The Existence of “Our” in Our Alleged Culpability in Gomery

Andrew Coyne is always very good and today’s Nat Post column (subscription required) points out just how shockingly unshocking Brault’s revelations about Adscam are. He also argues that “we” Canadians are also responsible for letting this go on for so long. K@chikel sensibly observes that for the most part, it’s Ontarians who should shoulder that blame.

I’d like to push K@chikel’s point a step further. Coyne’s argument that there must be a “we” in the first place. There must be a Canadian people – who understand themselves as a people apart from their government in order that they may act with one voice (or something close to that) in keeping that government in check.

I submit that this is based on a false view of the nature of the Canadian political system. As noted previously, Canada’s first principle is the crown from which authority flows. Unlike the Americans, no Canadian people ever founded the country or even subjected the Charter to ratification. Ratification was done through ministerial and legislative authority.

The notion of a people acting together as a unit is a republican idea common to the USA. For details, read David E. Smith’s Republican Option in Canada, which argues that there is no republicanism in Canada (and here – pdf). The gist of Smith’s thesis here and in his earlier The Crown in Canada is that without the crown (including its ministers, bureaucratic agencies, etc.), Canada would not exist. This ties in with Donald Savoie’s Governing From the Centre in which he demonstrates the increasing centralization of power within the PMO and Cabinet. It also ties in with various commentators who have looked to Canadian literature as a way of determining the extent to which such literature expresses an imaginative entity one would call Canada: the most convincing accounts suggest that there are regional literatures including Maritime, BC, Prairie, and so forth, but the notion of “one Canada” belongs to the garrison myth of central Canada (=Ontario).

The consequences of expecting a “we” when none exists can be seen in Charles Taylor’s account of another country’s problematic representation:

The mass of the peasant population couldn’t conceive of the Russian people as a whole as a sovereign agent. What they did perfectly well understand, and what they sought, was the freedom for the mir to act on its own, to divide the land that hte nobles (in their view) had usurped, and to no longer suffer repression at the hands of the central government. Their social imaginary included a local collective agency, the people of the village or mir. They knew that this agency had to deal with a national government that could do them a lot of harm, and even occasionally some good. But they had no conception of a national people that could take over sovereign power from the despotic government. Their repertory didn’t include collective actions of this type at this national level (in Modern Social Imaginaries, p. 116).

So Adscam results from an oligarchic management of political affairs deemed necessary because there is no other way to represent Canada in Quebec . One might also consider the Alberta government’s managerial style of politics in its recent whitewash, “Strengthening Alberta’s Role in Confederation,” which is Alberta’s own way of having ministers of the crown “regulate” the Alberta people and their relationship with the central power.

Incidently, in the quote above, Taylor is discussing the period in 1917 between the collapse of Tsarist rule and the communist revolution, when a provisional government was supposed to create a republican constitution.

I don’t mean to claim Gomery is anywhere near the magnitude of the collapse of the Tsar. Rather, we can learn from that example as a way of showing us the difficulties and dangers of expecting collective action when there is no collective. I put much greater hope in Stephen Harper and the Conservatives to form an alternative national voice. That said, I’ve always been skeptical that Conservatives (or anyone else) can form a national coalition. Have they ever done so before?