The Trudeau Amending Formula: Negotiating Surrender

You may not know it, but Canada has a new amending formula for the constitution. It now reads: hereditary leaders + American trust fund money/ activist Canada Supreme Court justices times a prime minister who won’t enforce laws equals kiss your country goodbye.

Certainly this equation is not what the father of the current PM had in mind when he repatriated the Canadian constitution to Canada in 1982. The statement of sovereignty Pierre Trudeau thought he was making was a maître chez nous moment that defined this territory called Canada as forever belonging to its citizens. 

Yes, Quebec refused to sign on and there was the sticky issue of how to reconcile the native people who had been here before colonization. But most everyone saw that it was a defining moment for independence. What could go wrong? And what were the odds that the agent of destruction in devolving Canada would be the son of the man who thought he was entrenching Canada forever in the community of nations?

But to anyone watching the impotence of the federal and provincial governments in the face of a few media-savvy organizations in Canada and the U.S. it is clear that— while he has plenty of company in the Blame Game—  Trudeau the Younger’s reticence to act has nudged Canada down the road to breakup. Faced with a few fanatics nationally shutting down the railroad system in sympathy with an internecine struggle for power in B.C. Wet’suwet’en territory, Trudeau blanched and played for time. 

(Contrast this with the reaction to protesters blocking the Dakota Access project in 2016. Nearly 15,000 native and other people protested, staging a sit-in at the site for months. They were given a deadline to move then bulldozers were sent in. Seeing the government’s resolve to complete the project the protesters left the site, and it was completed after getting approval from new president Donald Trump.)

As J.J. McCullough explained in the Washington Post recently, “Trudeau’s timidness personifies a Canadian political class increasingly unsure whether their own power is legitimate. Indian treaties were formally granted the supremacy of constitutional law in the 1980s, and since the 1990s, the Canadian judiciary has been chipping away at the idea that the Canadian state should always prevail when it collides with indigenous assertions of authority.

“New legal theories positing that aboriginal bands like the Wet’suwet’en still hold ‘title’ to their lands, and that the settler governments have a ‘duty to consult’ with what activists call Canada’s ‘rightful owners,’ imply the existence of a vague and open-ended indigenous legal authority that is at the very least coequal to that of Canada.”

Trudeau’s apprehension is understandable. The legal theories of consultation and hereditary rights McCullough describes— funded by trust-fund Americans and David Suzuki wannabes— have received a friendly hearing from courts stocked by Liberal party appointees and heroes of the Toronto Star editorial board. Politicians are now as intimidated by the courts as they are by well-armed Mohawks warriors brandishing weapons and shutting down trains.

The resulting invitation to the disgruntled to imitate the Wet’suwet’en experience  is a clear message to any other activist groups in Canada— and their American benefactors— that they will encounter little or no opposition should they wish to tie up the railroads, highways and courts with their complaints. 

As McCullough points out these protests are also a magnet for a vast collection of grievance seekers to make common cause with a native band or anarchist group. All cheered on by a gullible media that can’t resist the grievance narratives now capturing their newsrooms.

This abdication of authority is why premier Jason Kenny is pushing so hard in Alberta to create a new relationship with the nation. No one in Alberta or Saskatchewan wants out of Canada. But likewise they don’t want to be hitched to a narrative in B.C. or Ontario that countenances the destruction of the nation through piecemeal concessions to hereditary chiefs and their founders in the American Green movement. 

As well Kenney seeks to stem the influence of foreign money and interests in Canada’s business— a project being permitted in the larger population centres of the nation. 

McCullough’s article suggests that Canada may have already gone past the point of no-return in maintaining its national identity. It doesn’t require a constitutional scholar to predict the crack-up of a nation riven with land claims and run by inert caretaker politicians whose job it is to manage the disassembly of the country.  Quebec could survive with its identity but the ROC could dissolve quietly into American client states or confederacies with indigenous bands. 

Which would remove the need for amending formulae in the future.

Bruce Dowbiggin @dowbboy is the publisher of  Not The Public Broadcaster. He’s also a regular contributor to Sirius XM Canada Talks Ch. 167. A two-time winner of the Gemini Award as Canada's top television sports broadcaster, he is also a best-selling author whose new book Cap In Hand: How Salary Caps Are Killing Pro Sports And Why The Free Market Could Save Them is now available on brucedowbigginbooks.ca.