Automation: The New Industrial Revolution

Lyn Marcus

 

From Fourth International, Vol.15 No.2, Spring 1954, pp.53-58.
Transcription & mark-up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

THE development of automatic tracking and firing apparatus for anti-aircraft batteries during World War II introduced the germs of a new industrial revolution. The process thus portended is already under way. We have before us the technological possibility of freeing mankind from drudgery, providing mankind with incalculable material abundance and giving humanity the leisure time to develop its full potentialities. We have at hand the beginnings of a self-operating means of production. The name given to this new industrial revolution is automation.

The first industrial revolution came as one of the effects of capitalism’s unquenchable thirst for relative surplus value. Labor-saving machinery, increasing the productivity of labor, cut down the amount of socially necessary labor in a commodity; thereby breaking through a profit barrier. This first industrial revolution brought a persistent lowering of the value of labor power, an increase of constant capital at the expense of variable capital, and an inescapable decline in the rate of profit.

Now a new industrial revolution, automation, has entered upon the scene – a consequence, again, of capitalism’s lust for relative surplus value. Automation raises the contradictions of capitalist industrialization to a new intensity: technological unemployment beyond yesterday’s wildest fear’s, astronomical quantities of constant capital for each worker directly employed, and a plummeting rate of profit. With automation, the capitalist “spider” has taken a “wasp’s egg” under its skin. Automation, a qualitative change in the means of production, hastens the doom of an outdated society. Automation carries with it an intensification of the social and political forces that will drive the working class to take power and reorganize society from top to bottom.

Already the beginnings of this new industrial, revolution are met in such significant areas of the economy as Ford’s engine plant in Cleveland. (See Electrical Manufacturing, August, 1953.) The various journals which circulate among management and engineering staffs are crammed with both ads and articles featuring the “gimmicks,” instruments and methods of automation. Parts and units specifically designed for use in constructing computers are manufactured and offered in quantity by an increasing number of firms. Large banks are advertising their willingness to finance automation in industry. Practically every major manufacturing firm in the country has some kind of automation plans already in development.

Part of this development of automation is a by-product of the munitions industries. Modern jet aircraft fly too fast for the response rates of human reflexes. More and more of the control of these craft is passing from the pilot to various types of electronic “brains.” A supplier of parts receives orders for a certain quantity of such essential computer elements as servo-mechanism units. Soon this supplier is in position to produce more servo-mechanism, units than his Air Force contract requires. He advertises the surplus on the open market. This pattern is reproduced over the entire electronics industry.

The manufacture of radar equipment, television sets, etc., generates productive facilities which are readily convertible to manufacture of control circuits. The general scramble for odds and ends in a shrinking internal market forces the process to a new pitch. We have only to survey the topics of articles and ads in industrial and professional engineering journals during the past few years to see some of this process in operation.

Thus it is the inner, inescapable logic of US capitalism that drives it to wade in the seas of automation – seas in which it cannot swim.

What we shall do here is to show why automation represents the beginning of a new industrial revolution, why it is not merely a continuation of the old industrial revolution. We shall show why capitalism, for the most profound social and economic reasons, cannot complete this revolution. Finally, we shall show how automation relates to the problems of the socialist revolution.

What is Automation?

The history of man’s economic, social and political development revolves around his invention and development of tools. It is by the implements of chipped and flaked stone that we identify paleolithic man. The spear, the axe, the bow and arrow raised man’s food-gathering power above that of other animals. The invention of the plow speeded the development of agricultural economy and the social and political forms which evolved from agrarian society. In each stage of man’s social and political development we look for the root in the changes in man’s relationship to tools – changes in the means of production.

The first industrial revolution under capitalism, through mechanization, took the motive power and the tools from the workman and transferred them to the machine, but kept the workman as an appendage of the machine. (Marx, Capital, vol.I, chap.15.) Automation changes this relationship between man and his tools. From machines to make machines, our technology has now advanced to machines that control machines – and thereby machines that control themselves. The appendage of the machine – the worker at the machine – is junked. A small portion of this displaced labor force will find jobs in the control room and on maintenance teams. Further steps in automation will eliminate even these.

Automation eliminates the human appendage

  1. by devices which automatically transfer work from one machine in a sequence to another;
  2. by built-in guides and feeds;
  3. by “monitoring” devices which constantly or regularly inspect the operation’s output and automatically make the adjustments to the machine that meters, gauges, etc., indicate to be necessary;
  4. by coordinating devices, such as computers, which integrate each machine into a larger whole, and which make the whole production line work as one self-operating machine. In general, the devices and techniques for accomplishing this already exist.

Some further features are not yet developed:

  1. constructing machines which are effectively “self-repairing”;
  2. constructing machines which can add new elements to themselves automatically.

Neither of these two problems is more than an engineering problem; automation hasn’t yet reached that stage of practical development where these two features have received much attention. Nonetheless, a fully automatic factory must incorporate these features.

Thus it is technologically possible. through automation, to eliminate most of the labor force in industry today. This is not science-fiction; it is fact, as more and more workers will realize shortly.

