had been racked for a hundred years following the Norman Conquest by belligerent barons, earls, dukes and counts warring with each other and the royal authority. Anarchy prevailed as lords, both clerical and secular, trampled the people with their inconsistent, arbitrary and often cruel rule.

Previous kings of England had fought the lords directly. Henry II went around them to the leading men in the shires and boroughs – the commoners in the municipalities. He began to swing their support to him by offering “the King’s Justice” throughout the land. His courts for criminal and civil cases quickly came to be recognized as far more fair, learned and consistent than the crazy quilt of lordly courts.

And so began the transition of Britain into the fountainhead of justice for the individual and the triumph of the commons over the lords. It took centuries, but Henry II began it as a project to empower the crown by engaging the support of the municipal leaders thereby empowering the people at the expense of the lords. Today, the United Kingdom has over 4700 municipal governments and a single national government for c. 60 million people. There are no provincial governments gumming up the works.

The Canadian colonial provinces were supposed to have been united “… with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom:” [The British North America Act, 1867]

Churchill borrowed the phrase ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend” to justify rendering aid to a hitherto unlikely ally – the Soviet Union. With a lot less angst, the 1428-member Federation of Canadian Municipalities could ally itself, and thus all the people of Canada, with the Dominion government in a truly dramatic nation-renovation project.

Rather than banging heads with two governments, wouldn’t it be more sensible for Canada’s 1428 municipalities to become the ally of the Dominion government and lead this country to a new level of greatness by getting rid of provincial governments?

In Canada, provincial governments can only be eliminated by a new constitution, written by a constituent assembly of citizens chosen by lot, and confirmed by a binding national referendum.

The establishment of a Citizens Assembly should be the cardinal imperative for the Federation of Canadian Municipalities.

What Happened?

The BNA Act was supposed to unite formerly separate colonies into a single new nation – the Dominion of Canada. It was an amazingly bold and daring idea – a truly grand and glorious vision. And the operative concept was “Union”. In the BNA Act, the terms Union”, “Dominion” and “Canada” describe the new nation. The term “federal” appears only once, as an adjective in “…federally united…”.

The intention and language of the BNA Act was for Canada to be a Confederation. A Confederation is a union of entities. A Federation is a system of government wherein power is divided between central and regional governments.

The BNA Act was written with the just-ended U.S. Civil War as a vivid demonstration of the slaughter and destruction caused by the emphasis on States’ Rights in their Articles of Confederation. Canada’s governance structure was intended to be the opposite of that in the U.S. In Canada, the Dominion government was to be the paramount authority with the power to disallow provincial legislation that harmed any Canadians, to act in any and all matters affecting peace, order and good government for all Canadians, and to act on any matter not already specified in the BNA Act as a Dominion or provincial government responsibility. (The Dominion had the “residual power.”)

However, to get the deal done, the Fathers of Confederation had to pander to small-minded “little provincials”. Provincial governments were granted responsibility for 17 specified “local” matters and were basically intended to be limited to supervising municipal governments.

Significant numbers of people in every colonial/provincial governing establishment resented losing powers of positional authority to people in the Dominion governing establishment. New Brunswick’s establishment nearly scuttled the whole Union process before 1867. The establishments in P.E.I. and Newfoundland kept their citizens out of Canada until 1873 and 1949 respectively. Nova Scotia’s Joseph Howe led a group to England in 1867 that vigorously tried to haul Nova Scotia out of the Union almost before the ink on the BNA Act was dry. Some British Columbians were threatening secession at least a century before the FLQ terrorists and the PQ separatists showed up, and W.S. Fielding became premier of Nova Scotia in 1886 when his party swept into office on the one-word campaign slogan – “Secession”. Ontario’s premier Oliver Mowatt was unquestionably the worst of them all for ripping powers away from the fledgling Dominion and greatly weakening the original Union concept.

While the newborn Dominion was struggling mightily to knit together a new nation – in the face of aggressively negative actions by U.S. imperialists and little or negative support from U.K. imperialists – petty provincials were scurrying off to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council of Great Britain seeking more provincial rights and powers for themselves at the expense of the Dominion.

