Red Tories Vs. Right Wingers

For Grant, John Diefenbaker's rise and fall represented the last gasp of the kind of indigenous conservatism that had given rise to those national institutions designed to prevent Canada from being sucked into the commercial and political hegemony of the United States. For Grant, Diefenbaker represented the last leader to embody the kind of Toryism that had created the Canadian Pacific Railway, the CBC, the provincially owned Ontario Hydro and a host of other institutions whose purpose was to build up the industrial, social, and economic infrastructure of the northern part of North America. The aim of these state-sponsored exercises in institution building was to construct a more orderly and pluralistic society than the melting-pot republic under the Stars and Stripes. In Grant's estimation, this trajectory of Canadian history resulted in some overlap between conservatism and socialism. The indigenous conservatism of northern North America produced a very different kind of political culture than that of the United States. Among our neighbours to the south, conservatism became associated with the melting pot monoculturalism of E Pluribus Unum and with the deep distrust of public government as an instrument of positive social advancement. For Grant there were layers and layers of meaning in the media-led assault on Diefenbaker, who had refused the Americans permission to place nuclear weapons on Canadian soil. This assault revealed, for instance, the pro-Stars and Stripes bias of key elites, not only in the communications industry, but in many other agencies essential to the success or failure of Canadian democracy. It revealed, Grant argued, the elaborate links between the country's ruling class and the Liberal Party of Canada. For Grant and for many other like-minded Red Tories including, for instance, Stephen Leacock, Senator Eugene Forsey, John Farthing, and historians W.L Morton and Donald Creighton, The Liberal Party's historical mission has been to advance the economic and political integration of Canada into the United States. The other side of this same continentalist coin has been to dissolve and downgrade the constitutional ties linking Canada with Great Britain. According to Grant the elites' harsh attacks on the Dief the Chief, the PC's legendary, left-leaning prairie populist, exposed the ultimate futility of efforts to maintain not only Canadian conservatism, but all types of indigenous political culture not consistent with the unbounded commercialization and commodification unleashed on the world in the ongoing course of the American Revolution. In this revolutionary scheme, corporate conglomerates would come to dominate the republic's most privileged political turf once they combined the grant of public power derived from their charters with their legal recognition as "natural persons." After this innovation was set in place, the power of human persons would increasingly be subordinated to the superior force of corporate persons in most arenas including the market, litigation, and political influence peddling. This ascent of corporate power to the pinnacles of influence in the polity which emerged from the liberal side of the American Revolution was one aspect of the process of historical change outlined in the political philosophy of George Grant. As Grant saw it in 1965, the rise of the United States to worldwide pre-eminence would inevitably expand the secular religion of unfettered technological change linked with deregulation and capitalism's inevitable drive towards total privatization of every facet of the remaining global commons. The privatization by the US-based biotechnology industry of the very genetic basis of life's renewal re enacts on a microscopic level the same sort of insanity which once saw the Vatican and European sovereigns grant patents of ownership and jurisdiction to thickly-inhabited countries in the Western Hemisphere, Africa, Asia, and Australasia. Like patents of ownership in life forms, these earlier patents of imperial rule were based on dubious doctrines of "discovery." The assertion of the rights of so-called intellectual property in life forms represents an extended frontier in the ascent of corporate persons over human persons in the law and politics of the United States and its informal empire. Since the Second World War especially, this ascent of corporate rights over human rights, money power over people power, provided the predominant subtext for the rise of the superpower in an era when the European empires were being dismantled. This process entered a new phase of globalization with efforts to react to the demise of the Soviet superpower by retooling the Bretton Woods organizations to produce a new set of supranational agencies such as the World Trade Organization, the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation Area, and the North American Free Trade Authority. The prophetic quality of George Grant's Lament for a Nation was demonstrated in 1988 when Brian Mulroney, the first, long-serving PC prime minister after John Diefenbaker, outflanked the Liberal Party of Canada in advancing the process of continental integration in the form of the so-called Free Trade Agreement (FTA). In January of 1994 the FTA was extended to Mexico in the name of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Trade Agreement. By entering into these commercial treaties the PC government of Brian Mulroney abandoned the heritage of John A. Macdonald. Mulroney opted instead to outdo the party of former Rockefeller adviser, Mackenzie King, at its own continentalist game. Under Mulroney, the PCs became the party of Liberals in a hurray, the party of accelerated movement towards deeper integration with the United States. In October of 2003, PC leader Peter MacKay took this assault on indigenous conservatism one step further. In direct violation of a written contract with PC leadership candidate, David Orchard, MacKay agreed to fold the party of Macdonald, Borden, and Diefenbaker into a political consortium dominated by the Alliance Party of Canada. The outcome of this media-driven scheme to "unite the right" is to replace the Toryism rooted in the conservatism of the United Empire Loyalists with a clone of the neoliberalism which passes for conservatism in