[Canada] Canadian Politics Redux

[Barrister]

Alberta Court of Appeal holds the federal carbon tax is ultra vires the feds in a 4-1 decision.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/edmonton/federal-carbon-tax-unconstitutional-alberta-court-1.5473482

Two other Courts of Appeal have held differently.  SCC is expected to hear a decision on other provinces rulings next month.

Before you go just dismissing the Alberta Court of Appeal... remember that superior court justices are federal appointees.

[Admiral Yi]

I'd be interested in seeing the original text of the constitution that the decision references, but don't really know how to search it up.  Any chance you do that chore for me?

[Barrister]

I'd be interested in seeing the original text of the constitution that the decision references, but don't really know how to search it up.  Any chance you do that chore for me?

https://lmgtfy.com/?q=Canadian+constitution



I mean if you wanted the specific Court of Appeal decision I could help you, but you just want a link to the Constitution Act?  That's, umm, pretty easy to track down...

[viper37]

I'm guessing he wants the specific part the judges have referenced in their decision (i.e., section VII, article 3, paragraph d - sort of?).  But I don't think it's that simple.

BB, there is a provision in our constitution that says the Federal has the right to tax citizens any way it wants to.  Am I correct in interpreting this judgement that the court would have sided with the Federal had every canadian citizen be subjected to the same carbon tax, i.e. no exemption for provinces who already have their own carbon pricing mechanism?

The Feds have the power to spend in any provincial field they want to, establish their own programs, but it seems the albertan court does limit this power to actually collecting taxes in a province...

Too complicated for me.  I'll wait until I have time to read this.  Please post the link whenever you have some time

[crazy canuck]

I'd be interested in seeing the original text of the constitution that the decision references, but don't really know how to search it up.  Any chance you do that chore for me?

Here is a link to the decision and the sections you wanted to see.



https://www.canlii.org/en/ab/abca/doc/2020/2020abca74/2020abca74.html

B.       Key Provisions of the Constitution Act, 1982



1.         Additional Provincial Powers



92A. (1) In each province, the legislature may exclusively make laws in relation to...



(b) development, conservation and management of non-renewable natural resources and forestry resources in the province, including laws in relation to the rate of primary production therefrom; and



(c) development, conservation and management of sites and facilities in the province for the generation and production of electrical energy. [Emphasis added]

       

...



(6) Existing powers or rights – Nothing in subsections (1) to (5) derogates from any powers or rights that a legislature or government of a province had immediately before the coming into force of this section.



2.         Amendments to the Constitution



            38. (1) An amendment to the Constitution of Canada may be made by ...



(b) resolutions of the legislative assemblies of at least two-thirds of the provinces that have, in the aggregate, ... at least fifty per cent of the population of all the provinces.



(3) An amendment [that derogates from the legislative powers, proprietary rights or any other rights or privileges of the legislature or government of a province] shall not have effect in a province the legislative assembly of which has expressed its dissent therefrom by resolution by a majority of its members

[Grey Fox]

They went for the low hanging fruit there. Lazy court.

[crazy canuck]

Not at all.  The low hanging fruit would have been to adopt what other courts have already said.  Instead the Court embarked on an interesting analysis of how the division of powers in the Constitution should be properly analyzed. 

edit: and analyzed with a bias toward Provincial rights - something the jurisprudence has been moving away from over the last few decades.  The decision lays the groundwork for the submission before the SCC.  It will be very interesting to see what that court thinks of the division of powers argument made forcefully by the Alberta Court of Appeal.

[crazy canuck]

I'm guessing he wants the specific part the judges have referenced in their decision (i.e., section VII, article 3, paragraph d - sort of?).  But I don't think it's that simple.

I  just did it 

[viper37]

Jonathan Kay: Canada's cultural elites have seen the enemy — and it is Canadians

Executive summary: the likes of Oex and CC are threatening Canada's survival, only Quebec will remain standing from the ashes

If you're interested in history, there's no better podcast than Mike Duncan's "Revolutions," which takes listeners through detailed accounts of the great historical upheavals of the last 400 years. Canada gets scant treatment, of course, since this country never truly witnessed a real revolution. But we do get a significant cameo during Duncan's 15-episode arc on the American Revolution. And seeing Canada (or, more accurately, what would become Canada) through the eyes of late 18th-century American revolutionaries is instructive.

