Delphi complete works of.., p.706
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 706
From this burden the United States now shakes itself free. Presently the chain will just become merely an imitation, a pretence, like the gold chains of jewelry that once were fetters.
But while America was thus discarding American sin, Canada, after a first start away from it, came back closer and closer. It has reached now a point of States Rights, renamed ‘provincial autonomy,’ that Virginia might have envied.
The act of 1867, as framed, seemed all for central power. Its chief section (91 ) seemed to give full economic control. The Dominion government could tax by ‘any mode or system,’ not on the grudging terms allowed to Washington in 1789. It had control of ‘trade and commerce,’ written like that, complete in its simplicity, not part of it, but all of it. It had ‘banking’ in one word and ‘legal tender’ in two. Every section of it is meant to recall and rectify some misfortune of the Republic. It had all the public land outside the existing provinces — that meant all the vast stretch of the North West.
It passed in silence over labour legislation and such. No one thought of that. But to a plain mind the power was there.
Thus started, the Dominion of Canada advanced for at least a generation farther and farther towards consolidation. It took the Hudson Bay Territory. It made out of the ‘postage stamp provinces’ of Manitoba (1870), and organized the North-West Territories. British Columbia came in (1871) with the promise of a Pacific railroad, realized in 1886. Prince Edward Island joined in 1873. A national protective tariff (1879) sheltered home industry. Immigrants poured into the West. Canada appeared at the colonial pageant in London, 1897, as ‘the granary of the Empire, free homes for millions.’
The current turned. Unforeseen discoveries of mineral wealth, under provincial control, turned wilderness to Eldorado. The provinces fell heir to the great asset of water power. Hydro-electric power became a huge provincial interest. Along with it came the new pulp and paper industry, another provincial concern unknown at Confederation. The rise of the motor-car poured a wealth of licence taxes into the treasuries of the provinces; the rise of public utility corporations a second stream. The government sale of liquor, especially after the stimulus of prohibition, proved an open sesame.
At Confederation provincial finance was so feeble it could not stand without federal subsidies. Seventy years later the annual revenue of such a province of Ontario was seven times as large as that of the Dominion Government at Confederation.
The whole impetus of development favoured provincial power. To help it along the lawyers turned up the mysterious clause (under section 92) of the British North America Act, which gives the provinces control over ‘property and civil rights.’ This new power came out of its oblivion like the wicked fairy from the cupboard in the fairy tale. It wished that the young Dominion would prick its hand on the point of the clause and fall fast asleep. It nearly did. The war just woke it in time, or the Dominion, drowsing heavily at Ottawa, would have watched the huge provinces play the Saxon Heptarchy.
What this clause in question really means no one knows. Probably the Fathers of Confederation meant that ordinary day-to-day buying and selling, property and real estate, belonged to the provinces. It is used now to give the provinces any and every power which the courts care to give them, and to snap asunder the generality of such clauses as ‘any mode or system of taxation.’ It is like a chemical ingredient, thrown into the judicial retort to precipitate ‘provincial power.’ What used to be federal control is thrown away as the scum off the top. By this means all attempt to make general Canadian laws for labour, social help, social control, break into fragments. A whole group of statutes for social betterment (Minimum Wage Act, Weekly Rest Act, Limitation of Hours of Work Act) were all declared by the decision of the Privy Council (1935) as outside of the power of Canada. What can’t be done on one authority, is impossible as nine. People can’t enjoy nine kinds of rest, and nine varieties of old age. So we are put back with the California barbers and the Sunday shave. The forty-eight stars of the United States move forward in the social sky towards national solidarity. The Canadian constellation of nine drifts, retrograde, towards the darker side of the sky.
Nothing succeeds like success. A movement once started acquires momentum. Public opinion compelled the Dominion to give up its public western land (1931) and to pay a compensation (86,23-0,000) for having ever had it. Dominion power to disallow a provincial law fell into disuse, till Alberta forced the pace so hard as to resurrect it. But the political power of the province is seen in such a question as that of the Deep Waterways Plan, to connect ocean shipping with the Upper Lakes. This is a truly national question, in which we might envisage Canada as one. But the structure of Canadian political life brings in Ontario, as a full-sized partner in the argument.
