The Imperial Myth of Canada’s National Policy PART 1: The Fraud of the BNA Act
By Matthew Ehret
The mythology of Canada’s National Policy is a multi-layered fallacy of composition which must be addressed from the standpoint of locating Canada’s struggle for nationhood as locked in the midst of a battle between two conceptions of man and law expressed in the British vs. American systems of political economy. Before entering into any proper analysis of this problem, it must be stated at the outset that the primary fallacy of the Canadian National Policy of 1878-1885 is simply that the policy neither had a national origin, nor was Canada ever permitted by the British Empire to become a truly sovereign nation.
Understanding the true agenda behind Canada’s origins are necessary to understand why it has been the curse of Canada to be endowed with the most bountiful resources and landmass on the one side and the most underdeveloped population with only thirty three million inhabitants, strung across a 8900 kilometer border on the other, while its cousin to the south has a population of over 320 million. The average density per square mile is a mere 3.75 people per sq. km for Canada compared with 34 people per sq. km for the United States. This low density of the Canadian population is in keeping with the deliberate policy of the financial oligarchy to reduce the population of the globe from the current 7.6 billion to 1 billion people.
Today, as the world is threatened by the two-pronged threat of a collapse of world population by the destruction of food and water availability on the one side and thermonuclear war on the other, it is of dire necessity that such large scale development projects as the Bering Strait tunnel rail corridor be commenced post haste in the context of the new multipolar system being led by Russia and China.
The Bering Strait tunnel involves a U.S.-Canada-Russia-China alliance for Arctic development that would extend China’s Polar Silk Road into the Americas and touches on a policy fight which stretches back over 150 years and which I’ve written on extensively here and here and here. For this project to move forward however, it is imperative that Canada let go of its British imperial traditions.
These traditions which must be abandoned have historically defined Canada’s interests around either its “right to be left alone”, or “right to export raw materials as a hewer of wood and drawer of water”[1] and instead apply the superior form of sovereignty defined in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as “the Benefit of the other”[2].
Before this can be done, certain ghosts which now haunt the Canadian identity must be identified and then, promptly exorcised. These ghosts shape the cultural/political reflexes which prevent Canada from joining with its neighbours to the south and north in a common mission centering around large scale scientific and technological endeavours. This exorcism must begin with the true story of Canada’s origins and “National Policy” of 1878.
What is the Canadian ‘National Policy’?
Over the years, the Canadian “National Policy” has taken on various forms. At its origins, it received its name from the general policy applied by the Conservative Party platform beginning in 1878 under the administration of Sir John A. Macdonald. The policy again arose under significantly diluted forms with successive Conservative governments beginning with the 1911-1919 administration of Sir Robert Borden, followed by the 1930-1935 R.B. Bennett government. The policy ended once and for all after the fall of the 1957-1963 Diefenbaker government.
The National Policy was the protectionist counter-program to the typically free trade policy represented by Canada’s other major party, the Liberals.
From the time of Wilfrid Laurier, to the rise of the “Laurier Liberals” (led by C.D. Howe, O.D. Skelton, Ernest Lapointe, the confused Prime Minister King and St. Laurent), the liberals tended to move towards an economic union of the Americas.
This was a policy denounced by the likes of the Round Table leader Lord Milner and his Fabian ally Lord Halford Mackinder as a death sentence for the world hegemony of the British Empire which had to be stopped at all costs. Early Roundtable/Fabian Society operations resulted in the ouster of PM Laurier in 1911 who lamented during WWI that
“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.”
The great confusion caused by the dishonest application of the National Policy’s protectionist policies by the Imperial Privy Council and Foreign Office, is to be found in the fact that rather than being applied by a sovereign nation striving for defense against imperial looting as the American republic had adopted similar measures after the 1787 framing of its Constitution, the Canadian example witnessed an empire’s use of the powerful tariff and associated investment program in order to keep its valuable colony under its iron grip. By maintaining control of the vast territory above the United States, Britain could both subvert America’s institutions more easily, while ensuring that the unification of America with their historical allies in Russia could not occur.
Then, as today, the true value of a protectionist policy of America lay in the fact that, when combined with sovereign control over public credit and a commitment to internal improvements and the general welfare, it provided the best line of defence from rapacious imperial intentions on the one side, while providing a powerful instrument for nation building on the other.
The dishonest application of the protective system during Canada’s history have achieved none of these ends.
