Although Katherine Fierlbeck’s review of Janet Ajzenstat’s The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament is entitled “Canada: More Liberal Than Tory?” (July/August 2007), confusions abound in the juxtaposition of liberal and Tory rather than liberal/conservative or Whig/Tory, and especially in “Locke, the liberal, and not Burke, the Tory.” Locke and Burke were both Whigs (undemocratic liberals), or supporters of the Glorious Revolution, which established Protestant succession of the Crown and constitutional monarchy where executive prerogative is limited by the power of the purse in the parliamentary hands of representatives of landed magnates (gentry in the Commons, hereditary aristocrats in the Lords). Locke and Burke were at one in thinking that the principal function of government was in securing property and rights of inheritance as the basis of a stable tradition. Burke supported the American rebellion and other progressive causes, although he is best known for his opposition to the French Revolution, which I suppose is the reason Fierlbeck calls Burke a Tory, although neither she nor Ajzenstat indicates that Canada is the only country in the Americas without a revolutionary break from Europe.
Ajzenstat’s Locke is a supporter of democracy and universal human rights. Like other members of the “Calgary school” of political thought with whom she has been affiliated, Ajzenstat uses the notion of universal human rights to oppose spe- cial rights of the Québécois, First Nations, femi- nists, gays or those who use the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to have its claims adjudicated by the courts. Although the most ideologically American of Canadian political thinkers in their opposition to central Canadian dominance, the Calgary school is united in their opposition to entrenched rights and the American tradition of judicial review of legislation. The Locke Ajzenstat champions is not exactly the Locke championed by Thomas Flanagan, who used him to invalidate all First Nations land claims, or by Barry Cooper and David Bercuson to dismiss any special status for Quebec (Deconfederation: Canada without Quebec), the welfare state, equalization payments and First Nations land claims (Derailed: The Betrayal of the National Dream). No Canadian has endorsed Locke’s justification of slavery, however enthusiastically it was used by American republicans. No Canadian has espoused Locke’s ardent anti-Catholicism; Ajzenstat depre- cates Samuel Huntington’s characterization of American political culture as “Anglo-Protestant.” Indeed, the Quebec Act of 1774, which granted Catholics rights for the first time in the British Empire, was one of the three major causes of the American rebellion.
Ajzenstat champions Locke’s justification for popular sovereignty, which is not the same, pace Ajzenstat and Fierlbeck, as parliamentary supremacy. There are much more apt defend- ers of British parliamentary government than Locke, as Ajzenstat admits, and Locke was rarely considered by the Fathers of Confederation. The people (and Fierlbeck is certainly right that this erm excludes the vast majority of the popula- tion) entrust its sovereignty to parliamentary legislatures insofar as parliament observes the laws of nature, but if “the Body of the People, or any single Man” anticipates that the legislative or executive powers jeopardize their property, they have a right to take up arms against govern- ment “by a Law antecedent and paramount to all positive laws of men” (Second Treatise, #168). Judicial review would be an alternative to Locke’s right of revolution, founded upon the right of private judgement of the laws of nature. The doctrine of popular sovereignty moreover does not indicate whether it is the people of the states or the people of the American union who are sovereign, and Locke could not help us out of a constitutional crisis regarding whether James Bay belongs to the Cree, the people of Quebec or the people of Canada.
So why do Ajzenstat and other members of the Calgary school buttress their right-wing ideol- ogy with Lockean doctrine? Readers will have to decide for themselves.
Ed Andrew
Toronto, Ontario