In America's northern borderlands, "Canadians" — as we now call ourselves — broadly consisted of three separate groups: Indigenous societies, French Catholics in what would become Lower Canada, and (largely) English-speaking Protestants in what would become Upper Canada. For their own reasons, some First Nations participated in the American Revolutionary War, while French Catholics largely sat it out, having no particular interest in setting out from Montreal and Quebec City (which were already substantial towns with a well-developed civil society) to help two groups of anti-Catholic Anglophiles fight each over parochial trade and fiscal grievances.

As for English-speaking Canadians, on the other hand, Duncan points out that the question of our participation was somewhat moot, since we Anglos didn't then comprise a critical mass in regard to either politics or war-making. For the most part, English Canada was little more just a string of scattered supply depots, military barracks, ports, trading posts and tiny settlements. What did Americans think of Canadians? The short answer is they didn't. (And two and a half centuries later, they still don't: over four days of covering the Democratic primaries in New Hampshire earlier this month, I heard Canada mentioned exactly twice — once by Bernie Sanders as a prop for socialized medicine, and then again by Amy Klobuchar for a laugh line about how Minnesotans could see our country from their front porches.)

This is not the first time I've heard early Canadian history explained in this humbling way. But I found it especially resonant in this particular moment, with anti-pipeline protesters out on the streets of Canadian cities decrying the very presumption that our governments can assert sovereignty over Canada's own land mass, even with the explicit permission of elected First Nations band councils.

Canada Is Fake, read the title of a widely circulated article published last week. Just a few years ago, that kind of headline might have seemed absurd to most of us. But in the current environment, I'm reminded that, insofar as history goes, it's hardly a novel claim. To many Quebecers, Anglo Canada was always simply the moral successor to a hated colonial occupier. To many Indigenous societies, we were genocidaires. To the United States, we remain the half-forgotten residue of whatever British military supply chain remained operational following the fall of Yorktown. Seen from the outside — and even some part of the inside — English Canada is indeed kind of "fake."

I grew up as an anglophone in Montreal and, following the expected Canadian journalistic practice, spent much of my career fretting and columnizing about the resurgence of Quebec separatism. This always felt like important work, because I'd spent my whole life assuming the French-English divide to represent the main threat to Canada's continued survival. But even as governments now move to break up the rail blockades, it now seems clear to me that this is no longer true. While it's convenient to blame Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's indecisive leadership for the crisis, these events do not arise in a vacuum. Rather, they follow on years during which our political, academic and journalistic elites denounced Canada itself as an ugly scar on traditional Indigenous lands. Trudeau himself has spent much of his time in office pledging himself to somehow absolve Canada of this original sin, and one suspects that his exit plan from politics involves him becoming some kind of dean of reconciliationology at a Canadian university.

Canada survived Quebec separatism in part because our elites mobilized a massive campaign of propaganda to convince citizens of the enduring importance of the Canadian project. But in regard to resolving the grievances of Indigenous peoples, those same elites are now committed to the exact opposite project: a whole vocabulary ("settler," "neocolonial," "appropriation," etc.) and daily land-acknowledgment liturgy is broadcast 24/7 on the CBC, fetishized on social media and even broadcast as part of the morning announcements at public schools. Ultimately, this is why Trudeau felt checkmated by five Wet'suwet'en activists trying to torpedo a pipeline deal negotiated by their own legitimate elected band council. We've spent years declaring that Canada is garbage, hoping that an attitude of self-abasement would somehow lead us to "reconciliation." We forgot that when garbage talks, no one listens.

The idea that Indigenous political agitation would lead to Canada's break-up is not new. But the shocking thing about what we are now witnessing is that the main threat doesn't actually come from Indigenous peoples, who increasingly are becoming active partners in resource development. As many have noted, the Coastal GasLink project that was the subject of protests was approved by 20 out of 20 elected band councils in affected First Nations territories. Moreover, a Mohawk grand chief personally called for the end of rail blockades in Ontario a week ago (before having his own office then barricaded by protesters). Even amid this crisis, the Government of Alberta struck a deal with two Alberta First Nations for an open-pit oilsands mine. When Vancouver-based Teck Resources announced its withdrawal from the $20 billion project on Sunday, the cited reason wasn't Indigenous opposition — as Teck Frontier already had entered into agreements with 14 Indigenous groups in the affected era. Rather, the CEO (somewhat euphemistically) blamed the "much broader issues" now at play.

The political problem for Trudeau was never really the Indigenous activists themselves, so much as their urban white supporters. Indeed, it was never really a political problem at all, at least in the ordinary sense of balancing one interest group against another. The urban protesters who took to the streets exhibit Manichean tendencies, having been conditioned to regard resource development as an inherently evil form of geographic contamination, and to view Indigenous environmentalists — even those who oppose their own tribes' interests — as high prophets channelling a message of salvation. Consider a recent article that appeared in the Toronto Star, suggesting that our secular souls may hang in the balance: "The important step we need to take as Canadians is to inform ourselves about the history of genocide of Indigenous people. The blood is on our hands if we choose to ignore the people who lived on the land before us." This isn't the language of politics. It's the language of Sunday sermons.