How Automation Works

The one key principle that underlies automation is the principle of feedback. We shall attempt to make this principle clear through illustration.

Manufacturer Jones walks into the office of his engineering staff and announces a problem he wishes solved. In his factory there are a number of electroplating tanks which are cooled by water running through coils placed in the tanks. In this case it is important to keep the tanks at a temperature of 70 degrees Fahrenheit, with a tolerance of plus or minus two or three degrees. This means that the amount of water flowing through the cooling coils must be carefully regulated. If too much water runs through the coils, the tank temperature will drop too low; if not enough water flows through the coils, the temperature of the tank will rise too high.

It is not possible to run a fixed amount of water through the coils, for two main reasons: first, the tendency of the tanks to heat up varies with the amount of water and the temperature of the shop air; second, the temperature of the water flowing through the coils varies. So the manufacturer has to hire labor to regularly adjust the valves on the cooling coils.

Valve

Since Manufacturer Jones, like any successful business man, is money-hungry, there is a strong probability that he will perforate an ulcer unless his engineering staff finds a way to drop that “extra” labor from the payroll.

Fortunately for Jones’ ulcers, his engineering staff pops up with a quick and easy solution. On each valve they install a small, reversible motor, geared way down. In each tank they place a thermo-couple, which puts out varying currents according to the tank temperature. Now they take the wires from the thermo-couples and run them to control boxes which regulate the valve motors. When the temperature starts to rise, the electronic control starts the motor to open the valve. When the temperature starts to fall, the electronic control starts the motor in the opposite direction to close down the valve … and the “extra” workers get their notice.

A simpler but similar device operates the automatic oil-fired central-heating system in a modern home or office-building.

What has been done? Electrical “information” – a quantity of voltage, amperage or phase difference – from the output (in these cases, temperature) is transmitted to the device regulating the input (in these cases, a source of cooling or heating).

The same problem might be solved hydraulically. The engineers at Jones’ might have put a ball of fluid in the tank. Assuming that this fluid expanded and contracted in volume fairly rapidly with changes in temperature, they could connect the ball to a spring-loaded valve on the water line, so that when the tank temperature went up the fluid would expand, opening the valve; and when the temperature went down in the tank, the fluid would contract, allowing the spfing to force the valve partly closed.

In this kind of solution to Jones’ problem, hydraulic “information” about the temperature would have been used to control the device regulating the input.

In either case, this transmission of information about outputs to control devices regulating inputs is called feedback. Whether the information is electrical, hydraulic or mechanical, the principle is the same. Many modern computers use all three kinds of information, according to whichever kind is the most efficient and least costly.

Obviously, the same principle can be used to “tie” a reading from a meter, gauge, micrometer, etc., to a small motor or valve on a machine – to make the machine “self-adjusting.”

What, then, does a worker do to his machine? He reads a meter, gauge, micrometer, counter or blueprint, takes an order from some central authority – “information” – and adjusts, starts, sets up, stops the machine. The worker, then, represents to the machine a small amount of power used to adjust controls, and a “nervous system” to handle the nerve impulses (information) to control those iron muscles. The worker does not use all his intelligence, but only a very small part of it, to do his job on the machine. (Cf. Marx, op. cit., pp.461-462.) The factory uses the principle of feedback, built into the human being, to control the variable features of the machine. (Cf. Wiener, Cybernetics, 1948, chap.5.)

Now, by utilizing this principle of feedback in control and computing devices, it is possible to eliminate the production worker from his last function. Naturally, where the job is the most dull and repetitive, the possibility of relatively cheap automation is the greatest. Where a greater amount of skill is involved, it may be more expensive to automate.

Automation vs. Capitalism

It is clear that most workers are threatened with replacement by a machine. The practical question that faces the average factory worker is: How far can capitalism go with automation, and how long will it take them to get to me?

Unquestionably we are going to see a lot of automation in the next few years. Ford’s Cleveland engine plant is a clear and unmistakable warning of things to come. A project called “Operation Tinker Toy” threatens to eliminate a large percentage of the workers in the electronics parts manufacturing industries, leaving out the effect of the rate of growth of the electronics production industries. The major tool industries are showing a galloping interest in producing automation equipment, with a growing army of engineer-hucksters peddling the automation-products from door to door in industry. Can Wall Street go all the way to essentially man-less production lines?

We may answer that categorically: No.

The Bureau of Standards is now analyzing “Operation Tinker Toy,” according to a note in a recent issue of Electronics. “Operation Tinker Toy” presents a new method of assembling the components of radio, TV, radar, etc., in a manner suited for automatic production. Here are some of the figures given for the cost of producing 400 units of a certain assembly unit per hour:

Direct Manufacturing

Method

Materials

Labor

Overhead

Total

Conventional

$ 35.85

$ 5.60

$ 5.44

$ 46.80

MDE (hand)

   20.56

   2.27*

   2.27*

   28.23

MPE (auto)

   20.56

   2.83

   2.86

   26.25

* (Source gives $2.27 for each – undoubtedly an error. – L.M.