This growth of provincial autonomy suited the book of French Canada. At Confederation the French numbered one-third of the population of Canada. They had their Acadian extension eastward and their footing in the north-west. The half-breed Metis were spreading over the plains. The church towers of St. Boniface marked a French settlement of eight hundred souls, when Winnipeg — the name means ‘dirty water’ — only indicated a group of shanties and saloons straggling out of Fort Garry. It had two hundred and fifty people, with or without souls. But the French hope of a bilingual West went out with the Manitoba boom, the rebellion of 1885 and the American invasion at the turn of the century. British Columbia, including Victoria and its enchanted Island, had acquired such French as it knew out of an English school book. Hence French dualism for all Canada shrank to French Nationalism for Quebec.
This is not to say that French Canada is alien to the British Empire. The separatism is only as against the sister provinces, and that not as hostility, except against a more or less imaginary group of Orangemen. It is an isolation like the polite and friendly subdivision of Montreal. The great majority of the French have long since accepted the Empire. It is a commonplace of history that the last shot in its defence will be fired by a French Canadian. His only new competitor might be a New Englander. The gallant service of French Canada under arms, in the past and repeated now, is ample warrant for personal courage and political loyalty. Independence, talked of in the dog days of years of stagnation, is just a sort of dream. A little group of our French people — a group only in the sense that fourleaved clovers make a group, one here one there — like to talk of a dream-republic called Laurentia. It is a lovely place; there are no English there, and no capitalists and no power companies; and there are no soldiers and no armies and it never goes to fight in Europe. In this dream-world the government is all by orators — young orators — and they talk and talk, and write newspapers and pamphlets, and fall asleep and wake up and talk. No one quite knows where this Laurentia is, whether Montreal is in it, whether it has ports and ships that block the outlet of a continent, or whether it is up somewhere in the snows of Peribonka, in the country of Maria Chapdelaine. But what is life without its dreams?
When the war came to Canada it straightened all the provinces into line. It was a sort of ‘eyes right’ that took away attention from social credit in Alberta and from the retroactive inheritance tax that was resurrecting the dead in Ontario. These things could wait. The Quebec provincial election of October 1939 settled all question of Canadian neutrality. The new wind from over the sea clears the Canadian sky.
Australia presents a complete physical contrast with Canada. One is a whole continent, the other only a half. Canada touches the North Pole. Australia, in its mandated territory, almost reaches the Equator. Canada is divided by great mountain ranges. It falls north and south into separate systems of river basins and plains. There is water almost everywhere. Over great areas, as in the district round Lake Mistassini, it is hard to say whether the country is made up of land filled with lakes, or of lakes filled with islands. Australia is otherwise shaped. It has been compared to a vast tea-tray turned upside down and pounded in the centre. It thus consists, especially on the east and south-east, of a great rim of mountain, plateau and fertile coast line, with a sunken centre. The coastal region, with the adjacent island of Tasmania, contains all that is best of Australia. Its snowless climate is that of Mediterranean Europe’ its fertile valleys admirable for fruitland, much of it a garden soil to vie with Southern France. Inland it slopes upward till it rises, in places with an abrupt lift of three or four thousand feet, to a high plateau of grass and sheepland. But the plateau itself sinks gradually inland to the vast central ‘dead heart of Australia,’ which has set its stamp upon the picture of the continent. This country of one unending monotony of slate and sand and stunted shrub, sinks in places below the level of the sea. Here such water as falls runs away from the sea, towards the centre, and dies away in the sands. The large inviting body of water which appears in blue upon the maps under the name of Lake Eyre (area 3,700 square miles), is sometimes there and sometimes not. Its bed lies 39 feet below the sea level. In dry seasons the ‘lake’ is reduced to a certain feeling of dampness in the air where the water has evaporated.
