Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.The year 1629 marks the quiet divide that determined the fates of two nations. In the south, the English colonies that became the United States were founded by literate settlers who sought not comfort but freedom. They brought with them the conviction that faith and conscience were their own, that government was to be distrusted and restrained, and that their destiny depended on their own labour and judgment. North of that line, what would become Canada was conceived in commerce, not conviction. It existed first as a marketplace for fur, fish, and timber — chartered, regulated, and owned by monarchs and monopolies. The difference was moral before it was political. One society was founded by independent minds; the other by indentured hands.The Hudson’s Bay Company, granted its royal charter in 1670, made Rupert’s Land a commercial empire under a single corporate crown. Its men were employees, not citizens. Theirs was a world of ledgers, not legislatures. The French voyageurs and coureurs de bois who roamed the interior were hardy and self-reliant, yet politically neutered — subjects of the clergy and traders alike. Education, debate, and self-government were not their concerns. Their independence was physical, not philosophical. The contrast with New England could not have been greater. By 1636, Harvard College was already training a new generation of Puritans in theology, logic, and self-rule. The seeds of a republic were sown in classrooms; Canada’s future was measured in pelts and cargo..This divide finds its philosophical reflection in the English thinkers who framed the modern West. Thomas Hobbes, writing in 1651, envisioned the state as a Leviathan — a necessary monster that protected men from chaos at the cost of their liberty. Order required submission; survival demanded obedience. John Locke answered him a generation later with a vision of natural rights: life, liberty, and property as gifts not of the state but of the Creator, and therefore beyond repeal. Adam Smith completed the trinity by explaining how the invisible hand of voluntary exchange could order society more justly than any government decree. The American colonies internalized Locke and Smith; Canada absorbed Hobbes. The result was predictable. The United States built a constitutional republic where power flowed from the people upward. Canada built a managed colony where authority flowed from the Crown down.The American Revolution was not simply a tax revolt. It was the political expression of literacy and faith in self-government. When the colonists declared independence in 1776, they invoked Locke’s philosophy almost verbatim: that governments derive “their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Canadians, by contrast, remained bound to the idea that legitimacy flowed from monarchy, not from men. The Quebec Act of 1774, which allowed the Catholic clergy to retain its authority in exchange for loyalty to the British crown, sealed that bargain. While Americans fought for liberty, French Canada traded obedience for stability. When the loyalists fled north after the war, they reinforced the habit of deference. The fusion of French clerical control and English loyalism became Canada’s political DNA — a society that prized order, conformity, and politeness above individual conviction.This heritage shaped not only politics but culture. Where the American mythos celebrated the rebel and the pioneer, Canada’s national symbols praised diligence and virtue within bounds. The beaver became the emblem of a people industrious, compliant, and cooperative. The Mountie — epitomized by the cartoon figure Dudley Do-Right — embodied honesty, kindness, and service to authority. .These were admirable qualities, but they were the virtues of servants, not citizens. Canadians once took pride in them, seeing in such characters their own decency. Only later did it become clear that these traits, left unbalanced by a spirit of liberty, form the psychological foundation of a managed state.Over time, both nations drifted from their origins. The United States, despite its revolutionary birth, allowed the creeping advance of bureaucracy and collectivism. Canada, never having known a revolution, mistook government management for moral progress.Socialism took root by redefining compassion as compulsion. It promised a classless society but delivered a uniform one — equal only in dependence. Canada embraced this earlier and more completely than its southern neighbour, dressing the old Crown paternalism in modern bureaucratic language. Free enterprise survived, but only as a licenced privilege. The state decided who could build, who could sell, and who could speak.The pattern is as old as Hobbes’s Leviathan and as predictable as Smith’s invisible hand. When power centralizes, the hand disappears, and coercion replaces consent. The socialist ideal claims to elevate the collective, but it merely replaces the priest with the planner and the monarch with the minister. The moral inversion is complete when labour itself becomes property of the state. Canadians are told