What is the capital investment in each method? Electronics’ sources do not give figures for conventional methods, but a comparison of MDE (hand) with MPE (auto) gives us the kind of information we seek. MDE requires a capital investment of $82,000 for a productive capacity of 400 units per hour. MPE requires a capital investment of $665,000 (sic) for a productive capacity of 405 units per hour. For less than 10 percent decrease in the cost of production, your electronics capitalist must increase his capital investment by over 700 percent!

“Operation Tinker Toy” consists of light operations: dip-soldering, tube-insertion, etc. Now turn to the behemoths of steel and auto production – what fantastic ratios of capital investment are required to automate these giants? Only 8 to 1? We may well doubt it.

In other words, automation means, in the first place, a tremendous increase in constant capital relative to variable capital. Staying on the conservative side, let us assume that it only halves the labor force at only eight times the investment: the effect on the rate of profit becomes starkly clear. (Cf. Marx, op. cit., pp.444-445.)

How much capital would be required to automate a major part of the US economy? There is no precise estimate available, for obvious reasons; but from the preceding discussion, it is clear that the amount would be “astronomical.”

Thus automation presents those sections of the capitalist class lacking sufficient backing to convert to the new process with a potential squeeze many times more severe than similar past developments which sank powerful robber barons in the competitive struggle. Finally, automation signifies a great increase in technological unemployment, and therefore an ultimate narrowing of the market. Since automation represents the next stage of development in the means of production, we may scratch our heads in vain for a way for capitalism to escape these consequences.

Need for National Planning

At the present level of productivity, even the mighty US industrial apparatus cannot produce enough wealth to undertake automation at a leap. This holds true for either a capitalist US or a US under a Workers and Farmers Government.

What is possible is the planned achievement of automation through definite stages. Let us arbitrarily call these stages A, B, C, etc. – with stage A representing the amount of automation possible now. By accomplishing stage A we will raise the national productivity to a higher level, which will permit the advance to stage B. Then B will permit C, and so on.

Now, each stage of automation has the characteristic of linking together ever larger areas of the industrial capacity. Stage A might represent the automation of assembly lines within the factory. Stage B might represent the tying together of the whole factory as one automatic machine. Stage C might be the linking of steel mills to iron and coal mines, etc., as one automatic, man-less assembly, and so on.

Obviously, in order to put these assemblies together as one machine, they must be compatible. This requires national standardization of equipment, so that parts later to be fitted together will actually fit together. Otherwise, the rate of automation will be slowed down to a snail’s pace by the necessity for junking large quantities of useful national wealth and replacing it over and over again, simply because there was no planning.

Automation is going to produce great social changes, whether under capitalism or under a Workers and Farmers Government. Millions of jobs rationalized out of existence mean that workers have to have new jobs, jobs which should be at least as good or better than the jobs they have lost. If national planning is in play, it is feasible to coordinate the wiping out of old, outdated jobs with the creation of the new jobs which have to be done. Also, as the amount of socially necessary labor decreases, national planning will enable the general reduction of hours with planned increases in “pay.”

Again, automation not only wipes out jobs, it wipes out the need for old-style, repetitive factory labor. In place of production workers, we will need an equal or greater number of engineers and scientists. Our whole educational system will be hopelessly outdated by these changes in the means of production. Educational changes must be made so that we may have the skills we need. That is another problem of national planning.

At the level of productivity which automation brings about, the problem of natural resources – already an acute world problem – becomes a major issue. The archaic and wasteful use of coal for fuel, wood for houses and metal for products destined for junk, must be brought to a halt. The thoroughgoing national and international planning of the conservation and replacement of world resources is absolutely essential if we are to survive and raise our standard of living.

Automatic “Brains”

We have shown that full automation under capitalism is impossible. Some bourgeois sources agree with this conclusion – but for the wrong reasons.

From the Philadelphia engineering offices of Minneapolis-Honeywell, a firm which presumes to know something about control systems, we hear that “push-button” factories are not foreseeable. Minneapolis-Honeywell engineers point out that a computer with an “intelligence” comparable to that of an ant would require a structure the size of the Pentagon building in Washington. They inform us that it would require the amount of power necessary to service a city the size of Philadelphia. Also, they assert, it would require a cooling system equivalent to the flow of the Mississippi River.

How does this analogy apply to the problem of automation? What lies behind their thinking here? It is not only Minneapolis-Honeywell engineers who are laboring under a delusion here; many other major controls manufacturing firms make the same error. Their difficulty arises not from a slip of the slide-rule, but from their abysmal ignorance of capitalism and the vulgar social prejudices which they drag into the engineering laboratory.

Bourgeois Economics

Marx remarked of the bourgeois political economist:

“… when considering the capitalist mode of production, he … treats the work of control made necessary by the cooperative character of the labor process as identical with the different work of control, necessitated by the character of that process and the antagonism of interests between capitalist and laborer.” (Marx, op. cit., pp.364-365.)

Since engineers learned their little mishmash of economics from third-rate poll-parrots of the same variety, it is not to be wondered that they miss this all-important point. They mistake the class role of the boss for the necessary direction of the productive apparatus:

“It is not because he is a leader of industry that a man is a capitalist; on the contrary, he is a leader of industry because he is a capitalist. The leadership of industry is an attribute of capital, just as in feudal times the functions of general and judge were attributes of landed property.” (Ibid.)