It isn't clear how we an extract ourselves from this situation, since the way the GasLink deal was done in the first place — years of consultations, informed consent from affected bands, a fair distribution of economic benefits — is exactly what Indigenous groups themselves have always (rightly) demanded. And even if the immediate issue is definitively resolved in coming days, it won't solve the larger problem, which is that an enormous number of progressive Canadians have substituted the aforementioned enviro-spiritual creed in place of any baseline sense of national belonging. Specifically, they no longer accept the idea that our country has the moral right to insist on basic elements of nationhood: territorial sovereignty, the rule of law, the state's monopoly on the use of force, the integrity of internal trade and transportation networks, and the legitimacy of democratically elected representatives.

This is a much bigger problem than the blockades themselves, and it forces us to revisit the question of why Canada exists and what it's supposed to be. We've all been having a good laugh at Peter MacKay's attempts to use Twitter to stir up some kind of groundswell of old-school conservative patriotism. But think about his dilemma for a moment: how do you arouse patriotism in a country that has been instructed to regard itself — quite literally — as an ongoing "genocide" state? This is one of the farcical oddities of Trudeau's campaign to get a seat on the United Nations Security Council. By lazy cultural reflex, we have been conditioned to believe — to quote the 2017-era Indigo book-store slogan — "The World Needs More Canada." But in the wake of the MMIWG report, whose conclusions Trudeau accepted, that branding is now obsolete. Our new slogan is basically "Stop Us Before We Kill Again."

Years before a country falls apart in a formal way, it typically begins a process of cultural disintegration — which, if you look at the data, has been going on for some time in Canada. For one thing, we no longer have any kind of national literature, or at least none that people want to read. In 2005, 27 per cent of the books bought by English Canadians were written by Canadian authors. By 2019, that figure was down to 13 per cent, and I'd be surprised if it didn't soon drop to single digits. Similar patterns, I can attest, exist in the magazine industry. In the halls of Canadians arts and letters, I observed a powerful malaise born of the notion that the white grandees who still run the presses and own the galleries no longer have any moral authority to create, or even curate, any kind of national conversation that doesn't consist entirely of turgid and repetitive confession kabuki.

On Canadian campuses, meanwhile, many students are now programmed in the belief that an informed person demonstrates his or her commitment to reconciliation through acts of righteous "resistance" that align with Indigenous demands (or, at least, a certain kind of white-approved Indigenous demand). Rylan Higgins, a professor of anthropology at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, for instance, recently suggested that even "laid-off CN Rail workers could show solidarity" with the Indigenous protesters whose barricades got them thrown out of work. This is "urgent," he says, because "non-Indigenous people currently living on Turtle Island" — he means Canada — "(must) seek deep understanding of (Indigenous) resistance. (T)his resistance should form the cornerstone of attempts to educate young non-Indigenous people about Turtle Island. And this is because gaining this knowledge is the initial step toward an obligation that we non-Indigenous people must fulfil." And at Queens University in Ontario, commerce students now go through smudging ceremonies, which the university approvingly describes as a "ceremony for purifying or cleansing soul of negative thoughts of a person or place" — religious rituals, in other words.

Amazingly, this quasi-spiritual imperative now is seen as superseding the traditional demands of the Canadian left, which once were based in the rights of workers and unions. In the face of layoffs in the transportation sector, for instance, Higgins' own labour-union umbrella group, the Canadian Association of University Teachers, put out a press release on Feb. 20 "express(ing) solidarity with the Wet'suwet'en Nation and its Hereditary Chiefs who are insisting upon respect for their autonomy and sovereignty over their unceded land." When unions heap praise on the people putting unionized people out of work, you know that the forces of national self-hatred are reaching a tipping point.

Is it possible for Anglo Canada to rebuild some kind of positive national identity? If so, I think we will need to take stock of how our modern self-conception fell to pieces in the first place. Until roughly the late 2000s, Canada's identity was rooted largely in the idea that we were a poorer but more conscientious sidekick to America. Our whole multilateral (and occasionally pacifistic) shtick on the world stage, not to mention our system of cultural subsidies, was based on the conceit that our relative smallness and poverty compared to the United States masked some kind of well-hidden reserve of moral superiority. It was an insecure, passive-aggressive posture that often expressed itself as peevish anti-Americanism. But at the very least, it acted as a binding agent for an English-speaking Canadian intellectual establishment whose common culture otherwise was confined to hockey, cold weather and universal health care.

