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By Pierre Lemieux
Many Canadians believe that marginal policy changes (reducing the deficit, privatizing one shop here and there, alleviating regulation in this or that economic sector, electing the other party) are all that is required to keep this country free and peaceful. In my humble opinion, they are mistaken. We are far passed this stage. The question is, Will we be living in a free country tomorrow? Is this still a free country?
Federal Minister of Revenue David Anderson is asking taxpayers nothing less than to become government informers. The Globe and Mail (February 12, 1994) quoted him as saying: "People who are currently in the underground economy [...] will suddenly start realizing that any day of the week, any hour of the day, Revenue Canada may get a phone call and someone may rat on them."Why not also neighborhood committees to spy on the residents and elicit public confessions?
If the great Western thinkers to whom we owe whatever liberty we have left (say, Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, William Blackstone, or James Madison) came back, would they not immediately realize that what they feared is upon us? Would our Canadian ancestors want to live under the regime we now support?
Things have changed, the world is not the same. True. But let's not be fooled by this old rationalization for infringement on liberty. Said Benito Mussolini: "... the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become."
What we have been witnessing in Canada, at both the federal and provincial levels, is an irresistible advance of the steam-roller of state power in all walks of life. Close to half of what people produce and earn is confiscated by taxation. The income tax and the GST have created a fiscal inquisition that Adam Smith thought would be "altogether insupportable in a free country." A large proportion of the labor force is regimented by collective agreements and work permits. One fifth work for government. Most of education and research is nationalized.
Police powers, including search without warrants and entrapment, are enlarged under a variety of excuses: drugs, firearms, tobacco... I.D. papers have been brought through the back door with driver's licenses, health insurance cards, and the ubiquitous social insurance number. The state follows and controls the individual from the cradle to the grave. The sympathetic passport office has become a branch of "Public Security Canada." A driver's license or a Firearms Acquisition Certificate, like so many other required permits and authorizations, is now deemed by the official theory to be a privilege granted by the state to its subjects. The Canadian government apparatus has become "Police Canada."
Policemen object that, on the contrary, their hands are tied by the different charters of rights. Indeed, real, violent criminals and certain privileged (politically correct) groups are safer, but the average peaceful citizen sees more and more the police as the enemy. Police brutality is apparently increasing. Police forces obtain more and more powerful weapons while the citizen cannot buy a can of Mace without being liable to 10 years of jail under the Criminal code. New, non violent crimes are created, citizens are treated as irresponsible minors, while violent crime continues to grow. The law is more and more lenient for real criminals, but tougher and tougher with peaceful individuals.
We still have freedom of expression. Or some. For, in this field too, liberty is under assault -- by election financing laws, heinous literature laws, customs censorship and seizures, defamation suits, state subsidization of publishing and control of culture, sub judice rules, and politically correct government policies, like the Ontario "Framework Regarding Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination" which looks at universities as virtual reeducation camps. The federal government is the largest advertiser in the country, and you see state propaganda everywhere.
One can still easily criticize the government for not doing enough, but expressing opinions contrary to the state's agenda is more and more difficult and risky. The state now has the legal means to destroy the life of virtually anybody it chooses to persecute (I suspect that Raymond Malenfant, who had the bad idea of challenging the trade unions and not yielding to bombs, is a recent illustration of this).
Canadians are not alone. In Europe, the dominos of modern liberties started crumbling at the turn of this century. Governments in Canada and the United States have only started a bit later to speed down the slippery slope.
The slippery slope of what? There is a word for this. In the debilitating New Age atmosphere of this fin de siecle, most people don't want to hear what our forebears would have seen written everywhere. The word is: tyranny.
Why don't Canadians see this? One hypothesis is that, especially in democratic regimes, people do not recognize tyranny until it is too late -- witness the democratically elected Nazis. Tyranny is like an avalanche: you see it only when the last crystal of snow has tipped the balance. As Montesquieu warned us two centuries ago, the democratic mystique confuses the power of the people with the liberty of the people. Whether we are falling under the tyranny of the majority that Tocqueville feared, or under the tyranny of well- organized minorities, does not change the nature of the beast.
Another hypothesis is that people get accustomed to serfdom. The slaves often loved their masters, and the wards of the Welfare State come to love their chains. As French legal theorist Georges Ripert wrote so forcefully, "L'homme vivant sous la servitude des lois prend sans s'en douter une ame d'esclave."
There is a third, more optimistic, hypothesis, which is that the Canadians did recognize the tyrant, and said "non serviam" by peacefully retreating in tax evasion and the underground economy (and by voting "no" to the last constitutional referendum). Perhaps. The problem, though, with this sort of resistance is that it also fuels cynicism and, eventually, distrust and dishonesty in all social relations, witness Eastern Europe. The tyrant is the grave-digger of public morality.
Bureaucrats and politicians are often good family people who have a job and only obey orders. This century has seen other, more advanced, instances of such paradox. If there are still free men and free women in the City of Command (as Bertrand de Jouvenel called the locus of comtemporary governments[1]), I believe it is their moral duties to do anything they can to jam the machine that crushes individual liberty. We could then throw back the warning in the Minister of Revenue's face: "People who are currently in the City of Command will suddenly start realizing that any day of the week, any hour of the day, an editor or a writer may get a phone call and someone may rat on them."
The Western tradition of liberty, whether it be the Common Law, the Rights of Man, or the American Revolution, has thought us that it is a right, perhaps even a duty, to resist tyranny. In his Commentaries on the Laws of England, William Blackstone wrote, speaking of English liberties: "... to vindicate these rights when actually violated and attacked, the subjects of England are entitled, in the first place, to the regular administration and free course of justice in the courts of law; next, to the right of petitioning the king and parliament for redress of grievances; and lastly, to the right of having and using arms for self preservation and defense."
The so-called Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedom is devoid of any real limits on state power. Parliament is largely filled with straw men proud to be part of the governing class. Wonder why the tyrant does not trust his subjects with firearms anymore?
According to John Locke, a government's legitimacy can only be based on the consent of the governed. In a recent book,[2] John Simmons convincingly argues that, under the consent criterion, actual governments are illegitimate.
Now, not all illegitimate governments are equally evil. Some of them may still do more good than harm. They exercise Lockean rights belonging to all individuals in the state of nature (like the right to punish violent crime), while they infringe on individual rights in relatively mild ways. They are illegitimate but "good" governments. Vis-a-vis these governments, we are in a state of nature, i.e., we have no moral obligation to obey them, but we should take care that our actually raising against them would bring worse alternatives. Bad illegitimate governments, on the other hand, have declared a Lockean state of war on their subjects. In this case, resistance is not only a right but a moral duty.
The question, then, is whether the Canadian state (federal and provincial) is still a "good" illegitimate government, or whether it has become, or is becoming, a bad illegitimate government. Given the growing, severe infringements of individual liberty in this country, the answer is not clear. For our children's sake, let's just hope that we are still capable of recognizing a tyrant.
[1] Bertrand de Jouvenel, On Power: The Natural History of Its Growth [1945] (reprinted in English by Liberty Fund: Indianapolis, 1993). [2] John Simmons, On the Edge of Anarchy. Locke, Consent, and the Limits of Society (Princeton University Press: 1993).
A Montréal-based economist and author, Pierre Lemieux is currently a Visiting Professor at the Université du Québec à Hull. His most recent book is Le droit de porter des armes [The Right to Bear Arms] (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1993).