In other words, the Minneapolis-Honeywell engineers implicitly assume that the function of the boss is essential to the means of production. From that they assume that automation requires the imposition of intelligence on the production line from the top down, that automation requires a hierarchy of “capitalist” thinking-machines to replace the existing hierarchy of bosses.

Exactly the contrary is true. The development of the means of production has outdated the capitalist economically and socially. That means we can dispense with the boss and his equivalents altogether.

Let us recall our illustration of Manufacturer Jones’ plant. A man was removed from production. Did we replace him with a machine with the equivalent of human intelligence? By no means. A motor, a thermo-couple, and a few wires and tubes did the job quite nicely – even better than the human operator. In principle, we shall have no greater scientific problem in “laying off” the bosses: automation makes them “extra labor.” In fact, getting rid of the boss is equivalent to an essential technological improvement in the means of production.

Lesson from the Ant

Let us take our Minneapolis-Honeywell engineer sluggards to the ant and teach them a few lessons.

The individual ant is not particularly intelligent as insects go; an ant is a muscle-head through and through. However, the ant colony displays a marvelous degree of over-all intelligence. From whence this intelligence? From a super-ant “boss” hidden among his bonds and coupons down in the hill? Not at all. The intelligence of the ant colony is greater than the intelligence of all its members; it is the product of all the ants functioning in a social organism; this intelligence is a social product.

The intelligence of the ant colony is derived from the organic evolution of ant colonies, as the intelligence of a human being is a function of matter organized through organic evolution, an effect of natural selection. There is nothing mystical about it; as any dialectician knows, when you put a lot of similar objects together you obtain a whole which is something quite different from its parts. The intelligence of the ant colony does not reflect an average intelligence in each ant, but arises from the particular organization of ants as a whole.

A similar “law” holds when individual workers are put together in a factory. Turning again to Marx:

“When numerous laborers work together side by side, whether in one a,nd the same process, or in different but connected processes, they are said to cooperate, or to work in cooperation.

“Just as the offensive power of a squadron of cavalry, or the defensive power of a regiment of infantry, is essentially different from the sum of the offensive or defensive powers of the individual cavalry or infantry soldiers tnken separately, so the sum total of the mechanical forces exerted by isolated workmen differs from the social force that is developed, when many hands take part simultaneously in one and the same undivided operation, such as raising a heavy weight, turning a winch or removing an obstacle … Not only have we here an increase in the productive power of the individual, by means of cooperation, but the creation of a new power, namely, the collective power of masses.” (Marx, op. cit., pp.357-358.)

This may be instanced in the prob-lem-solving power of certain groups of individuals, in relation to the problem-solving power of the same persons working individually. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts; the intelligence of the group is greater than the intelligence of the sum of its members taken separately. We may say that this organization produces a new intelligence, a social intelligence, a social product, which, for lack of a proper term, we may call a “social brain.”

Social Intelligence

Needless to say, not all kinds of organizations of human beings produce an efficient increase in social intelligence, just because they seem to be cooperating groups. Fifteen real Bolsheviks, organized as a “problem-solving group” in a Bolshevik organization, generally present more collective social intelligence than a thousand Mensheviks, organized in one of their bleating conventions. This is historical fact, as any candid and intelligent student of history will admit. The source of the difference lies largely in the fact that Bolshevik organization represents a group integrated about the performance of a function, whereas Menshevik organization is linked to the performance of no continuous practical function. The cooperation of workers in the means of production forms them, into an efficient problem-solving group, evolving on the basis of its efficacy in improving productive output. It is for this reason that we place so much justified confidence in Bolshevik organization and in the social intelligence potential of factory workers in cooperative productive groups.

Now, applying these principles to automation, when we “slave” a machine to the output of a standard of production, we have given that machine enough “intelligence” to do its job, and not much more. We don’t concern ourselves with the pretty problem of making the machine as “intelligent” as the man it replaces; we merely construct the machine to do the job required.

Let us take the example of several automated machines in a sequence. When machine A does its job on a part, it ejects its finished product, which then goes into B. But what if A begins to outproduce B? B simply doesn’t pick up any more parts from A than it can handle. This prevents A from ejecting its parts ahead of schedule – so A has to slow itself down to the proper pace. No boss is needed. By simply putting the machines together in the proper fashion, we have machines which “automatically” solve their problems.

The viewpoint of Minneapolis-Honeywell engineers would not permit this. They would say: “Let’s build a computer which will handle this kind of problem, and tell A, in that case, to slow down.” What would they do? They would build an analog (the electrical or other equivalent of a working-model of A and B). Now, if A “wished” to step up its production, it would first have to send that information to the computer-boss. The computer would “try out” A’s higher output on the scale-models. Then, discovering that B couldn’t handle the work, it would tell A to slow down. What has been accomplished? Minneapolis-Honeywell engineers have built a very expensive and by no means fool-proof machine to tell A what B could tell A all along without a computer-boss: Slow down.