This dead heart of Australia’ corresponds in a sort of pot-and-kettle fashion with the frozen north of Canada. Time may show that the heart is not so dead nor the north so frozen as fancy painted. A distinguished Glasgow scientist estimated a few years ago that Australia could support 43-,000,000 people, then repented the estimate and wished he had doubled it. Any reasonable esimate of the potential population of Canada goes beyond that again. But meantime the physical environment of each country has conditioned its settlement. People had to find, not always successfully, warm corners in Canada. And population had to come to Australia by occupying the coastal belt. For each country, access must follow rivers and harbours. Sydney Harbour, really a submerged river valley, was admirable for entrance. But the great inland plateau behind, scarped steep by nature, defied all ascent for many years. Thus the Australian colonies broke out as patches on the coast. The Commonwealth still bears in its divisions and its economy this stamp that nature set on it. On its northern coast torrid heat challenges white residence and fertility invites in vain.
Settled in this way, federation was long in coming to Australia. The connection of the colonies with England and with one another was by sea — long distances at that. Even for modern steamers Brisbane is two days from Sydney, two more to Melbourne, then two to Adelaide, and beyond that a four days voyage to Fremantle (the port of Perth) in Western Australia. To this last region there was no other access. Even for the eastern colonies the railways were on a local basis, with varying gauges — in fact they still are. Until the time of the Japanese-Chinese War (1894) there was no outside danger to quicken union. The Orient seemed asleep.
The federation of all Australia was of course proposed in its cradle, as happy marriage is wished to a baby girl. The idea has a kind of grandeur about it, a natural consummation. But beyond grandeur there seemed little in it. The Australian colonies set more stress on their divergences than their points of resemblance. The fact that they were all of one race, one language, one culture and one allegiance, they took for granted. They had as a birth right what the mills grind slowly for the rest of us. But they laid stress on their disagreements. The colony of Victoria had been a pioneer in tariff protection (i860) and was proud of it. New South Wales was, outside of Britain, the sole remaining area of free trade and clung to it like a survivor on a rock. Western Australia had received with its responsible government (1893) the unrestricted control of 975,000 square miles of the globe, about equal to one-third of Europe. Its 50,000 — inhabitants (1891) proposed to take advantage of this sublime imbecility of imperial administration. When presently nature threw in gold mines (1892 — 93) they clung to their inheritance all the closer.
The altered world that was made by the awakening and arming of Japan changed this situation. It was clear that six separate Australian colonies could never hold a white continent against an inundation of Asia in arms. The federation that followed after long negotiation was framed in Australia and cast in an imperial statute, the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act of 1900, proclaimed January 1st, 1901. New Zealand stayed out. Distant 1,500 miles they must work out their own salvation. Western Australia, cast for the part of Rhode Island, or Prince Edward Island, stayed out at the initiation, but was coaxed in in time to become an original state. The chief inducement was the pledge of a railway across the desert. This is the trunk-line, Trans-Australian railway, 1,05-2 miles, connecting Port Augusta (the port of Adelaide), South Australia, with the Western Australia railway system at Kalgoorlie, 387 miles east of Fremantle. The railway has proved an economic failure and even as a political gesture has missed its mark. Western Australia thus married in haste has repented at leisure. It has never ceased to deplore the Union. As recently as 1933 a plebiscite showed a two-to-one vote for secession and the State petitioned the British Government for release (1934). But the Westminster Statute had thrown away the key to the padlock. The British Government was able to fall back on its own inability, using the Statute of Westminster much as Mr. Spenlow in David Copperfield explained that Jorkins was inexorable.
Under the circumstances described, the federal government of Australia was made on the reverse plan to that of Canada. The idea was to keep as much authority as possible for the separate units, and give only necessary powers to the central government. The names ‘State’ and ‘Commonwealth’ reflected this. Canada had been called a Dominion (official French, Puissance). The name was adopted as a second best. Sir John A. Macdonald and other leaders suggested, ‘The Kingdom of Canada.’ This frightened the Colonial Office, in that day the final authority. They wanted something with more sound and less meaning. Dominion hit it just right. But not for the Australians; they chose Commonwealth, a term at that time with just a touch of Oliver Cromwell and a whiff of Massachusetts in it. This has since evaporated in the larger sense that replaces Empire. ‘State’ superseded province in spite of any academic contradiction. The States became the basis of the Federation. They kept the ‘residual power,’ surrendered in Canada to Ottawa, meaning thereby that any authority not given to the Commonwealth must belong to the States. They kept, still keep, their governors imported from England.
