I found the writing of Canadian author Alan Fotheringham to be juvenile, a tad vicious and usually unfair. But I always read Macleans Magazine from back to front because I wanted to start with a good laugh by reading his back page commentary. He will be remembered for his gadfly role on Front Page Challenge as the foil to the properly bow-tied Pierre Burton and for nicknames that would turn Donald Trump green with envy. Brian Mulroney was “the Chin that walks like a man,” Preston Manning was Presto! Manning, Joe Clark was Jurassic Clark, and he named himself the Great Gatheringfroth. My favourite was his insistence on calling our southern neighbour the Excited States of America..This last came to mind as news broke last week regarding the indictment of Donald Trump. No doubt Mr. Trump felt the words of Jean Jacque Rousseau as he walked into the office of the Manhattan District Attorney and posed for his indictment mugshot: “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”.Rousseau went on to write, “Let us then admit that force does not create right, and that we are obliged to obey only legitimate powers.". Freedom ConvoyFreedom Convoy .Both quotations come from his political thesis, The Social Contract which was an extension of the arguments of men like Locke and Hobbes. They argued we willingly subject ourselves to a natural law in the form of a social contract..Rousseau’s departure from their argument was to redefine “legitimate powers.” He argued there is no divine right of kings and not all power is legitimate. In fact, the nature of his social contract is such that both sides have the right of abrogation when the other side no longer observes its terms. It was a revolutionary thought that found utterance in the American Declaration of Independence, Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man and the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen..But that was then, and this is now. Surely the dictums of some white, long dead, French philosopher have no purchase on the modern public square?.Think of it this way. If I am employed to provide 40 hours of labour per week for a fixed amount of money, how long will I stay in that employment if my employer insists I now work 60 hours for the same amount of money? And how legitimate will I consider the Ministry of Labour if it breaks its own policies and supports my employer in the change of contract terms? Is the legitimacy of the ministry enhanced by coercing my labour through threatened penalties?.The point is there is a de facto social contract between governor and governed in a liberal democracy and the legitimacy of that contract can be eroded by repeated attacks on the contract terms such as when one political party uses the power of the governing institutions to question and degrade the legitimacy of another political party, provincial government or people from a defined area of the country..Since 2020, the delegitimization of government institutions through demonstrations of raw political power accelerated. During COVID, the government abrogated the rights of citizenship as enumerated by the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. More recently Calgary’s City Council abrogated rights through passage of anti-protest rules..There are, of course, arguments to be made on both sides of the issues but Rousseau's point was the contract must be widely accepted for it to be legitimate. When a large portion of the governed think that the contract terms are no longer acceptable, then problems in governance begin to arise. Both the Americans and the French felt the decreasing legitimacy of their social contract resulted in the increasing legitimacy of revolt. For our governors today to test the acceptance of today’s social contract is, to my way of thinking, a foolish way to govern..How does the fraying of this contract play out?.Several provinces are learning from the experience of Quebec and are authoring legislation which gives them the right to unilaterally void sections of the Constitution to the extent the nullifying effect is only felt in the applicable province. The legislation was tested at the Supreme Court and is constitutional, but is Canada governable when every province opts out of the Constitution? I am on record as approving of Alberta’s Sovereignty Act and the Saskatchewan First Act, but I am not indifferent to what these statutes could mean to the governance of the country..So where do we go from here?.Conrad Black, in a recent speech, suggested the governments of Canada and the United States may soon be changed. I read into this many of these aggravations will be resolved by new governments which are less interested in testing the limits of the social contract..We can hope so. In the meantime, we appear to be stuck in the thrall of arrogant governments whose doctrinal stupidity is readily observable throughout history..It rarely ends well.