You don’t have to have computer-bosses to make automation work. A machine is the best working-model of itself that can be built. Once you have built sufficient, information and control networks into the machine for it to do its own job automatically, it is able to transmit, at the same time, any essential information about its performance to other machines – the computer can do no better. Merely by hooking these machines up in the proper way we have made them capable of doing group problem-solving. The automated factory thus completed has enough “intelligence” to handle all the jobs for which it is constructed. If we discover that this is far less than the intelligence of a human being, that only reveals how much we have been wasting human intelligence under capitalism.

Machines Don’t Revolt But Workers Do

Finally, it is important to emphasize the separation of truth from claptrap concerning the “intelligence” of the machine. The capitalist notion of robot “intelligence” springs from a society where capitalist bookkeeping reduces the worker to a cost item along with oil, electricity, tools and raw materials. From the capitalist point of view, the worker is nothing more than he is on the production line, an appendage of the machine. Thus, when the capitalist replaces a worker with a robot, the capitalist assumes that the robot is as intelligent as the worker replaced.

In fact, the intelligence of the worker, as history proves, is of another sort. The worker’s intelligence fits him not only for slavery to his master or his master’s machine. The worker’s intelligence is sufficient to accomplish what no machine has yet threatened to do: topple a whole rotting society and replace it with a new society. In automation we do not reproduce the “intelligence” of a worker: the “intelligence” of our automated machines is less than what the biologist meets under the microscope in that simplest of animals, the amoeba.

What kind of organization of the labor process occurs under automation? It parallels the social organization of a workers’ state. This is not an accident. We have reached the point of historical development where the means of production have outgrown capitalist society. At this point the working class is impelled by the unbearable contradiction between social production and private appropriation to take the leadership of society and reconstruct it along patterns compatible with the new development of the means of production – automation.

Automation, under capitalism, will be distorted, gross and brutal. The falling rate of profit, impelled by the tremendous investments that automation requires, will drive the capitalists to take fresh advantage of competition among the workers over vanishing jobs. For the worker, it means the constant threat of unemployment, destruction of whole sectors of skilled work, and a savage drive to lower the standard of living.

The establishment of a Workers and Farmers Government in the United States, on the other hand, means that automation will be used to lower the average working day and raise the standard of living. Socially, automation under a Workers and Farmers Government will free mankind from degrading slavery to the factory production line, and give humanity the leisure to raise the cultural level to a point which would now seem impossible.

On the international scale, an automated US industrial power will be able to end hunger and poverty on a world scale, to really raise the level of life of colonial peoples to our own level. We shall be able to break down all national boundaries and make a universal reality of that dignity of man which capitalism preaches on Sunday occasions, that dignity of man which capitalism works so mightily to suppress and corrupt 365 days a year.

Since freedom and culture cannot exist in the face of want and exploitation, automation in the hands of the socialist revolution represents the only real solution to the ills of humanity. With that knowledge it cannot be much longer before the workers and farmers of America exert themselves politically to undertake both tasks.

Will Canada Choose The American System

With Russia’s recent proposal that Canada and the US join it in building a tunnel across the Bering Strait, a question of great historical importance has been set before the Canadian people:


will Canada join the growing chorus of nations which are denouncing the neo-liberal ideology of free trade and globalization, or will Canadians blindly follow the dictates of lunatic environmentalists such as David Suzuki and Al Gore?
Around the world nations are moving in a new direction: towards what is now being universally heralded as the “nuclear renaissance”.  Russia and China are leading the way, with plans to build dozens of plants each, both domestically and internationally.  What these nations and others are implementing is the vision of Lyndon LaRouche: of continental corridors of development and infrastructure, connecting and uplifting all mankind.  These international shifts have also released the potential for great changes in Canada, centered upon plans to build as many as twelve new reactors in the next ten to fifteen years.  At the same time, with the Bering Strait project, with rising clamour over the miserable state of Canada’s rail infrastructure, and with the inability of North America’s west-coast port facilities to deal with the massive volume of Pacific trade, Canada is being presented with new opportunities to revolutionize its railways.

Nuclear Redux

After more than 25 years of domestic neglect, the Canadian nuclear power industry, now operating 22 facilities nationally, 20 of which being in Ontario, is gearing up to take part in the global nuclear renaissance.  While Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL) has completed construction of a second reactor at Cernavoda, Romania, the latest in a string of overseas projects that recently included two reactors in China on-budget and ahead of schedule, the company is now looking to do business in Canada itself.  General Electric is planning to expand its production and research center in Peterborough Ontario, a facility which has been in operation since 1955, but has never before experienced such incredible growth rates in sales of nuclear technology; the management claims that orders are up 600% over recent years.  The expanded GE facility will include an R&D lab, both for developing new methods of manufacturing fuel and a production line for new fuel bundles.  Meanwhile, the Ontario Government plans to begin construction of two new plants and to refurbish others; however the two Ontario-based nuclear power providers, Bruce Power and Ontario Power Generation (OPG), are seeking permission to build four new reactors each.  Add to this list a project in the Alberta tar sands to construct two 1,100-megawatt reactors, providing power to the area, as well as heat and steam for industrial purposes.  Finally, MDS Nordion, the world’s largest producer of medical isotopes, is building two reactors in Chalk River Ontario, which will be dedicated solely to the production of medical isotopes, such as Cobalt-60, used for cancer treatment and the sterilization of medical supplies.