Diefenbaker’s Misunderstanding
This Conservative National Policy was entirely scrapped after Prime Minister John Diefenbaker attempted to apply it to develop the productive powers of the nation under an honest, but naive vision for the first time in history. Diefenbaker’s policy, which threatened the Empire’s control of Canada was named the “Northern Vision”, or “New National Policy”, and was based on not merely a stroke of genius that called for the opening up of the great Arctic territories to scientific and industrial development but a new system of funding through the Bank of Canada. Diefenbaker’s failure to achieve his objective not only arose from the active nests of Rhodes Scholars within and without his own cabinet who strove to sabotage it, but from his own inability to reconcile his love of progress and creative pioneering change, with his love for his British traditions, which were derived from an intrinsic antagonism to progress and creative change. This has come to be known as the “Diefenbaker Paradox”.
Diefenbaker’s ‘New National Policy” announced in 1957 took its inspiration from a popular misunderstanding of the first “National Policy” of his idol, Sir John A. Macdonald. Although Macdonald’s policy involved the adoption of a protective tariff to favour local Canadian manufacturing and agriculture, and internal improvements vectored on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, this policy lacked substance as it was not applied against an Imperial intention, but was rather itself an Imperial policy which desired to preserve a strategic North American colony by a dying British Empire.
Although similar in outward form to the Hamiltonian American System adopted a century earlier by the founding fathers of the United States in order to achieve economic independence from the British Empire, the Canadian version lacked all of the substance. It was rather the case that Macdonald’s “progressive” policy was nothing more than an illusion designed to break Canada off from any unification of mission with an America then being shaped by Abraham Lincoln’s nation building dynamic.
The Shadows of a Fraud
The period of 1865-1871 remains one of the densest in terms of potential for the establishment of an evolutionary phase shift in human history that had begun with the success of the American Revolution and the Renaissance view of man over the bestial dark age view embodied in British imperial traditions.
A quick overview of a timeline of the sweeping events following 1865 will provide the historian a valuable reference point in which to expose the principled drama shaping those dates and events.
April-May 1865: Lincoln’s victory over British sponsored Confederacy. Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth via an operation run out of British Canada [3].
March 30, 1867: Alaska is purchased from the Russians by Secretary of State William Seward, a firm believer in Manifest Destiny. The Russians had earlier saved America in 1863 by Czar Alexander II’s deployment of the Russian fleet to the coasts of America in San Franciso and New York. Major allies from both nations recognized the vital extension of rail between the continents even during the Civil War.
March 1867: The first British Columbia annexation movement petition for leaving the British Empire and joining America is presented to Queen Victoria.
July 1, 1867: The British North America Act is established creating a federation of four Canadian provinces under a British-modeled constitution. B.C. resists joining due in large measure to the vast expanse of land separating it from the eastern confederated colonies.
July 18, 1868: Rupert’s Land (the vast private territory separating B.C from the eastern colonies) is purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company by an Act of Parliament in British Canada establishing this territory as “crown land”.
May 10, 1869: The U.S. Trans-Continental Rail line is completed (begun by Lincoln in 1863) establishing the world’s first rail line crossing a continent and opening up both the middle of America to Manifest Destiny and providing a link to California from the Atlantic. The Colony of British Columbia benefits enormously from the increased access to trade.
June 10, 1869: B.C.’s anti-Confederation Governor Frederick Seymour dies under mysterious circumstances.
December 10, 1869:a 2nd Annexation petition from B.C. merchants and politicians is delivered to President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant and his colleagues make their interest known to the public.
July 20, 1871: Arrangements for B.C’s entry into Confederation are streamlined.
Penetrating Deeper into the Cause of Shadows
By the time of Lincoln’s 1865 victory over the British-financed Confederate South, events were moving at great speed. The continued application of Lincoln’s American System practices of protectionism, public credit and internal improvements was resulting in the greatest potential for growth in world history. British Canada’s failure to break free of the mother country almost 100 years earlier had resulted in a stagnant and underdeveloped economy which was both divided internally, and rift with annexation movements exploding from British Columbia to Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. Former leaders of the Rebellion of Lower Canada of 1837 such as Louis-Joseph Papineau became ardent leaders in the Annexation movement of Quebec that peaked with the Annexation manifesto of 1849 and whose currents were still strongly felt across Quebec… especially among the Eastern Townships largely settled by Americans.
In the United States America, awareness of British-Canada’s pro-Confederacy policy of terrorist operations, hosting the Confederacy Secret Service and even the assassination of Lincoln from Montreal were much better understood than they are today.