But during the Obama years, all of this was thrown into confusion, because the housing-loan crisis smashed America without much affecting Canada. Suddenly, we were no longer the poor cousin. At almost exactly the same time, Barack Obama's election in the United States, coupled with Stephen Harper's rise in Canada, reversed the left-right political valence that had powered Canadians' sense of moral superiority since the early years of the Cold War. Suddenly, we were the bad guys, and the whole organizing principle of Canadian intellectual life began to collapse. Into this vacuum came Idle No More, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the MMIWG report, the Indigenous backlash to Canada 150 — and Trudeau, whose political instincts are rooted in the confessional, self-lacerating spirit of political correctness that began to infect campus life at McGill University (and elsewhere) in the late 1980s and early '90s. Twenty years ago, we bashed America. In 2020, we bash us.
These things move in cycles, and it is possible that in a few years we may be facing the opposite problem: a populist counter-revolt that leads to a real culture of nativism and xenophobia in Canada. But given the blurring of social justice and environmentalism into a de facto religious movement, it's also possible to imagine that in my lifetime, B.C. will elect a hyper-progressive provincial government that truly does subordinate itself to some kind of as-yet-undefined overarching system of Indigenous spiritual or moral leadership. Even parts of Ontario and Atlantic Canada could succumb to this sort of phenomenon, with only Quebec, I think, being completely immune.

Ironically, many Indigenous people would themselves be horrified by such an economically regressive development, as they have just now gotten a seat at the table when it comes to pursing their just share of Canadian economic spoils. But recent developments show clearly that the Canadian left honours Indigenous people more as noble-savage protest mascots than as flesh-and-blood humans with real economic needs.

If there's a ray of hope, it lies in the next generation of leaders, who will be today's immigrants from China, India, Philippines, Syria and a hundred other places. These are people whose families came to Canada for a better life. And that better life did not include marching through the streets, ululating fidelity to Gaia and self-flagellating with barbed-wire dream-catchers. It wasn't their grandparents who ran the residential schools, after all, and few of them are stained with the Canadian Mark of Cain. These are the people who will finally put a punctuation mark at the end of the mania for weeping contrition that's taken hold of this country. They are the ones who will stand up and say, "there was a time for apologies, but that time is over."

Trudeau and the people around him are clearly not capable of doing this. Nor is the aging crew of guilt-addled old-stock Canadians clinging to leadership in Canadian media and arts. If they're looking for a way to demonstrate their "allyship" with both Indigenous people and new Canadian immigrants alike, the best option might be to simply pack up shop, let a new generation take over and retire to that great unspoiled Canadian wilderness whose sanctity they have long purported to protect.

[email protected]

Twitter.com/JonKay

It's kinda funny reading this, knowing that he worked with Trudeau on his autobiography some time ago. And with Gerald Butts too

And seeing him pointing at Quebec as the only part of the country that will resist the onslaught of repressive leftism?  Gee, for a guy borned in Montreal, he sure is clueless.

But it is true that we seem to have made a lot more progress to reconciliate with indian nations on our territory than the Federal government.  Didn't stop the Mohawks from blocking roads, railroads and bridges one again though.

[Grey Fox]

We're immune to it because we have our own special one.

[crazy canuck]

I think Duncan has a potential defamation claim for being tied to that article

[viper37]

He is truly moronic about Quebec, and his claims about Canada are... weird, to say the least.  But two solitudes&all, I'm not going to comment.  I just found it funny and wanted to post it here

[Malthus]

Trudeau has no really good options here - he has publicly stated he wants dialogue, but the other side refuses to talk, and really their demands cannot be met without making a mockery of the rule of law, so what is there to dialogue about?

Trudeau's strategy is, it appears, to let the protests wear out their welcome (and lose residual sympathy for the various causes espoused by the protesters) and pressure build to remove them, before allowing legal injunctions to be enforced. Problem with that strategy is that, by allowing the protests to continue without interference, he has encouraged more protests. 

The notion that any of this somehow spells doom for Canada, or that Canada is "Fake" is, of course, laughable. Though the article has a point, hidden in the hyperbole, that too many on the left downplay Canadian virtues and make a meal of Canadian vices.

[Zoupa]

ROC has always been fake. Doesn't mean it can't be a country.

[saskganesh]

ROC has always been fake. Doesn't mean it can't be a country.

I was born here. That's news to me.