The Darlington site in OntarioThe Darlington site in Ontario

In a recent poll by Ipsos Reid, available at the website of the Canadian Nuclear Association, it was found that support for nuclear power in Canada is on the rise, now at 44% nationally compared to 35% only two years ago.  Support in Alberta is 47%, and 38% in British Colombia, up 16% and 18% respectively in the past year alone.  Of great significance is the support in Ontario, the province with the vast majority of Canada’s reactors, registering at 63%.  As late as 1988 more than half the nation supported the commercial use of nuclear power; however, with the overwhelming propaganda campaign launched by the lying environmental lobby after Chernobyl, public support collapsed.  It has been a long road back for the nuclear industry since that time; and, with an immaculate record of safety and reliability, it is ever more difficult for the greenies to maintain their fanatically ideological opposition.  Ironically, with the current hysteria over climate change, many greens are also changing their tune.  Who would have imagined that nuclear power could be the white knight of the environmental movement!  Even Prime Minister Stephen Harper is turning towards nuclear energy as a necessary part of any viable, long-term energy strategy, although he is not overly vocal for fear of being harassed by the environmentalists.
As the nuclear renaissance gains momentum, the anti-nuclear lobby continues to regurgitate the same tired and baseless complaints, such as AECL’s inability to complete projects on time.  Claudia Lemieux, spokeswoman for the Canadian Nuclear Association, debunked this claim in discussions with this writer.  “They use that excuse because it scares people.  AECL has been a very active nuclear reactor builder.  Their Cernavoda II is actually being fuelled now, and it’s going to be providing electricity to the grid in September.  They are doing the refurbishment of the reactor in Argentina, and they are doing refurbishment in South Korea, so they are not getting these contracts because they aren’t delivering.  They are delivering.  So these are old arguments, primarily due to Darlington [which was delayed by environmentalists], which was primarily due to a lot of political interference.  They are holding onto those old arguments because people just don’t know, they have no idea how [nuclear power] works.”
By 2020 more than two-thirds of Canada’s coal-fired power plants will reach the end of their useful lives, the replacement of which will require approximately $150 billion in capital investments.  Despite the calls from environmentalists for increased spending on “renewable” energies, governments are turning to nuclear as the cheapest, most reliable source of energy to replace whatever capacity is to be decommissioned.  Under current conditions Canada’s nuclear plants are producing power at approximately five cents per kilowatt hour, while the most competitive wind farms come in at more than eight cents per kilowatt hour; solar power is not even close to these numbers.  Other forms of power, such as oil and gas, are cheap as long as oil and gas prices are cheap, which is no longer the case.
Within several years AECL will be ready to produce its new generation of advanced CANDU (CANada Deuterium Uranium) reactors (ACR).  These ACR units will use enriched uranium, with 2.5-3% fissionable material, as opposed to the current CANDU reactors, which use natural uranium containing approximately 0.7% fissionable material.  Using enriched uranium will increase the operating efficiency of the reactors as well as their total energy output.  The ACR will have a lifetime of sixty years.

Next Generation Candu
Other fascinating prospects for the Canadian nuclear industry include the development of thorium-based power systems.   Currently India is engaged in research to take advantage of the vast thorium reserves they control.  Canada, also having reserves sufficient to power Canada’s economy for many hundreds of years, could engage India in joint projects to more rapidly develop this area of knowledge.  As reported by Boczar, Chan et al to the IAEA, “The high neutron economy of the CANDU reactor, its ability to be refuelled while operating at full power, its fuel channel design, and its simple fuel bundle provide an evolutionary path for allowing full exploitation of the energy potential of thorium fuel cycles in existing reactors.…  AECL has done considerable work on many aspects of thorium fuel cycles.… Use of the thorium fuel cycle in CANDU reactors ensures long-term supplies of nuclear fuel, using a proven, reliable reactor technology.  Those same CANDU features that provide fuel-cycle flexibility also make possible many thorium fuel-cycle options.”

The Future is Rail

In a January interview with EIR, Canadian Wheat Board (CWB) director Ian McCreary voiced his frustration over the miserable state of Canada’s rail infrastructure, describing how, for example, many farmers are being compelled to truck their produce sometimes fifty miles to a rail depot, while the service even then has been abysmal – that is, if the trains show up!  Since the 1960s, Canada has ripped up thousands of miles of track, mostly branch lines which served outlying farm districts, while investment in what remains has been meagre at best.  Incredibly, as Brian Morris, transportation analyst for the CWB, reports, it currently takes 9-10 days for freight trains to travel from the mid-prairies to Vancouver, a trip of less than two thousand kilometres!  The policy of the rail companies has been to shift their costs onto the backs of farmers and manufacturers; however, this policy is fast approaching its end.  Derailments are increasing in number across the country, the system is over-taxed, and the total amount of track continues to shrink.  Last summer, when water levels in the Great Lakes were significantly lower than usual, the fragility of the system became apparent as the additional freight could scarcely be managed.  The extent of the crisis also becomes clear in the raw fact that Canada has zero capability to produce its own tracking; any new rail tracking must be imported.  Although it is true that Canadian Pacific is engaged in certain projects along its main Vancouver-Winnipeg corridor, these are simply not sufficient for the future needs of the country.