With a sense of timing so cosmically unfair as to make the gods weep, the main influencer on North American matters brought before the Judicial Committee during these critical early years was a man named Lord Watson. Watson developed his attitudes toward North America from a man named Judah P. Benjamin. Benjamin had been the Attorney General of the failed Confederate States of America and was an ardent proponent of the doctrine of States’ Rights. When the U.S.A. prevailed over the C.S.A., Benjamin moved to England where he continued to preach his doctrine of disintegration. For some unknown reason he was accepted by Lord Watson as the ultimate authority on North American issues.

It was Lord Watson who, in judgment after judgment, influenced the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council to reverse the intention of the founders of the BNA Act and transfer Dominion rights and powers to the provinces. By 1896, the Judicial Committee had even gone so far as to declare that the Dominion’s residual powers should be confined to strictly all-Canadian matters and should not interfere with provincial interference in matters that had been specifically reserved to the Dominion in the BNA Act. That judgment haunts us to this day. Canada was turned into a Federation and became far and away the most broken-up, Balkanized country in the world.

Power-hungry provincial governing establishments have been promoting territorial segregation and separation, and preventing Canadians from enjoying the full benefits of the national Union, since the Dominion was created. The cost has been horrendous and has kept us poorer than we could have/should have been.

All the provincial-power advocates claim that provincial governments are better for the people because they are closer to the people. Rubbish! Municipal governments are closer to the people – everywhere in Canada! “Little-Canada” provincials are only trying to hang onto, nay enlarge, the positional powers, perqs and privileges they’ve abused since colonial days.

B: Two’s Company, Three (Or More) Is A Crowd.

Adapted from the Original in the Toronto Star March 25, 1994

The first thing a new constitution will have to do is redesign the territorial jurisdictions in Canada. Now, it may be that a Citizens’ Assembly would conclude that the current territorial jurisdictions (provinces, territories, counties, regions, townships, districts, parishes, municipalities, etc.) are just dandy and should stay the way they are. But, if there is one thing about which almost all Canadians are agreed it is that the country has too much government from too many governments. Canada has too many layers of government – too many power centres fighting each other for jurisdiction, advantage and money rather than solving problems and serving people.

Canadians are beginning to realize how damaging it is to still be locked into a 130+ year old deal whereby colonial governments were “federally united”.

There is no desire among Canadians to give every provincial/ territorial government even more powers and to build 13 even larger intermediate, alternative governing establishments. A federation of semi autonomous sovereign realms, fighting each other and the national government, does not serve the people of Canada effectively nor does it reduce their taxes.

Canadians have noticed the ever increasing incompetence, venality, lack of sensible policy and failures of service from (all) their provincial governments. For several years, Decima Research has been asking Canadians what they think of the people who run their provincial governments. In 1980, 28% still had “a great deal of confidence” and 21% had “hardly any confidence” in their provincial governors. By 1994, only 6.6% had “a great deal of confidence” and 44% had “hardly any confidence” in them.

When a company needs fixing, business renovators usually reduce bloated middle management first.

The whole world is moving in two directions – toward globalization (more universal, broadly based standards), and, toward localization (putting the delivery of services to those standards in the hands of persons, families or local governments). The underlying theme is centralized global standards for outcomes and decentralized local control of process. Or, put another way, we’re moving toward a basic renovation of governance where national standards of public service are delivered by municipal governments and local people who know what is needed in their own communities. It’s national vision, standards, inspection and funding with local authority and responsibility for administration and delivery.

For years, in all the polls, commissions and surveys, most Canadians have declared they are Canadians first. They want a single national government of equal citizens, not a federation of intermediate governments, “nations” or “peoples”, equal or otherwise. Canadians want a national government for 30 million unique, distinct and equal citizens a national government that responds to them, not to alternative regimes that only divide, duplicate, obstruct and waste.

When Canadians get their hands on their own constitution they will redesign the country’s internal boundaries and create a centralized/decentralized, national/municipal structure that eliminates the provinces.

(Part B, section 1, continues for 14+ pages specifying reasons why provincial governments deserve to be eliminated. Section 2 continues for 20 pages describing a jurisdictional alternative for Canada.)

Extracted from Essay 3 (completed Nov. 1999), one of six essays in “Personalism v. Socialism”, pub. 2001