the United States. Accordingly, the party of indigenous conservatism in Canada is being terminated to make way for the ascent of a party to be dominated by the US version of conservatism. The very idea an authentic and deeply-rooted conservatism in the United States is problematic given that the country emerged from a revolt against conservative elements in Great Britain and the Anglo-American colonies. Many of the English-speaking conservatives who opposed the American revolutionaries fled to what remained of British North America after 1783. For the most part, they were successful in grafting their communities onto the older polities of the Indigenous peoples and the canadiens, the makers of the original partnership that had given rise to Canada in its first, fur-trade incarnation. Thus the United Empire Loyalists chose to follow the French-Aboriginal lead in maintaining their connection with the British Crown rather than to join anti-Tory revolt centred in the Thirteen Colonies. One result of this most formative stage of North American history is that the so-called conservatism of the likes of Barry Goldwater, Newt Gingrich and Pat Robertson-- bearers of the kind of ideology that the Reform and Alliance parties of Canada was designed to ape and emulate-- is absolutely antagonistic to the indigenous conservatism of Canada, a country which emerged from the Tory, Aboriginal and French Canadian sides of the American Revolution. It would be hard to overstate, therefore, the negative ramifications of the MacKay-Harper accord for the possibility of perpetuating a decent and historically-grounded basis of Canadian nationalism. It would be hard to overstate the dire consequences of terminating the primary institution, the Progressive Conservative Party, which countered American Manifest Destiny by transforming the largest part of Canada from a fur trade preserve into a viable nation state. So extreme are the implications of the Alliance Party's ingestion of the PC Party that one could speculate that the real merger being prepared, is a merger of Canada with the United States. What other scenario might we expect from a project aimed at replacing one of Canada's most important founding institutions with a party of ideas and values imported from the United States? Why not suspect the covert involvement in this initiative of the superpower, a polity whose undercover agents routinely work with local collaborators to influence the course of domestic affairs in virtually every country on earth? Why not suspect the worst of this scheme, one whose goal is to channel mainstream opposition to the Liberals, historically the party of continental integration, towards a party of right wing extremism seeking even more complete absorption of Canada into the economic, political and military orbits of the United States? The fact that this initiative is so enthusiastically promoted by Alberta's Ralph Klein, an Alliance Party clone whose main platforms in virtually every policy field mimic those of President George W. Bush, speaks volumes about the continentalist undercurrents of this attempt to drown the PC Party and all it represents at the nationalist heart of Canada's indigenous political culture. As I see it, a sharp focus on Aboriginal Affairs best illustrates the vast ideological distance differentiating the US-inspired Alliance Party from the part of the PC Party that is most consistent with the vision of indigenous conservatism espoused by George Grant. This schism, I think, is entirely consistent with the configurations of conflict in the civil war in British North America which has been memorialized as the American War of Independence. As I outline in my volume, The American Empire and the Fourth World, the conflict which gave rise to the emergence of the United States from the British Empire can easily be envisaged as a confrontation between genocidal Indian fighters on the liberal side of the conflict and Tory imperialists who allied their interest with those of First Nations and French-Canadians. The coalition of British imperialists, Montreal-based fur traders, First Nations and French Canadians joined forces after 1776 to defend their various visions of Old World conservatism against the zealous incursions of the so-called New World Order being advanced by the likes of pamphleteer Tom Paine, plantation owner Thomas Jefferson, and the Philadelphia land speculator Benjamin Franklin. While the Anglo American propaganda promoting a revolutionary break with British colonialism did embody some of more advanced strains of Enlightenment thought, when it came to the treatment of Indigenous peoples the government of King George was far more progressive than the Indian fighters who dominated the Continental Congress. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 gave constitutional force to the more enlightened stance of the imperial government on the human rights of Indigenous peoples. The Royal Proclamation is the legal instrument which formalized the integration of Canada, Florida and Grenada into British North America after the Seven Years War, or, as it is tellingly remembered in the United States, the French and Indian War. King George's Proclamation reconstituted as Quebec the St. Lawrence Valley heartland of the canadiens who remained in North America after the conquest of New France. Drawing on the heritage of the Covenant Chain, which connected commercially and diplomatically the governments of the Anglo-American colonies, but especially that of New York, with the Iroquoian-speaking citizens of the powerful Longhouse Confederacy, the British sovereign set aside the largest part of the British North America as a vast Indian reserve and as an economic hinterland of the fur trade interests of Montreal. King George outlined very strict procedures to be followed in the event that any of the Crown's Indian allies should decide to sell parcels of their reserved territory. This provision established the basis for the negotiation of Crown-Aboriginal treaties in Canada. A recent addition to this series of agreements is the Nisga'a Treaty in British Columbia, a deal that was bitterly opposed by the Alliance Party of Canada and by their provincial allies who presently form the BC government. Similarly, the Royal Proclamation of 1763 established the