The belief of some, particularly in the deindustrialized east, that Canada can function without a comprehensive, advanced rail network is an absolute fantasy; there is little future for the country should it not make the leap to high-speed, electrified rail as a primary mode for the transportation of goods and people, while also preparing to leap into magnetic levitation technologies, which will eventually replace high-speed rail.  One option for maglev development would be a transportation corridor from Montreal to Windsor, which is the most heavily populated and industrialized region of Canada, to serve as a test case for future maglev systems across the nation.  This system could also tie into similar systems being examined in the United States.

Maglev Train


One of the great economic benefits of such projects, apart from the massive savings that would accrue from reduced transportation costs, would be the overall stimulation of the productive economy.  The government, by financing great infrastructure projects, can create the demand for increased production of goods, while at the same time increasing the productivity of the population, per capita and per square kilometre.
Recently the Chinese shipping firm COSCO announced that it will begin shipping to Prince Rupert, as the facilities in Vancouver, like most major ports on the west coast, are experiencing great congestion.  This will require an upgrade of current port facilities as well as local rail infrastructure to handle the expected increase of goods.  This type of project, and the obvious need for it, demonstrates the viability of the Bering Strait project.
Thus it is most propitious that Russia has stepped forward with exactly the type of great project required to uplift mankind.  Were Canada to participate in the building of this transportation link, the basis would be laid for the long-delayed development of northern Canada, and for expanded collaboration with Russia to overcome the many difficulties posed by the north.  Furthermore, the demand for hundreds of thousands of tonnes of steel, concrete, and rail tracking, as well as the demand for massive investments in capital goods and jobs, would give Canada’s failing industries a new birth; as the economic benefits accrue, the entirety of Canada’s existing rail infrastructure can be upgraded and expanded to the benefit of the entire nation and its neighbours.

Overcoming the Culture

While the Federal Government has issued no response, that from the Canadian media to the Bering Strait project has been lukewarm at best; at worst, typified by the Vancouver Sun and the National Post, the coverage has been deliberately fraudulent.  When energy economist Vince Lauerman was recently interviewed by the National Post, he demonstrated his and the paper’s incompetence when he claimed, “You’re sort of going from one fairly underdeveloped, underpopulated place to another that’s somewhat underdeveloped and underpopulated and doing it in an extremely expensive way.”  Lauerman’s stupidity is revealed with a simple reflection on how the once barren Canadian West was populated in the first place!  That is, that the continental railway had, necessarily, to be built first.  However, to those unversed in physical economy, and lacking a more rigorous understanding of history, his critique could perhaps seem plausible.  Lauerman should consider that if humankind actually listened to his advice, we would still be living in caves.
Lauerman is only typical of the cultural deficiencies which plague Canada.  Having never fully experimented with the American System of Alexander Hamilton, President Lincoln, and Henry C. Carey, nor having taken measures equivalent to those of President Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Great Depression, Canada has yet to experience that unique progress which has occurred historically when American System methods are coupled with sovereign governance.  Rather, our history reveals but piecemeal applications which, up to this point, have left the bulk of the nation’s territory empty of human habitation.  Canadians have forgotten that the primary issue of 19th century Canada, as for the United States, was the development of continental railways, industrialization, and the settlement of the western territories.  
At the same time, fools such as David Suzuki parade around the country, attacking human progress as essentially evil!  In April of this year, Suzuki and Al Gore spoke to a fawning mass of young Canadians in Montreal.  In his speech, Suzuki compared humanity to cancer, because, in his view, apart from man, only cancer can multiply exponentially.  He also employed a metaphor of bacteria living in a jar, consuming their limited food supply at an escalating rate as population increases, finally reaching the point at which the entire colony of bacteria perishes: this, Suzuki said, was human nature.  Suzuki also made the outrageous claim that the point at which humanity “went wrong” was the agricultural revolution!  Suzuki represents the fascist tendency within the so-called “left”; a man who hates humankind, yet is considered one of Canada’s greatest icons.  And yet, despite the operations of those openly against civilization, Canadians are picking themselves up once again, after so many decades of decadence and backwardness.  Nuclear engineering is increasing in popularity in Canada’s universities, with an entirely new technological institute in Oshawa Ontario, the doors of which first opened in 2003 – the University Of Ontario Institute Of Technology.  The nuclear engineering program and similar programs at other Universities receive generous grants from the nuclear industry to help meet the growing demand of an expanding nuclear industry.  Canada is also participating, in conjunction with other leading nuclear-powered nations, in the development of fourth generation reactors; because, as Claudia Lemieux explains, “the thinking is shifting.…  [AECL is] looking at developing in their next generation of reactors – they’re looking at another kind of system – and then that changes the whole dynamic.  They are looking at what are called ‘non-proliferation technologies’ which are proliferation resistant: you are using them to produce electricity, but they can’t be used for other things – that’s what they’re working on now, because the thinking is that the only way used fuel is going to be acceptable to people is if it is used and used and used again.”
Whether or not Canada joins the international rail and nuclear renaissance will be determined by the political battle now being waged by the patriotic forces of the nation.  Therefore, Canadians should reflect upon the words of Friedrich Schiller, who wrote of the failure of the French Revolution to establish true Republican government, as in the United States: that a great moment found a little people.  Will Canadians fall victim to their worst cultural tendencies, or will they rise above their littleness, their regionalism, and their pessimism?  Will Canada choose the path towards true sovereignty?  In 1903, when Canada’s population was a paltry 5.6 million, perhaps our greatest Prime Minister, Wilfrid Laurier, envisioned a Canada of sixty million citizens, criss-crossed with railroads, factories and farms, before the youth of his day had passed on.  With a little under thirty-three millions today, with collapsing infrastructure and industry, and with true Canadian patriotism (which simply means a passion for development) seemingly forgotten, it is clear that much is yet to be done; but if the Canadian LaRouche Youth Movement have their say, Canada will become the nation it has often promised to be.

