About Canadian Government

June 19, 2024

We are not going to solve our problems within the rules of the existing system.

Comment boxes of blogs are often productive places. As with most forms of discussion, you are not going to get agreement about the facts. Especially in these times, everybody has their own set off acts and their own cherished dogma.

However, such discussions clarify why a problem cannot be dealt with in a logical way, with no ‘consensus’ possible. They reveal the root cause of the inability to deal with the problem. It shows what misunderstandings must be overcome to be able to correctly define the problem and identify the solution options.

The topic was the dysfunctional relationship between the Alberta provincial government and the government of Canada. The original can be found at under the title of “Therapy Time.” It is over a month old now as it has taken me awhile to get around to finishing it.

However, I knew from the start I would write this. My part in this discussion resulted in the core of an interesting blog post. That is how some of my best blogs start. I say again, hanging around these comment box discussions is often worthwhile, although time consuming.

What my fellow substacker thought was that this intergovernmental relationship is like that between two estranged parents. She joked about the need for a family therapist to solve this problem. I have been studying this problem for awhile and I have found it to resemble a different kind of family situation.

The biggest flaw in her analogy is the idea that Alberta is the wife with custody of the children under law, because she made them. Then there is the idea that Alberta remains dependent on daddy federal government, who must pay child support. However, the two cannot stand each other and refuse to even be in the same room.

The kids in this narrative are actually the people of Alberta. But they are citizens of Canada, not of Alberta. Canada made Alberta. Then it very unwisely conceded powers to the provinces which they never should have been allowed.

But the premise of this blogger’s piece was the behaviour of mommy Alberta toward her children, which she posed as the municipal governments of Alberta. That is, the laws the Smith government is passing to restrict municipal government in various ways. Mommy Smith does not like the way Calgary and Edmonton want to use federal grants to build public transit and perhaps public housing.

She is like the mommy who does not like the choices her children are making and wants to take back their autonomy. Crypto fascist politicians are always ‘bat shit’ about anything ‘public’; transit, education, health, and so on. She does not want Daddy coming in and giving the kids money so they can go in ways she does not want.

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I, however, do not think feuding parents is a good analogy for the issues between the federal and provincial governments in Canada.

It is like this; we live in a country called Canada. Alberta is not an independent state, it is a subnational government within Canada. It cannot be allowed to try to act like an independent state.

Government has always functioned poorly in Canada. This has held the country back more than people realize. The problem has been that the basic constitutional structure was thought out poorly to begin with.

It was assumed in ye olden days that mother Britain would settle by fiat any constitutional problems between governments in Canada. Then after the nineteen thirties Britain just walked away from it, and seemed to assume it was just handing over to the Americans.

So, if you want a family analogy to Canada’s problems, it is that of the abandoned child who was left without the where-with-all to make it in the world as a functioning adult. One of the more serious consequences of this is that provincial governments have mostly gone delinquent. They need to be knocked back into their place; hard!

This abandoned child analogy refers only to the Canadian nation. The solution is an overthrow of the existing setup and establishment of constitutional arrangements appropriate for a sovereign nation. The provinces are the big obstacle to this.

Of course this is not going to happen within the framework of the existing arrangements. It will be imposed from outside, by decree. If that does not get done soon by the right kind of people with the right motives, then Canada will be dismantled by the wrong kind of people with the wrong motivations.

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There were amusing responses to these analogies. Some thought Mommie should spend less time watching Fox News. Someone else noted that lawyers, not therapists, were making the money out of this family dispute.

Someone did not like my abandoned child analogy, for unclear reasons. He also thought old Premier Lougheed was a good example of how the province should deal with the rest of Canada. I should quote a piece of this;

“It is interesting that Peter Lougheed and his Government were able to achieve much within Canada. Of course he was a can do politician with a vision of the future. He could see where the puck was going. He could stand up successfully to the Federal Government and could also work collaboratively with the Federal Government when required…

Isn’t it time for the UCP Government to grow up, start looking at where the puck is going, stop complaining about their inability to stand up for Alberta in a positive way rather than acting like a spoiled brat that lashes out at everything.”

Pft!? This guy talks about looking where the puck is going, like some kind of game is going on between governments. He talks about Lougheed achieved much within Canada? Where would he have achieved things in, Outer Mongolia.

He talks about Alberta “standing up” to the federal government, like it is an independent country. In no way can a province be allowed to override the national government or try to act like its interest equals or overrides the national interest.

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I was living in Alberta when Lougheed was premier. He was a disaster for the country because the federal government failed to deal with him and his crap, in the interests of the nation and even the people of Alberta. I and some friends and relatives of mine were very harmed by the attacks on the health and social services systems which went on in the latter part of Uncle Peter’s tenure.

What Canada got from Lougheed was the legitimation of such attacks. He engineered the “Lougheed formula” which makes impossible any attempt to adapt government to be used for the common good. This has made a popular revolution the only solution for the institutional gridlock which is destroying the country.