But unwittingly the Australians had made a constitution which nourished the centre, just as Canada kept draining it dry. First, they avoided certain obvious errors. They gave the Commonwealth a federal capital (made ten years later at Canberra) — a place to call its own, the humblest of human desires. In Canada the capital city of Ottawa is in and under Ontario. It must behave itself accordingly. Members of Parliament and federal civil servants are kept wet or dry with the Ontario liquor law; baseball and such wickednesses are forbidden on Sunday. Sleigh-riding on Sunday has brought children into courts. Australia, at least, knows nothing of this nonsense.
A sensible step was taken also by putting into the constitution a provision for amendment, modelled on the American plan. A proposed amendment must be passed by both Houses (Senate and Representatives), and then receive a majority popular vote, carrying also a majority in at least four states of the six. An amendment altering the representation of a state must also be accepted by the state itself. Under these terms, plus the Statute of Westminster, Australia could amend itself out of the Empire. It won’t.
Of necessity the tariff power had to be given to the Commonwealth. Victorian protection and New South Wales free trade were as incompatible as two women in one house. In such cases tariff wins. The sharp, specific interest of the producer fights better than the broader and lazier interest of the consumer, with whom everybody’s business is nobody’s business. Thus incidentally tariff making, and its connection with labour interest, strengthened the central government. Still more did its power grow by the application of the wide range of social services, labour arbitration, pensions, insurance, and the regulation of society, which grows as naturally on Australian soil as the plants round Botany Bay. There was a general consensus that no intrusion of States’ rights must alter this. The constitution provided specifically for a wide range of control in industrial arbitration and such matters.
Of necessity the huge central, up and down strip of unoccupied area called Northern Australia, passed under federal control (1911), is now divided into the administrative divisions of North Australia and Central Australia; it covers in all $23,000 square miles. An official estimate of 1937 found in it 4,on white people and 1,802’others.’ These pathetic ‘others’ are aborigines. More of them, about 22,000, live in Western Australia. The British colony of Papua was transferred to Australian control in 1906. To it was added after the Great War, the part of the same huge island called the mandate of New Guinea. Thus the Commonwealth, apart from its other functions, is a trustee for humanity on a large scale.
It was, moreover, the Australian constitution which gave the first blow to the system of judicial appeals from the colonies to the Privy Council in London. This appeal, the right to plead to the King against the failure of justice in his courts, is as old as Kingship. In the early days of colonial settlement it was as reasonable as it was natural. But as settlement changed from pioneer colonies to huge industrial overseas communities like Australia and Canada, the system became as inconvenient as it was expensive. The Statute of Westminster has removed its constitutional basis and it no longer exists except for Dominions which wish to retain it. There is no reason now why Australian or Canadian judges should not have a final decision as to the interpretation of the law of their own country. But when Australia, in drafting its constitution, proposed to cut out the appeal altogether, the home government objected and the appeal was retained in regard to matters involving interpretation of the constitution, as especially the powers of the federal and state governments. British public opinion at the time felt that to cut out the appeal to a single final court would destroy the unity of the Empire. So it would; but that sort of legal unity has vanished anyway with the Statute of Westminster. Canada, for its own reasons, keeps the system of appeal to the Privy Council. Originally it may have seemed a further safeguard of the relative rights of French and English, of province and dominion. To many, it may have seemed that it would have meant better law. The appeal remains still, although the Canadian Supreme Court has given the opinion that the Canadian Parliament can abolish it. To outsiders the appeal seems cumbrous and expensive, and charged with fatal delay. For modern business a bad legal decision (what the lawyers call bad) if given quickly is better than a slow good one. Business can accommodate itself to anything provided it knows what it must accommodate itself to. A company that is kept waiting two years to know if a statute, vital to its operation, is valid or invalid, would rather settle it by drum-head court martial, or by asking Charlie McCarthy over the radio. Nor is it true that a Privy Council decision is, in and of itself, more logical than one made by Canadian judges.
