Answering a seven-year-old rhetorical question: Why Canada needs to outlaw freelance ‘diplomacy’

Back in 2018, I asked, “Do we need a Canadian version of the Logan Act to put a stop to dangerous freelance diplomacy?”

The proximate cause of this rhetorical query was the supposed-to-be-secret visit to the Trump White House that former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper was scheduled to make a few days later. This happened while the federal government responded to the last time U.S. President Donald Trump, acting in bad faith, broke a trade agreement between Canada and the United States.

Canadians, including the Government of Canada, were apparently not supposed to know about this covert meeting. They probably never would have had it not been for a blunder by someone in the White House who phoned up the Canadian Embassy in Washington to ask if anyone was coming along with the former Conservative PM.

Whatever Mr. Harper was up to there seems never to have been established, although news reports at the time speculated he was going to speak with John Bolton, the U.S. national security advisor of the moment, and Larry Kudlow, Mr. Trump’s economic advisor at the time. 

We know he attended the meeting on July 2 because an Associated Press photographer snapped him scurrying out the White House security gate afterward.

Perhaps Mr. Harper was attending in his capacity as supremo of the Neoliberal Internationale, known officially then as the International Democrat Union and since rebranded slightly so as not to be confused with the American political party with a similar name. Perhaps it was just a social call on Mr. Bolton, known to hold similarly belligerent opinions about Russia. 

I doubt Mr. Harper was actually trying to harm Canada, but as I wrote at the time, the potential for harm was nevertheless real.

After all, I said, “it’s a well-established principle in diplomacy – the real kind, practiced by diplomats – that freelance negotiations of this sort have the effect of undermining any government’s position.”

Unlike 2018, we now have a group of people from Alberta, who actually want to break up Canada and ludicrously declare Alberta to be a separate nation, travelling to the United States and trying to cut deals with unnamed American officials. 

And while these advocates of Alberta separation, 51^st statism, or whatever certainly don’t enjoy the stature of Mr. Harper, who is now also the chair of Alberta’s pension management Crown corporation, they do claim to be speaking with officials of the second Trump Administration in the United States about how best to break up the American republic’s next-door neighbour and historic best friend. 

If the report by DeSmog International last week is accurate, the delegation from the so-called Alberta Prosperity Project appears to think it would be a good idea to sell out the country for something less than the modern nation state equivalent of a mess of pottage – a ludicrously low $500-million loan from the United States to cover the costs of setting up a landlocked new petrostate on the North American continent. A loan for crying out loud! 

“I met the senior U.S. administrative officials just a couple steps away from the president himself,” DeSmog quoted former Alberta Prosperity Project CEO Dennis Modry telling a pro-independence event in Red Deer of a visit he and other APP leaders made to Washington last spring. “When we walked into the conference room, the first comment was ‘We recognize and support Alberta becoming the sovereign nation for the first time.’”

Now, we have no idea with whom Dr, Modry was chit-chatting, or whether this is an accurate memory of what was said. But while the Alberta Prosperity Project can fairly be described as a pretty marginal group, they do appear to have active support from Alberta’s United Conservative Party Government. So right off the top it should be obvious why the kind of freelance “diplomacy” is dangerous. 

Since some reader is bound to call this kind of behaviour treason, I do not believe it meets the legal definition of that term in section 46 of the Criminal Code of Canada, which limits the definition to physical attacks on the head of state and other leaders, attempts to overthrow the government of the country or a province, fighting against the Canadian Armed Forces, assisting an enemy at war with Canada, and so on.

Part III of the Emergencies Act, which allows cabinet to declare an “international emergency” in the event of a crisis “involving Canada and one or more other countries that arises from acts of intimidation or coercion or the real or imminent use of serious force or violence and that is so serious as to be a national emergency,” might provide a theoretical remedy. (Presumably when this was drafted, no one imagined the hostile country would be the United States.)

But that is a drastic step for when it’s too late to head the crisis off at the pass with more practical and limited measures designed to prevent an emergency from occurring in the first place.

A careful reading of sections 59 and 60 of the Criminal Code, which deal with sedition, suggests that our Alberta separatists have been mindful of its cautious prohibition of advocating the violent overthrow of our governments as well.

Which is what brings us back to the Logan Act, the venerable U.S. legislation that since 1799 has made it a crime to carry on unauthorized negotiations with foreign governments.

Named not for its advocates but for George Logan, the pacifist Quaker state legislator from Pennsylvania who sailed to France to try as a private citizen to end an undeclared war between France and the United States over the American failure to repay debts to France.

Logan’s apparent success so upset the Federalists in both Houses of Congress that they drafted and passed a bill outlawing what he did, signed into law by President John Adams on Jan. 30, 1799. By the way, in 1801, Logan was elected to the U.S. Senate, so his efforts must have had some popular support. 

The Logan Act, as it came to be colloquially known, says: “Any citizen of the United States, wherever he may be, who, without authority of the United States, directly or indirectly commences or carries on any correspondence or intercourse with any foreign government or any officer or agent thereof, with intent to influence the measures or conduct of any foreign government or of any officer or agent thereof, in relation to any disputes or controversies with the United States, or to defeat the measures of the United States, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than three years, or both.”

The Logan Act has remained on the books ever since – for the obvious reason that there is a real need to prevent such interventions, all the more so in the globalized and corporatized world of the 21^st Century. Its mere presence is a useful reminder of the necessity of a state’s government holding a monopoly on diplomacy.

It’s all very well and must remain legal for deluded folks to advocate terrible ideas, including theocracy, opposition to immunization against disease, and separation of one or more provinces from the Dominion – all of which appear to be policies of the UCP under Premier Danielle Smith.

But plotting with officials of a foreign government on how to implement such a plan is another matter entirely – or should be.

It’s time to acknowledge in law the reality of the schemes of the Alberta Government and extremist fringe groups which it supports like the APP – not to mention the Free Alberta Strategy, whose tentacles extend right into the Premier’s Office, where one of its three authors is the premier’s chief of staff. 

Likewise it is time to recognize sad reality of the fact our great neighbour on the southern side of the World’s Longest Undefended Border can no longer be considered either an ally or a friend. 

The need for a similar prohibition in Canadian law on freelance diplomacy a matter of the utmost urgency in defence of the realm.