Prime minister announces two Alberta Senate appointments; UCP throws predictably petulant tantrum

The first settlers of Atlantic North had no idea what a federated state should look like because they were from unitary states (as UK and France remain today). A century and a half later nothing much had changed except that Founding Fathers of the new American republic were studying the Iroquois Confederacy for clues.

But senates they knew about from their Ancient history textbooks—Athens, Greece, birthplace of democracy. There were in fact no elected senates in Mother Europe at the time and senates like those of Ancient Greek poleis, or city-states, had never been adapted to federal organization before. The idea of a sage body of experienced old men was probably undesigned happenstance in Ancient Greece, itself product ancient, conservative traditions: inherited accumulated wealth tended to be represented by the oldest male heads of leading families, not by the fittest warriors of legend and myth. The concept of “old” might just as well have applied to the depth of one’s ancestral pedigree.

Certainly several of the US Founding Fathers who proposed adopting a federal “senate” for their new republic were astoundingly young—some lists include a couple of teenagers, although the average age was 44 years. The most-elderly statesman, Benjamin Franklin, 70 yeas-old at the time, wasn’t at all enthusiastic about federalism (in hindsight prescient of the Confederate States’ secession eight decades later). Several delegates to the Congressional Convention refused to be signatories on the purely democratic ground that a strong central government is antithetical to individual freedoms.

Yet the Senate was approved (indeed, one for each state government as well), not to emulate or inherit the British House of Lords or the soon-to-be overthrown French Parlement, both being non-elected bodies purposed to preserving privileges of the land-owning class, not primarily to establish an institution of sober second thought proffered by presumed wise old men. Land ownership was incomparable between overpopulated, over-worked, and completely parcelled-out Europe still firmly pegged to feudal rights and the New World where, despite every colonial effort to transplant seigniorial tenures through charters, grants, titles, licences, royal provinces and reserves, the new immigrant could simply walk uphill from tidewater until the terrain matched his penury and there squat.

In fact, the senate was adopted to resolve smaller states’ protest that they would be democratically pushed aside by more-populous ones. Thus the senate was the first accommodation of federalism: to guarantee the equality of all federates, regardless their geographic size, population or location, each state was assigned two senators.

The European relationship with land tenure was meaningless in the new republic where land was seemingly inexhaustible and White settlers were finally allowed to flood over the Appalachians into the Indian Territory which the British Crown’s Quebec Act of 1763 had reserved exclusively for indigenous nations and those deported from their native homes on the Eastern Seaboard by overwhelming colonists (the Indian Territory was nullified by the Treaty of Paris which ended the American Rebellion in 1783). The senatorial institution was therefore not about protecting property ownership rights per se (unlike in the motherlands, New-World land-ownership was ordinary, not special) but rather to protect the pernicious institution of chattel slavery which attended land development in warm colonies from the beginning. Again, the vastness of ‘virgin’ land (indigenous occupants were either confined to Indian reservations, deported to Oklahoma Territory, or exterminated by introduced diseases) necessitated importation of African slaves to tame interminable wastes in gargantuan gulps the size of whole European nations. Chattel slavery was invented in the Royal Provincial Court of Virginia in 1624 (a slave-owner attended the court to reclaim three runaway indentured labourers who’d been captured together; the court ordered the indenture of the two Celts increased from 7 to 14 years but for their fugitive African comrade the judge increased the term of his indenture to life, forming the Common Law legal precedent for chattel slavery. Prior to this, Britain had no naturalization mechanism for people not born British subjects).

Controversy over slavery existed from the beginning; it jeopardized the confederation of the New England states whose Puritan mores had always disapproved against those of plantation owners in more verdant southern states whose wealth depended on producing cotton and tobacco with unpaid Black labour. The compromise was ‘states’ rights’ which allowed a state to prohibit or permit slavery as it would or even to abrogate existing federal Indian Treaties and deport the natives westward in order White settlers appropriate their land. Contention whether new states could be confederated as slave or free incited the proto-Civil War called “Bloody Kansas”, 1854-59. These human injustices could only be sustained by force and hypocrisy—numerous Indian wars and, of course, the Civil War which was ostensibly fought to end slavery (it cost Americans more casualties than, to present, all other US wars combined).

Numerous examples prove the racist scar still exists today, 159 years later. Indeed, the recent convulsion of tRumpublicanism shows the scab hasn’t healed, that a demagogue can successfully pick at it, an uncomfortable realization that the entire American construct needs at least review and probably reform, some fingering the federal Senate as a significant factor in sustaining the US’s racist history from its colonial origins until now.