Lougheed did not “see where the puck is going”. He and the creepy, shadowy interests behind him steered events in this bad direction. The present UCP government in Alberta is one of the negative consequences of this.

Here is what really should have happened back in Lougheed times. I advocated for this in those times. The oil business should have been nationalized. Administration of Health, education, and welfare should have been but under national administration until the provincial government was prepared to run it correctly. The province’s finances should have been put under federal management to prevent a ‘resource trap’ economy developing.

Provincial politicians who decide they are going to ‘stand up for’ their province, actually for special interests hostile to the public interest, should simply be removed. In some cases, they should be criminally charged. You cannot run a country with provinces acting like they have ‘interests’ outside the national interest, and can override national government.

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So, this is also about the relation between provincial and local governments. The UCP, Unhinged Crackers and Paranoids, is destructively interfering with the government of the major cities of Alberta. They may want to use Ontario’s treatment of Toronto as a template.

One positive thing I could say about Alberta; I do not think the public would stand for that in the way they did in Toronto. I could go into deep discussion of the really wide cultural differences between Alberta and Ontario, but not here. Basically, Ontarians have this “respect authority” mentality. It really does not work well in the neoliberal age.

I am someone who grew up in Alberta and have been living in Toronto for the past thirty years. I have been through all the extremely harmful provincial interference with local government in GTA, Greater Toronto Area. The bad precedent is set, we are starting to see this kind of thing all over Canada now.

It all comes from the false idea that the provinces do whatever they want with municipal governments. This is really a legal fiction. That is not what the people who wrote the BNA act intended. Provinces having jurisdiction over municipalities does not mean they do what they want with them.

It is time people noticed that in eighteen sixty seven the population was small and mostly rural. Now most of us live in big cities. Jurisdictional boundaries and divisions of powers from that time no longer make sense. We need to study arrangements from most other urbanized countries, where cities above a certain size become provinces/states/lander/prefectures/departements, etc.

There is a significant “Province of Toronto” movement but there are great efforts to shush it up in this wussie town. The politics around it are incredibly complicated. It could fill up several blogs. I will do so one of these days but there is so damned much to blog about.

Some people in Toronto concoct these complicated schemes in which Toronto would be given a ‘charter’ by the federal government. It is unlikely to happen because in requires Provincial cooperation. If T.O. left Ontario most of the GTA would follow and that is half of Ontario and most of the economy. So the rest of Ontario will resist to the end.

However, I have a much simpler solution. Just draw up a written constitution for the province, something which should have been done long ago. This would spell out the powers of local governments in a way yahoo governments cannot mess with. This could make GTA a de facto province.

This should not be so hard to bring about. Unfortunately, it will be so until the dysfunction gets so bad that there is no choice but to do it. It requires getting ‘confrontational’ with the forces of immobilism.

The same applies in Alberta. Contrary to the ideas Albertans have about themselves, they are also reluctant to challenge the hegemony. The problem is that the hegemony is extra nasty/crazy there, and an unusually large part of the population actually buys into their garbage.

The upshot of it is that cities like Calgary, Edmonton, and Toronto need to acquire provincial status. The legacy provinces need to shrink back. Some of them even need to be split up. Some of them should be merged.

The federal government needs to take back much of what history has shown never should have been left to the provinces. It must be made clear that the provinces will be strictly subsidiary to the national government.

These kinds of changes to the existing system are not going to come about through it. They will be forced from an outside position. You know what I mean.

No one seems to want to think much about the kind of restructuring which will be needed. In the near future I will be putting out a piece about exactly that. I will discuss what I would do if I became absolute dictator and Cliesthenes of Canada for five years.

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By the way, if people are interested in my view of the culture of Albertans and the historic reasons for it, it is here.

My theme here is that Alberta was taken over by fascists in the nineteen thirties and they have retained a strong influence, poisoning the minds of four generations.

Comparing that with the mind set of Ontario, I have concluded that this part of Canada has been strongly influenced by the Quakers and similar pacifist religions. A large proportion of the ‘Loyalists’ who arrived after the American revolution were Quakers. Another big influence, unfortunately, has been the Orange order.

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There was also some play about whether getting the right people into office next time would solve Alberta’s governmental problems. Naheed Nenshi , former Calgary mayor, now a candidate for the leadership of the Alberta NDP, was idealized.

Yes, Nenshi is a personable person. I have even met him in person though I have not lived in Calgary for thirty years. It would be good to have someone in office who is not a crook or a whacko, and even has a little brains and charisma.

As with Notley or any other NDP leader or any progressive politician at all, he will not be able to do anything. The decline of society and economy and government will continue in Alberta and in Canada. No government working within the existing rules will be able to change that.

What it will take to reverse decline is a big a topic, but it will not involve just getting elected. The sad thing is that Nenshi, an admirable person, could only be the scapegoat for the decline he can do nothing to prevent.