December 1999
by Barry Stagg
The uproar over Nova Scotian native fishermen unwisely attempting to exercise supposed treaty fishing rights off the Burin Peninsula is just another example of what happens when a federal government wilfully delegates government power to its clients/preferred customers in preference to provincial governments. These are the actions of a national administration that at heart prefers a unitary state run on statist principles, not unlike the model represented by present day France.
Consider the following examples of recent times. On the Grand Banks the Canadian government permitted and even encouraged decades of fish plundering by foreign countries. Unregulated market forces and brute stupidity were allowed to conquer a vast resource that defined Newfoundland's economy and its very soul. This can be called international indifference or cowardice if you prefer.
At home the Ottawa Raj prefers to alienate power away from citizens and vests it in an array of regulatory bodies and federal clients that are in effect federal municipal governments. These federal municipal bodies are the many aboriginal governments, all operating under the federal version of the Municipalities Act, known infamously as the Indian Act.
In Canada's federal state, a federal government philosophically dedicated to a unitary state can hinder the federal system by bureaucratic means. Delegating its paramount national power to third parties, aboriginal governments for example or regulators such as the National Energy Board or the C.R.T.C. alienates power and control to bodies that are uncontrollable and unanswerable to the provinces and the citizens of each province. These are inherently controlled by the federal government by virtue of being federal statutory creatures.
There are other insidious means of emasculating provincial rights and making the rights of ordinary citizens less meaningful. Two of these are litigation subversion and legislation subversion. In the litigation situation, the indifferent marshalling of a federal case can obtain the desired political result of losing to a preferred opponent. How convenient for the federal government to lose the Marshall case with respect to native fishing and property rights. This decision undermines provincial property rights and places the control of provincial resources such as mining and forestry in peril. Ordinary citizens will wake up in the year 2000 to face the dubious prospects of natural resources being up for grabs between an imperious federal government and the federal government's own preferred clients, aboriginal groups.
Legislation subversion is another process whereby the federal government either deliberately or indifferently permits federal laws to be passed which are almost certain to be struck down by the courts. Drafting and proclaiming sloppy laws which are doomed to be struck down by the Supreme Court of Canada are another means by which preferred third parties can succeed in the face of token federal opposition. The most obvious example of this type of legislative subversion is found in the immigration laws of this country.
The immigration refugee laws are a fiasco in progress, insulting to Canadians and designed to punish the average citizen with illegal job competition, higher taxes and the real feeling that their country is not secure. Citizens grow to feel that they have no firm stake in ownership of their own country. Instead citizenship is something sought illegally and through criminal organizations and which is then casually and arbitrarily granted by the Canadian government. The examples of Chinese organized crime gangs sending boatloads of illegal refugees to British Columbia is the most glaring recent example. There are numerous examples of illegal refugees who deliberately enter the country without documents and who are ultimately granted citizenship despite their patently illegal behaviour.
The reason why these illegal immigrants can succeed is because the immigration laws enforced by the federal government are so carelessly drafted that even these glaringly bogus claimants are entitled to a process that keeps them in the country for so long that the same federal regulators then turn around and grant them citizenship on compassionate grounds.
One final thought on the aboriginal issue now confronting Canadians after the Marshall decision. Native citizenship in Canada has become a form of federally enhanced super-citizenship. It has become a convenient reservoir for federal political power. The ultimate beneficiaries of this super-citizenship are not the natives themselves but rather the federal government which continues to consolidate its governmental power, eroding the power of the provinces, and gathering more and more power to regulate and control resources under the auspices of the Indian Act.