A friend of mine has a habit of calling our Prime Minister “the man who would be king.” I politely laugh. But after recent events in Strasbourg, I think he may be on to something. Mr. Carney, who smiled alongside Ursula von der Leyen after announcing their intention to bring Canada into a special relationship with the EU, looked for all the world like “a man who would be king.” A king of clapping seals, perhaps, but a king, nevertheless.Does Mr. Carney consult his caucus on anything? It would seem not, and this comports with his hot-mic moment with the Croatian Prime Minister on June 22 when he said that his fellow Liberal MPs were “just useful for votes.” Hence, they are clapping seals. It must get boring when self-confidence is so low.He clearly does not consult Parliament, as he scarcely shows up in the House. There seems to be a touch of “divine right” in his approach to governance. L’État, c’est moi and all that. “It doesn’t matter. I have clapping seals who will provide the votes.”I am not too concerned with a potential linkage between Canada and the EU, as Mr. Carney’s government has been thus far distinguished by its apparent disinterest in getting anything done. By next week, he will no doubt be pestering some other world leader for a deal so that he can smile in another photo op. In this, too, he resembles the Sun King. Louis XIV, on balance and despite a lot of activity, didn’t accomplish much of anything either. He did build a lovely home for his clapping seals but then chased his most productive citizens out of the country. He gained some land through incessant war and then lost most of it, leaving his young great-grandson a nearly bankrupt country. And that left France open to the “extraordinary popular delusions” of John Law. Like our high-spending Prime Minister, Mr. Law abrogated the guardrails of his own theories, inflated the French currency with printed money, and bankrupted the country when the Mississippi Bubble popped in 1720..There are interesting parallels between our modern “divine rights, man who would be king” and the eighteenth-century popularizer of high heels who was, in fact, king. But we daren’t go further into the details.The picture of our Prime Minister with Ms. von der Leyen also put me in mind of the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. That dust-up centred on a group of corrupt elites known as the Family Compact — sort of like I imagine the Laurentian group to be. Bound together by intermarriage, political power, and elite control of major institutions, the oligarchic Family Compact ruled by divine right. They were a group who assumed the powers of the Crown so that, in effect, they would be king. Things became rowdy enough that Lord Durham was dispatched in 1839 to write a scathing indictment of the Family Compact and bring things back under control. Today, we don’t have a Lord Durham to rein in our Prime Minister and his efforts to rule by divine right. But in Alberta, at least, we have something better. On October 19, we can send a shot two feet off the Laurentian bow. In the referendum, we can start the process to remove ourselves from the regal pretensions of the Carney government. On October 19, be sure to vote and vote for Option 2 so we can commence the legal process required under the Canadian Constitution to hold a binding provincial referendum on whether or not Alberta should leave Canada. The Laurentian group needs to be told:L’État, ce n’est pas vous.