Then again, in the internet age of misinformation everything from the Electoral College to the SCOTUS to democracy itself has been blamed for the alleged “culture war” supposed raging in the heart of America.

Thirteen-Colony America got as old as the nation of Canada is right now. Even though the Rebellion required creating new institutions which had no example in Europe, it had accumulated 160 year-old tradition of slavery among the South’s land-owning class which the invention of a federal Senate helped preserve for the new republic—that is, for another eight decades until the carefully constituted model failed and the nation split in two.

Now, 159 years after the Civil War, the vulnerabilities of the US political system are frightfully apparent, despite the constitutional amendments that followed the permanent wounding of America’s soul.

American rebels failed to persuade Quebec Habitants, then British subjects, to join the American Rebellion. While the Founding Fathers squabbled over federalism and constitutional wording, obsession with British flanking positions in its remaining part of North America culminated in the US policy of “Manifest Destiny” which aimed to strategically wipe out British and Spanish threats on the continent. Britain’s theatre-of-war against colonial New France ended in 1759-60; it sent much-diminished regulars to repel the American invasion of Quebec in 1775 and barely afforded troops to end the War of 1812 when, thinking Napoleon’s abdication in 1814 permanently ended the continental French theatre of war, British marines hurriedly shipped to Washington where, occupying it for a few days, they burned the Capitol, compelling America’s surrender. After dutifully defending land-owning Tories in the Thirteen Colonies and occupying the premiere City of New York for seven years undisturbed, Britain finally opted to preserve instead the prospect of historically superlative bilateral trade with its rebellious scion (hitherto-superlative was between Britain and German Hanse-League cities). Despite three major military conflicts, American/British trade did nothing but grow—even during wartime. The US Civil War put UK in a touchy diplomatic position of having to officially embargo the Confederacy in the Union’s favour, but also to appease many UK investors in southern cotton.

Britain’s interest in defending its North American possessions against this increasingly powerful trading partner was fading. It’s new star was colonial India and if American hegemony over British North America was as destined as its defeat of the Confederacy and its amassing of the world’s first industrial war machine, then so be it. Trade, not patriotism or loyalty to the King, was priority; UK had already rationalized divestment of its unprofitable Pacific Northwest possessions; indeed, in the very year Canada began to confederate, it sold the Alaska Panhandle to US for a paltry sum over brandy snifters in a posh London club.

Although the design of a Canadian federation lagged behind the US by nine decades, the American preoccupation with war (the Seminole, Mexican and US Civil Wars, 1816-65) temporarily distracted from Manifest Destiny until the victorious Union recommended resurrecting the policy while it still possessed its newly-idled war industry. Luckily for Canada, American distractions hitherto 1867 fated both nations to synchronize their respective races to their distant outports waiting on the West Coast. The completions of both country’s designed federations began in the late 1860s.

Canada began to confederate in 1867 in order to compete in the transcontinental race, as well as to better defend British North America against the USA. Luckily Canada’s Founding Father’s benefited from hindsight of the American nation-building experience: a federation, yes, but expedited by circumstances to confederate BC, thousands of miles away (1871) and later infilling the trackless prairies with much larger provinces until the federates were continuously joined, sea-to-sea, in 1905 (and sea-to-sea-to-sea in 1933 when UK ceded the Arctic Archipelago to the Canadian Dominion). And the Founding Fathers were careful to avoid the American’s Fathers’ overzealous democracy, especially with regard the Senate. The States have 51 elected senates that continually frustrate liberal policies, yet we Canadians howl with indignation that we have even one—and one that’s not elected and therefore has virtually zero political legitimacy and very little potential to do wrong. Many Canadians wonder why the federal Senate needs to exist at all when provinces are unicameral and have no problem passing laws or governing. Most, however, acquiesce to the fact that the amending formula introduced in the Constitution Act of 1982 makes it virtually impossible to get rid of the perfunctory Upper Chamber of supposedly sober second thought. That is, most Canadians are happy knowing we don’t have an elected Senate to get all in our hair and that the provinces where they live are senate-free zones. We might say the same for an elected head-of-state of which we’ve also been spared. Those of us who know are also appalled that 35 US states actually elect their judges.

Which is why most Canadians find Alberta’s carping about legitimizing Triple-E, or elected, senates to be plain goofy. I half expect Danielle Smith—or maybe even PP himself—to argue that the rest of the world is laughing at us because we don’t elect our federal Senate. Really, it’s just the rest of Canada that’s laughing. We’ve been that lucky so far. Two-hundred and forty-nine years, 1775-2024.