The City of Winnipeg, Canada, in the Province of Manitoba, is to be found at the longitudinal centre of both the country and the continent. It straddles the juncture of the Red and Assinaboine Rivers, for millennia a meeting place for the first peoples of North America. Between June 16th and June 23rd of 2010, three significant and interrelated events occurred in Winnipeg, individually and collectively defining both the historic nature of Canadian federalism, and suggesting a shape for its future. They were: the first national convocation of the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation Commission on Residential Schools; the World Religions Summit, 2010; and the visit of HRH Elizabeth II and the laying of the corner stone of the Canadian Human Rights Museum. “How”, I hear you say “do these three events relate one to another, let alone to the essentials of federalism in Canada”?
Federalism is a political philosophy, but even more a political methodology; a structural device of some use in the governing of human affairs – especially in areas of political diversity and complexity. The Oxford English Reference Dictionary defines federalism as: a system of government which unites separate states while allowing each to have a substantial degree of autonomy…(Federalism) usually has a written constitution and tends to stress the decentralization of power and, in its democratic form, direct communication between the government and its citizens. This definition adequately describes the structure of federalism, and even suggests why federalism is such a useful tool in establishing institutional harmony amongst diverse sovereignties, whether states parties or otherwise. But the capacity of federalism to be an instrument for peace building in a global community depends more on its substance or essence than on its structural excellencies. This essence is less tangible than constitutional instruments, but no less critical to its functioning. It is characterized by an appreciation of three principal attributes: diversity, inclusivity and interdependence. These together denote an attitude of mind rather than of statute.
H.G. Wells, a pioneer of the world federalist vision, captured this in his prophetic 1933 book, The Shape of Things to Come. In describing the aftermath of the risible Versailles Peace Conference of 1919 and the establishment of the League of Nations – more the “Beleaguered Nations” –, Wells notes the Allies' desire to establish black and white categories of “Good Peoples” and “Bad Peoples” in order to demonstrate who might be in and who out of a new world order. Such categorization is inimical to a federalist vision.
He writes: “If Russia and Germany in their character as Bad Peoples were excluded from the League, such remote peoples as the Chinese and the Japanese were included as a matter of course. It was assumed, apparently, that they were ‘just fellows’ of the universal Treaty-of-Westphalia pattern. The European world knew practically nothing of the mental processes of these remote and ancient communities, and it seems hardly to have dawned upon the conferring statesmen that political processes rest entirely upon mental facts”. This must have been particularly irksome to the man who, in 1917, “sat down with the Encyclopedia Britannica at his elbow” to attempt for the first time a history not of discreet nation-states but of the whole human community. Today we take the principles which dominate Wells’ Outline of History for granted, but during the “war to end wars” – another Wellsian phrase, this from 1914 and sadly inaccurate – it was a revolutionary concept indeed, and one without which a real vision of a diverse, inclusive and interdependent world federalism could never have developed.
It is vision which drives world federalism; structures, no matter how sophisticated and nuanced, are but tools to be modified and improved upon as needs must. For federalism is complex; it is ever evolving, ever in process of negotiation and renegotiation.
If you will permit me to risk a humorous aside, for it is always risky to test humour in the context of multiple linguistic and cultural constituencies, I will illustrate with a Canadian story the complexity of federalism as an evolutionary concept. Three philosophers were commissioned to produce books on the elephant. A French philosopher produced a slim volume entitled The Elephant: a Gastronomic Delight. A German published a treatise in 8 volumes with 2 additional volumes of appendices entitled The Elephant: An Ontological and Dialectical Approach. A Canadian wrote a volume with a particularly contextual flair, The Elephant: a Question of Federal or Provincial Jurisdiction.
There is often much truth in humour, and this illustration captures well the Canadian experiment in federalism which, I will suggest, is a useful model to be considered for the great global adventure. It demonstrates that Canadian federalism is constantly under negotiation despite a nearly thirty year old written constitution, the gift of our late Cartesian Prime Minister, Pierre Elliot Trudeau. Its living essence, diverse, inclusive and interdependent, can be expansively illustrated through an examination of the three convergent events which I noted in beginning this paper. Permit me to briefly describe the surface expression of the Canadian federal system, then to peel away that surface layer to embrace the complexity which lies beneath.