constitutional framework for the agreement with the main body of Inuit in Canada, a treaty which laid the groundwork for the establishment of the new jurisdiction of Nunavut in 1999. As I see it, the Royal Proclamation is a seminal instrument in the development of a central principle of international law. The basis of that principle is that no people can be dispossessed unilaterally of their ancestral territories. Of course the Royal Proclamation was far from a perfect accommodation of the ideals referred to in the terminology of Canada's constitution as Aboriginal and treaty rights. It signified, nevertheless, a significant move by the world's most powerful polity away from the kind of extreme ethnocentrism informing the charters of, for instance, the British East India Company, the Royal African Company, the Massachusetts Bay Company, the Hudson's Bay Company, or the Carolinas Company. By placing limits on his own assertion of sovereign jurisdiction in the British imperial Indian reserve to the rear of the Anglo-American colonies, King George recognized, however imperfectly, that Indigenous peoples were invested with civil, jurisdictional, proprietary and democratic rights. He recognized that that the imperial power of colonizing governments was not absolute; that the principle of Crown sovereignty in British North America would have to be balanced against the ideal of obtaining consent through treaty negotiations with Indigenous peoples for their peaceful co-existence within the British Empire. The Royal Proclamation of 1763 became a symbol of Tory tyranny for some whigs on both sides of the Atlantic. It helped arouse the antagonisms that would eventually coalesce in the string of accusations against King George in The Declaration of Independence. Some saw in the monarch's Proclamation proof that the King was trying to undo the constitutional principles established by the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Thomas Jefferson went much farther, countering the Crown's recognition of Aboriginal title with a theory stating that Anglo-American settlers held their own form of native title. This form of original title he dubbed "allodial title" in 1774 in a pamphlet entitled A Summary View of the Rights of British America. The idea of allodial title, argued Jefferson, went back to the imagined rights of free Saxons in England before their liberties were supposedly constrained by an alien Crown in the Norman conquest. In his theory of allodial title and in his subsequent authorship of large portions of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson drew heavily on the writings of John Locke. In Two Treatises of Government Locke had assigned North American Indians to the infant stage of humanity. Locke associated this imagined infancy with a state of undisturbed nature before the existence of money and before what he characterized as the improvement of North American lands through the investment of labour by transplanted English farmers. The principles announced to the world in 1776 in the Declaration of Independence, perhaps the most consequential political manifesto ever penned, included a long list of accusations directed squarely at King George. The charges ended with an accusation that was directly connected to the British sovereign's recognition of Aboriginal and treaty rights in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. Jefferson and his peers in the Contental Congess alleged that the King "has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." This pronouncement is, to say the least, a bold contradiction of the principles of universal liberty and equality that rightfully constitute the Declaration's most celebrated ideals. In 1776 the new polity-- the new experiment in human governance-- was ushered into life on the principle that there is no such thing as a legitimate right of Aboriginal self-defence, let alone an Aboriginal right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In designating indiscriminately all of America's Indigenous peoples as anarchistic savages who must be placed outside the rule of law and outside the framework of universal liberties cited as the very reason for creating the United States, the founders prepared the way for a trajectory of frontier violence in the rise of America from republic, to transcontinental empire, to hemispheric hegemon, to global superpower. The most recent manifestation of this pattern is evidenced in elements of so-called War on Terror, a campaign which would see the so-called 'detainees" of the US military base at Guantanamo Bay Cuba put in the same constitutional no man's land once inhabited by the incarcerated Geronimo and his captured band of Apache resisters. Like Geronimo and scores of other Aboriginal resisters captured in the American Indian wars, the Guantanamo Bay prisoners have been placed outside the framework of both international and domestic law. They have become the most obvious descendants of the merciless Indian savages referred to in the passage of the Declaration of Independence that made provision for the United States to engage in a perpetual War on Savagery, a War on Terror. I attempt to elaborate more fully the details of this historical panorama in _The American Empire and the Fourth World_, a volume that starts with reflections on some of the tensions between empire building and indigenous resistance since the modern era of globalization began in 1492. I continue this narrative in the forthcoming second part of the project entitled _The Bowl With One Spoon_. In working on these texts I have been struck again and again by the consistency of tactics and ideology in the expansion of the United States towards its current status as the world's sole global superpower. This process of expansion saw the United States emerge and grow on Aboriginal territories which formerly were the sites of the North American colonies of Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, Russia, and, of course, Great Britain. This process of incorporating older imperial systems into its own transcontinental empire foreshadowed the process after the Second World War, when the corporate, military and political power of the United States moved decisively into the vacuum of authority created by the dismantling of European empires. As