The Annexation Bill of 1866 introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives stated:“from the date thereof, the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East, and Canada West, and the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan, and Columbia, with limits and rights as by the act defined, are constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America.”[4] The Bill also authorized $10 million dollars to be used to purchase the vast private territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company, known as Rupert’s Land and the North West Territories. Vast public improvement programs were also authorized in the bill centering around canal building, and rail through the Maritimes from New York.
The Hudson’s Bay Territory was a strange phenomenon in North America. From 1670 until 1869, the vast largely unexplored and undeveloped wilderness was the private property of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who, having received a Royal Charter under King Charles II, had the duty as a subsidiary of the British East India Company’s global operation, to maintain an operation of a vast corrupt fur trade on the one side while blocking American ventures into continental development on the other [see figure 1]. The Colonies still in the possession of Britain, north of the United States, had very little opportunity to develop into anything more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water” because of this fact.
The second important post-Civil War development took place on March 30, 1867 with the Alaska Purchase.
Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward and his close ally Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, advanced a bill for the annexation of the Russian territory in North America for the fire sale price of $7 million dollars. It was after all, the Russian Navy under Czar Alexander II that had worked with Sumner and Seward to tip the balance of the Civil War in Lincoln’s favour, by extending their entire fleet to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of America as a warning to European powers not to aid the Confederacy in the conflict [5]. This purchase (popularly called by modern fools as “Seward’s Folly”), suddenly made British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.
With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.
Although the annexation bill of 1866 had the support of men such as William Seward and his ally Senator Charles Sumner, it never entered the Senate and was not voted upon. This Bill’s appearance, combined with the Alaskan purchase, and the growing independence and annexation movements across Canada, did however give Britain the sense of existential urgency to consolidate its territories under some form of imperial federation beholden to the British Crown at all costs. The Colonies of Canada, so close to Britain’s mortal enemy were far too geopolitically important for the Empire to lose at this moment in history.
The Fraud of the BNA Act
The first vital maneuver conducted by the British as a response to these developments, merely three months after the Alaska purchase, was the speedy completion of the confederation of the four easternmost colonies under the British North America Act of July 1, 1867 [6], renaming Upper and Lower Canada as “the provinces of Ontario and Quebec”. The BNA Act was the consolidation of 72 resolutions hammered out in two 1864 conferences which were designed to thwart the dynamic of American Annexationists on the one side and honest Canadian Nationalists such as the President of the Executive Council Isaac Buchanan (under the Macdonald-Cartier government) who worked valiantly not only to unite Canada with Lincoln’s America, but also fought to keep Canada out of any further wars with Great Britain [7]. Buchanan had lost this powerful position by a coup inside of his party run by his nemesis George Brown and John A. Macdonald. While Brown and Macdonald appeared to public view as enemies, the reality was that they were both beholden to the City of London’s interests for the entirety of their lives, and chose to adapt themselves to a rigged game of free market “Grits” on the left (Brown) and “protectionist” Tories on the right (Macdonald). This is the root of the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada.
The fraud of the BNA Act merits a greater analysis, but for the present purposes, it suffices to demonstrate that it did not establish a “sovereign nation of Canada” as is popularly held. Rather, the architecture merely maintained a framework of pure British Privy Council control of Canadian affairs, permitting only an illusory degree of democracy. By establishing its foundations not upon a Principle of the General Welfare, nor acknowledging the existence of unalienable rights as embodied in Canada’s southern cousin, the Canadian Constitution is a very different beast. Its preamble literally states:
“Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom: And Whereas such a Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”[8]
According to this preamble, the “raison d’être” of Canada is not the defense of the general welfare of its people, but rather the promotion of interests of the British Empire!
The BNA Act used the old British trick of the “fur blanket” bribe used first in 1774 to keep Quebec from joining the rebellious 13 colonies under the “Quebec Act”[9]. The Act gave the Dominion of Canada increased legislative control over its local affairs by forming for the first time, a federal structure around a Parliament, Judiciary and Senate which would have the appearance of power only, while the true power always remained in the powerful office of the Crown and its agents in the Privy Council Office and Governor General. This fact is laid out in several sections within the act:
“The Executive Government and Authority of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen.”