The Canadian federation is a constitutional monarchy enshrined in a bicameral parliamentary system with an elected House of Commons and an appointed Senate – appointed ostensibly by Her Majesty Elizabeth II, but in effect by the Prime Minister of the governing, most often majority party, in the House of Commons. The federal union brings together ten provinces, the self-governing aboriginal Territory of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories and the Yukon Territory. Each of these has a legislature which is responsible for significant areas of governance in the best tradition of subsidiarity: the delegation of governmental authority to the most appropriate and effective legislative level. In Canada, provincial authority and responsibility is closely defined and circumscribed, and all juridical authority not named specifically to the provinces or Nunavut devolves to the federal government. Parenthetically, this is diametrically opposite to the republican system of devolution of powers in the United States of America.
The system was formally established through the British North America Act of 1867, passed by the British Parliament, Canada being a British colony at the time; modified by the Statute of Westminster, passed in 1931, again by the British, but relinquishing virtually complete sovereignty to what was then delineated the Dominion of Canada; and then rendered fully independent by virtue of the repatriation of all constitutional authority through the adoption of a written constitution and a Charter of Rights and Freedoms under the leadership of the Hon. Pierre Eliot Trudeau in 1982. Nine provinces operate under British Common Law; Nunavut incorporates significant aboriginal tradition, and Quebec, closely linked by history and sentiment to France, according to the Code Napoleon. All in all, this is a complex yet fairly tidy approach to federal governance. But it fails to tell the whole story.
On the surface, Canada is a country established and governed according to the two antique European traditions traditionally referred to as the founding “nations”: those of Great Britain and France. But a minority view, long quietly espoused by the reemerging aboriginal communities of Canada – the First Nations, Inuit and Métis – has recently been championed by the eminent Canadian public philosopher and iconoclast, Dr. John Ralston Saul. In his 2008 publication, A Fair Country, Ralston Saul argues controversially and effectively that Canada is not really a European nation at all, but a Métis nation, and it is that demonstrable and incontrovertible fact which renders Canadian federalism unique in all the world. I contend that it is this particularity which renders Canada a model for world federalist approaches to the complex issues facing theorists of global governance in the 21st century. It is this heritage which addresses not only the structure but the substance or essence of federalism, which, in the end, as Wells suggested, is more mental than material.
And it is at this point that I will draw together the three events which I cited in the opening paragraphs of this paper. The eminent biblical scholars, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, in their recent collaborative work The Last Week, have noted with deadly accuracy that the majority of humanity has, throughout history, experienced life in three dominant ways: political oppression; economic exploitation; and religious validation of the first two. This has been clearly evident in the story of the indigenous Aboriginal population of North America, and, for the purposes of this paper, Canada.
When I was a child we recited a bit of doggerel that went, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue”. Whatever that may have meant by way of good news for Europeans, the result was rather more mixed for the Aboriginal peoples who came to be identified by the generic and erroneous label of “Indians”. From the spread of virulent European diseases through land grabbing fictions denoted treaties, the millions of inhabitants of North America, replete with rich and complex societies, were nearly annihilated during the first 450 years of European incursion. And yet despite the easily demonstrable hardships brought to Aboriginals by Europeans, it was Aboriginal support that allowed Europeans to flourish in the harsh environment of what is today Canada.
The earliest Europeans in Canada were French, Scots and Orkney traders through Hudson’s Bay and up the St. Lawrence. They were taught the cure for scurvy; how to use the natural river “highways” of the continent with the aid of birch bark canoes; how to employ fur to survive brutal winters – and how to develop new expressions of society. They intermarried with Aboriginal women, forming alliances of great strength and significant advantage. While some were no doubt simply for convenience, many proved long lasting, bringing into being an entirely new culture, the Métis. One of the most interesting and illustrative was James Douglas, the son of a Scots trader and a black West Indian freedwoman, who married an Aboriginal princess, became the first governor of Victoria on Vancouver Island; married her by benefit of Anglican clergy, and whose children married into the English aristocracy.
And there is the rub. By the latter half of the 19th century, a desire to forget the Aboriginal roots of Canadian society caused Canadians to lose the knowledge of how this country was conceived, in a mad scramble to emulate Europe to become “more English than the English”. The disaster of the “residential school system” was implemented. With the kind of good intentions paving the road to hell, Aboriginal children were torn from their families and taken away to schools in which many were beaten, many were abused, and all lost their heritage. In consequence, the larger Canadian society suffered a commensurate loss.
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been established as a means to begin the redress of this national tragedy. Through it we are beginning to recover the essence of Canadian federalism which is marked more by an Aboriginal than a European worldview.