a result, the planet's Indigenous peoples, who collectively make up about three quarters of the world's population, went from so-called decolonization to a global regime of neoliberalism. Accordingly, the small oligarchy which presently dominates the superpower's governing institutions extended their rule to worldwide proportions through a globalized version of the military-industrial complex which first came into existence in the violent westward expansion of the United States into Indian Country. Unlike the empire of the USA's British imperial parent, the laissez-faire empire of the Uniterd States exists informally. In other words, it exists outside the constraints of the rule of law, outside formal legislative enactments of imperial governance like, say, the British North American Act of 1867 which continues to provide Canada with much of its constitutional edifice. This laissez-faire approach in the exercise of power in the global community is mirrored in some of the domestic laws and policies of the United States. It is reflected, for instance, in the fact that there is no ongoing process of treaty negotiations with the First Nations of the United States which resemble the fifty or so treaty negotiations underway in British Columbia to bring that jurisdiction within the framework of the rule of law as articulated by King George in the Royal Proclamation of 1763. The US government, rather, cites the doctrine of conquest as the source of its power over Indians, as the basis of its acquistion of Aboriginal territories, and, increasingly, as the main explanation of its extraordinary power throughout the entire planet. This American infatuation with conquest is becoming especially clear in the Middle East, the predominantly Arab-speaking and Muslim-dominated realm which constitutes the new Indian Country on the most extended frontiers of US control. As I see it, David Orchard, the Saskatchewan farmer who consciously models himself on John Diefenbaker, is presently the prime embodiment in Canada of the kind of indigenous conservatism described by George Grant in _Lament for a Nation_. Orchard gave compelling voice to some of Canadian Toryism's most deeply-rooted convictions in the speech he gave on October 17 condemning Peter MacKay's decision to fold the PC Party into the Alliance Party. In condemning the Alliance Party's extreme, right wing positions, Orchard emphasized especially the ethnocentrism of his opponent's Aboriginal policies. He pointed to the pervasive contempt of Alliance members and of its leader for the ongoing tradition of Crown Aboriginal treaties, instruments which originally arose from the heritage of Tory alliances with First Nations in opposing republican forces in the American War of Independence and in the War of 1812. He pointed to Alliance policies which seek to repeat in the Canadian context prior American efforts to privatize Indian reservations. The US government enforced this push to privatize and eliminate the remaining Indian Country with the Dawes Act of 1887 and with the appropriately titled termination enactments of the 1950s. Alternatively, Tom Flanagan, who was born and educated in the United States, is one of the leading advocates of importing into Canada of some of the main legacies of the American Indian wars. Flanagan is a University of Calgary Political Scientist who is the chief policy advisor to the Alliance leader, Stephen Harper. This professor is the author of First Nations? Second Thoughts, a volume sponsored by the right-wing Donner Canadian Foundation. Upon the volume's completion, the Donner group further rewarded their author by giving Flanagan a prize of $25,000. Throughout the text Flanagan defends those chapters of US and Canadian Indian policy based on the historic paradigm of civilization's ascent over the imagined Aboriginal savagery of North America. He thus defends and promotes all schemes right up to the present day that treat First Nations communities as backward anachronisms whose most positive fate would be to break up and disappear in the natural course of progress. This position Leads Flanagan to laud the Indian residential schools and the various forms of enfranchisement legislation designed with the explicit aim of terminating the distinct existence of Aboriginal societies. These instruments of assimilation were necessary, Flanagan argues, because "the Old World was five thousands years ahead of the New World on the path of civilization." Flangan's text is organized around a critique of the work of the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples (RCAP), whose members recommended renewing the principles of the Royal Proclamation of 1763 in contemporary terms. RCAP's inquiry and conclusions, argues Flanagan, were based on a set of positions which he dubs as the "aboriginal orthodoxy." This so-called aboriginal orthodoxy is allegedly based on the replacement of the ideals of Enlightenment universalism with the vagaries of cultural relativism as first introduced in the anthropology of Franz Boaz. I would argue, however, that it is Tom Flanagan and his constituents in the Alliance Party of Canada who have turned their back on some of the most important ideals of universal justice that animated the century of Enlightenment. Some of these Enlightenment ideals of universal human rights infused the Aboriginal provisions of King George's Royal Proclamation of 1763. Thomas Jefferson responded to the Royal Proclamation's limited recognition of Aboriginal rights with the provision in the Declaration of Independence which excluded the so-called "merciless Indian savages" from the universal liberties and laws of the new republic. This seminal exercise in racial profiling pointed the way to a trajectory in history which would see consistent attempts to counter the ideas and delegitimize the activities of patriots who have defended the indigenous right of all peoples to conserve our own heritage and our own resources in the face of the imperial Manifest Destiny of the superpower. This heritage of resistance to the inroads of imperialism forms the basis of an inclusive Fourth World movement, a movement whose proponents offer the world alternative models of globalization emphasizing biocultural diversity rather than the totalitarian monoculture of universal capitalism.