Since the Monarch herself could not be in every Dominion at the same time, provisions were made to ensure that her absolute authority would be actively arranging the affairs of state modeled on the British Privy Council system:
“There shall be a Council to aid and advise in the Government of Canada, to be styled the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada; and the Persons who are to be Members of that Council shall be from Time to Time chosen and summoned by the Governor General and sworn in as Privy Councillors, and Members thereof may be from Time to Time removed by the Governor General.”
Peppered throughout the Act are ongoing references to the importance of the Queen’s Privy Council of Canada to “advise” the government under the absolute authority of the Governor General, who is still legally recognized as the only head of state and legal representative of the Crown. Responsibility to keep the individual provinces under coordinated control was left to the power of the Lieutenant Governors assigned to each province. The real seat of power ensuring optimal control of Canadian federal policy by its London masters, especially in the field of economic warfare has been from this time on, the Privy Council, of which every single Prime Minister of Canada has been a member [10]. And just in case one might think that the Canadian military would be exempt from this control, the Act goes on to read:
The Command-in-Chief of the Land and Naval Militia, and of all Naval and Military Forces, of and in Canada, is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen [11]
In order to ensure that Canada was to remain as fragmented as possible and no strong federal structure of checks and balances modeled on the American System could occur, the Act also laid out in Section 92, a framework which gave the largest possible power to the provinces to control their own resources, taxation and internal policy outside of any federal structure.
To Be Continued in a few days with part 2
[1] This historic economic identity has been re-embodied in recent years with the nation-killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
[2] The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only ended the 30 Years War that ravaged Europe, but also established the basis for the modern form of sovereign nation state defining international law for the subsequent 350+ years. The pre-amble of the Treaty read in part: “That this Peace and Amity be observ’d and cultivated with such a Sincerity and Zeal, that each Party shall endeavour to procure the Benefit, Honour and Advantage of the other; that thus on all sides they may see this Peace and Friendship in the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of France flourish, by entertaining a good and faithful Neighbourhood.” And can be read as a whole here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp
[3] Anton Chaitkin, Why the British Kill American Presidents, Executive Intelligence Review, December 12, 2008, http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2008/2008_50-52/2008_50-52/2008-50/pdf/26-35_3548.pdf
[4] The full text of the bill can be viewed on http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annexation_Bill_of_1866
[5] Known as “the Great Liberator”, Czar Alexander II was so inspired by Lincoln’s vision that he followed the American program of emancipation when he liberated the serfs in 1861. His life was cut short by an assassins’ bomb in 1881.
[6] The belief that the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms replaced the 1867 BNA Act is nothing more than a mythology. As section 60 of the Charter clearly lays out: “This Act may be cited as the Constitution Act, 1982, and the Constitution Acts 1867 to 1975 (No. 2) and this Act may be cited together as the Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982”… meaning the 1867 Act is still in full force to this day.
[7] Buchanan’s famous December 1863 speech provides a clear insight into his principles: “The adoption by England for herself of this transcendental principle [Free Trade] has all but lost the Colonies, and her madly attempting to make it the principle of the British Empire would entirely alienate the Colonies. Though pretending to unusual intelligence, the Manchester Schools are, as a class, as void of knowledge of the world as of patriotic principle… As a necessary con-sequence of the legislation of England, Canada will require England to assent to the establishment of two things: 1st, an American Zollverein [aka: Customs Union]. 2nd: Canada to be made neutral territory in time of any war between Eng-land and the United States”. Cited in Isaac Buchanan’s Relations of the Industry of Canada with the Mother Country and the United States, 1864, p. 9-22
[8] This is especially ironical since the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. Such a document does not exist. See Professor Helmut Weber’s 1999 paper “Who Guards the Constitution?”, Center for British Studies of Humboldt University, Berlin http://www.gbz.hu-berlin.de/publications/working-papers/downloads/pdf/WPS_Weber_Constitution.pdf
[9] Pierre Beaudry, The Tragic Consequences of the Quebec Act of 1774, The Canadian Patriot Special Edition, 2012,
http://www.committeerepubliccanada.ca
[10]Today the oath of office which every single Prime Minister has taken upon entering office reads: “ I, __________, do solemnly and sincerely swear (declare) that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada. I will in all things to be treated, debated and resolved in Privy Council, faithfully, honestly and truly declare my mind and my opinion. I shall keep secret all matters committed and revealed to me in this capacity, or that shall be secretly treated of in Council. Generally, in all things I shall do as a faithful and true servant ought to do for Her Majesty. So help me God.” http://www.gg.ca/document.aspx?id=316