they “own” their labour, yet nearly half of its fruit is confiscated before it reaches their hands. Property ownership, too, is an illusion: under Crown law, all land is held in “fee simple,” a perpetual lease from the sovereign. The Magna Carta promised that even the king was subject to the law, but in Canada that principle stops at Parliament’s door. Legislators stand above the rules they impose. The law binds the governed, not the governors..This condition is not fascism in the cinematic sense — there are no jackboots in Ottawa — but it meets Mussolini’s definition precisely: “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism, because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” That merger defines modern Canada. Its banks, media, and energy sectors function as extensions of government policy. Its universities echo official ideology. Its elections change the faces but never the fundamentals. The parties differ in slogans but share a conviction that the citizen exists to be managed. Canadians mistake civility for freedom because they have never had to fight for either.Ayn Rand, writing from the vantage point of exile, warned that socialism is the politics of envy disguised as virtue — the systematic sharing of misery. Her prophecy has been realised not only in the obvious failures of Marxist states but in the slow suffocation of societies that thought themselves immune. Canada’s bureaucratic socialism is more polite than Soviet communism but no less corrosive. It rewards conformity, punishes excellence, and flatters dependency. The bureaucrat becomes the new aristocrat, immune from consequence and rich in moral pretence. The citizen, conditioned to gratitude, confuses servitude for security.The United States, for all its flaws, still contains remnants of its Lockean soul — a reflexive suspicion of authority and a belief that rights are inherent, not granted. Yet even there the infection spreads. The welfare state, born of compassion, now breeds resentment. The Leviathan that Hobbes envisioned to keep men safe from each other has re-emerged in digital form, watching, measuring, and managing in the name of safety. Both societies now stand at a crossroads where freedom survives only in rhetoric. Canadians have reached that point first because their political structure was designed for it. When you begin as subjects, you end as managed assets.A truly democratic society requires more than ballots. It requires that those who vote bear the cost and consequence of their decisions. Locke’s concept of property was not merely material — it was moral. Ownership confers responsibility; responsibility produces restraint. When those without stake outnumber those with, democracy becomes an auction of stolen goods. Adam Smith’s invisible hand ceases to function because the market is no longer voluntary; it is coerced through taxation and regulation. .Socialism thrives in that soil because it promises equality through the redistribution of responsibility. The result is predictable: the capable withdraw, the incapable demand more, and the state expands to mediate the misery it created.Canada illustrates this with clinical precision. Its citizens, convinced of their moral superiority to the brash Americans, have allowed the state to absorb every function once left to families, churches, and associations. The promise of universal welfare has produced universal dependency. The child is raised by bureaucrats, the elder sustained by subsidies, and the worker trapped by taxes. The reward for honesty and diligence — the very traits once celebrated in the national character — is to subsidize the indolence of others. The invisible hand has been shackled, and the Leviathan smiles.Yet none of this was inevitable. The same human capacity for self-government that built one half of the continent exists in the other. The difference lies in what each society chose to believe about itself. Americans, at least at their founding, believed they were free men capable of governing themselves. Canadians believed they were good men who needed to be governed. That single assumption still defines the boundary between liberty and loyalty.Today both nations stand in moral debt to their own origins. The American experiment survives only so long as its people remember that freedom is not granted by law but limited by it. Canada will remain trapped in the Crown’s shadow until its citizens reclaim the spirit of Magna Carta and apply it not to kings but to their modern equivalents in government, media, and bureaucracy. The lesson is eternal: when authority ceases to be answerable to those it governs, it becomes tyranny — whether draped in robes, uniforms, or business suits.The hope, faint but real, is that enough Canadians will rediscover what freedom actually means. It is not the right to obey different masters every four years, but the refusal to be mastered at all. The path back begins where it always has — with truth spoken plainly, property defended fiercely, and government restrained ruthlessly. Anything less is submission by another name.Alan Aubut is a retired geologist, based in Nipigon.