Ralston Saul notes some of those attributes: “Our obsession with egalitarianism. Our desire to maintain a balance between individuals and groups. The delight we take in playing with our non-monolithic idea of society – a delight in complexity. Our tendency to try and run society as an ongoing negotiation, which must be related to our distaste for resolving complexities. Our preference, behind a relatively violent language of public debate, for consensus – again an expression of society as a balance of complexity, a sort of equilibrium. Our intuition that behind the formal written and technical face of society lies something more important, which we try to get at through the oral and through complex relationships. Our sense that the clear resolution of differences will lead to injustice and even violence. And related to that a preference for something that the law now calls minimal impairment, which means the obligation of those with authority to do as little damage as possible to people and to rights when exercising that authority”.
All these ideas are, Ralston Saul demonstrates, “central to indigenous culture”. Canadian federalism is, he says, “…all about working out how to create relationships that are mixed in various ways and designed to create balances. It is the idea of a complex society functioning like an equally complex family within an ever enlarging circle. That is the Canadian model”. (emphasis mine) It is captured in the Cree term, Witaskewin, or “harmonious living”, which means, Saul notes, “living together on the land…an agreement to live together in peace. You could translate it today as democratic federalism or practical environmentalism”. Permit me to note, without any sense of hyperbole, that this is not only the essence of federalism, but critical to the very nature of democracy. In fact, democracy, especially a federal democracy, has but little to do with elections and constitutions, and everything to do with the free associations inherent in a healthy civil society and the complex interrelationships of the same.
This brings me to the second and interrelated event, The World Religions Summit, and the 47 member Inter-religious National Partnership to coordinate that Summit. In 1997, then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, convened the G8 leaders in Birmingham. During the course of the summit, Mr. Blair made an opportunity to meet with demonstrators of global religious communities, mostly Christian, who were promoting the principle that the wealthiest nations ought to forgive the debt of the poorest of nations. Like Wesley before him, Mr. Blair found himself “strangely moved”, and used his influence with his colleagues in G8 leadership to achieve just that end.
Heartened by this, in 2005, Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury and Jim Wallis, the influential editor of Sojourners’ magazine out of Washington, convened the first World Religions Summit in coordination with the G8 in Lambeth while Mr. Blair hosted for a second time in Gleneagles, Scotland. The results were again extraordinary, with the G8 leaders reaffirming their commitment to the achieving of the Millennium Development Goals, established by the United Nations Millennium Forum in 2000. World Religion Summits – now interfaith in nature – followed each year in Moscow, Cologne, Kyoto and Sapporo and Rome. Each has been of intrinsic value, but in Canada, the format was greatly changed by virtue of the Canadian “model” cited by John Ralston Saul. Not only was the event convened through a national interfaith collaborative partnership, but an extensive public engagement campaign was incorporated including a significant youth constituency. In every aspect of the Summit, a process of consensus was employed, another gift of Aboriginal governance principles. This campaign included thirty-five “Interfaith dinners” among people of a variety of world faiths and legislators of every level of government, and convened from “coast-to-coast”. This has never been attempted before, and while it is a process which corresponds to the Oxford definition noted earlier, its importance is that it demonstrates the substance or essence of federalism more than formal constitutional structures.
The third interrelated event was the visit of Elizabeth II to Winnipeg, on which occasion she dedicated a cornerstone for the emerging Canadian National Museum for Human Rights. The cornerstone was brought from Runnymede, the English meadow in which King John signed Magna Carta. This was surely the symbol, the hymn in stone, which connects the Truth and reconciliation Commission and the World Religions’ Summit.
Here is the crux. I believe that H.G. Wells was right. Federalism is much more about mental than material processes; far more a question of substance than of structure. By all means, let us pursue diligently political and constitutional strategies to achieve a more peaceful planet. But let us pursue with equal diligence the poetry of peace.
A great federalist and a mentor of mine, Arthur Beel, observed that Italian unification was achieved because it had three champions: Cavour, the statesman; Garibaldi, the soldier; and Mazzini, the poet. Though a contemporary poet of world federalism has yet to emerge, we have had our poets in the past. Dated, perhaps, yet still they speak words with power. In 1837, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, wrote in Locksley Hall:
For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,
Saw the vision of the world, and all the wonders that would be;
Saw the heavens fill with commerce, argosies of purple sails,
Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales;
Heard the heavens filled with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations’ airy navies grappling in the central blue;
Far along the world-wide whisper of the south-wind rushing warm,
With the standards of the peoples plunging thro’ the thunderstorm;
Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furled
In the Parliament of man, the Federation of the world.