Alberta government seems intent on shredding the social contract
By Lethbridge Herald on October 29, 2022.
Editor:
The recent death of Queen Elizabeth has receded quickly with none of the imperial ramifications of the death of her great-great-grandmother Victoria, and certainly none of the dangerous tumult when a Caesar might fall in the heady days of the Roman Empire. Safe to say that when you’re hightailing it north out of Calgary, who stops to think that this double strip of greasy asphalt dubbed the QE2 is named after an otherwise obscure monarch whose reign was seemingly seated far, far away in time and place. Nonetheless, there is still room for reflection, for we live in a constitutional monarchy, and this enigmatic little woman was my queen since I was two years old.
Yes, I have tossed her a toast accordingly. But it was her office, the Crown, which warrants some thoughtful consideration.
In our country the Crown is the absolute embodiment of the state, and the state is our collective acquiescence to living together in a national community.
The Crown is the protector of the common law, it is the arbiter of last resort, it is the overseer of communal lands, it is the erstwhile champion of the common weal, it is the collocutor with Indigenous peoples, it is the guarantor of the sanctity of our Parliament, and it is the living representative of this Crown who summons our freshly-minted Prime Minister at election time to see if she/he is ready and able to form government. It is the unimpeachable element that suffuses our democracy, yet exists apart from democracy’s necessary messiness and rough and tumble.
Ah, but we inhabit a world of paradoxes, do we not?
My political sensibilities have always lain on the left – on that broad strip of the social spectrum where the benefits of production, distribution and services are seen to necessarily accrue to the many rather than the few.
And indeed, given my enduring belief in the self-determination of all peoples, it seems incongruous to place such trust in an entity of governance which exists as distinct from the polity, the roiling folk, yet exerts overarching demands and expectations of ‘peace, order and good government’. Let’s look deeper, putting aside for the purposes of this essay the whole issue of republicanism.
If I pull a penny out of my pocket (where I still keep a couple as a link to simpler days) I spy, next to Elizabeth’s profile, the Latin words ‘DEI GRATIA REGINA’ – by the grace of God, Queen. OK, we’ll put that dubious premise aside for now too. But surely the most salient and compelling aspect of the Crown is in its existence as an idea – an idea that there is a supra-state covenant which seeks to hold in trust for the people a promise of sober concern for fairness and justice and good stewardship. This is to say that above the clamouring mob there exists an abiding principle which avers that the Whole of the People is greater than the sum of its parts.
This means, among other things, that justice must be blind, that the rule of law must be absolute, that government must serve the people and not the other way around, that lands held in trust for all must be handed down to the next generation in vitality and wholeness, that a federation of distinct jurisdictions must hold to a common purpose, that accommodation and compromise are the stuff of living societies, and that every flexing of the State must be subject to a sober process of long-term cost-benefit analysis – ie. will it lessen the burdens of our children?
Yet, as robust as these holdings might seem, they are in fact shockingly fragile – just as is our democracy itself. Right now in Alberta we are in the grips of radical re-ordering of the social contract foisted unceremoniously upon us by an un-elected premier whose prime motivating principle would seem to be the sequential demolition of any – and everything – which might smack of communitarian sensibility. Freshly-minted so-called ministers of the very Crown in consideration here espouse heretofore reviled radical beliefs seemingly centred on shredding the social contract in favour of unfettered individual rights devoid of any sense of their concomitant responsibilities.
We can hear the ugly, reactionary braying of such malignant vulgarians as Bolsonaro and Trump and Orban.
Pandering to base instincts is the motivating principle, and giving the tacit okay to language that targets the weak, the different and the marginalized is rapidly becoming the order of the day.
It’s all so breakable – so many eggshells upholding the mighty infrastructure of our collective lives. We’ve spent a thousand years piecing this edifice together through storm and war and plague and ignorance. We place the Crown above it by bond of mutual consent. Careless and amoral opportunists can come along in big hob-nail boots and shatter the whole sublime construct – crunch, crunch, crunch.
It is best to understand what we have before we allow it to be squandered for the lowest of low reasons.
Phil Burpee
Pincher Creek
27
-26
Eloquent and quite correct.
Thank you, Mr. Burpee.
It’s a joy to read such an elegantly written and cogently argued letter to the editor.
What’s this? It’s Saturday evening and only three comments, all positive. I guess the charter members of the “Axis of Outrage”, a group that I imagine is dominated by septuagenarian and octogenarian white men, are still dusting off their dictionaries.