http://www.iaea.org/inis/aws/fnss/fulltext/te_1319_4.pdf

Will Canada Join the Rail and Nuclear Renaissance?

will Canada join the growing chorus of nations which are denouncing the neo-liberal ideology of free trade and globalization, or will Canadians blindly follow the dictates of lunatic environmentalists such as David Suzuki and Al Gore?
Around the world nations are moving in a new direction: towards what is now being universally heralded as the

A Draft Constitution For The Commonwealth of Canada

On the cover : the statue of George the III being taken down in New York City.

 

A Draft Constitution

For

The Commonwealth of Canada

By Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.

PDF Version of this Document to download

 

On the cover : the statue of George the III being taken down in New York City.

© Committee for the Republic of Canada. All Rights reserved.

Preface

 

As this first printing of Lyndon H. LaRouche’s Draft Constitution for the Commonwealth of Canada goes to press, the world is rapidly plunging into the hell of thermonuclear confrontation. A military junta installed in Moscow is poised for a global showdown foreshadowing a war that would leave the United States and Canada a desolate wasteland of radioactive rubble.

 

It is my duty to expose the evil behind Prime Minister Trudeau’s “peace mission.” If this mission of appeasement is successful, according to the scenario of the Pugwash-Ignatiev circles, then, history will judge our Prime Minister a greater fool than Neville Chamberlain.

 

I “The people of Canada are among those portions of mankind relatively more advantaged to set the kind of example which this imperilled mankind of today’s most sorely requires.” This 1981 judgement, by U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Lyndon H. LaRouche, on Canada’s opportune role in establishing a model republic for the world, could also stand as a statement of our people’s special moral responsibility today to safeguard Western Civilisation against destruction by nuclear obliteration or to repel a conquering Russian Empire.

 

We must stand up as one, and demand that our government set the proper policy course that would make available to Canadians “. . . the means of rendering nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete” as President Reagan announced to the world, on March 23, 1983, the new strategy of energy beam defence systems.

 

Such a strategy, while guaranteeing the continued survival of the human race, would generate the scientific and technological progress necessary to lift our nation out of economic depression, to cut the bonds of indebtedness and free the Third World from IMF genocide; in short, to provide the foundation for a flourishing cultural and technological renaissance world-wide.

 

Therefore, I am calling upon every able citizen to run for political office upon the measures and policies that can save the nation and the world .

 

I especially urge those patriots who are in moral agreement with this proposed Draft Constitution of the Commonwealth of Canada, to get in touch with me and join our forces to establish a new federal political party.

 

Canadians must rise above routine issues and act to ensure that Canada joins a Community of Sovereign Nation States based upon a community of principle as defined in this Draft Constitution.

 

 

 

Gilles Gervais

 

Secretary General of the

 

Committee for the Commonwealth of Canada

 

Montreal,

 

February 28, 1984

SECOND PREFACE

 

More than 15 years have now elapsed since communist tyrannies in Berlin and Moscow were overthrown.

 

And while the full promise of economic betterment and human dignity that these momentous events portended have still to be fully realized as we enter the dawn of a new century, we are nonetheless greatly encouraged today to observe that when Lyndon LaRouche was called upon to play a leading role on that stage of history in the 1980’s and early 1990’s, his legacy in the form of the European Productive Triangle and his later Eurasian Land Bridge concept have today become policies which are earnestly studied and debated by a growing number of government institutions and of patriotic circles across Eurasia.

 

Indeed, Lyndon LaRouche’s two most recent additions to his several decades long committment to bring about a more just new world economic order, have just been released: Toward a New WestphaliaTreaty: The Coming Eurasian World and The Dialogue of Eurasian Civilizations: Earth’s Next 50 Years. These documents will serve as the basis for discussion at an historic conference to be held in Berlin on January 12, 2005, that will bring together leaders from many nations of Europe and Asia.

 

The recent worst flood catastrophe in history which has hit South and South East Asia now make this previously scheduled conference all the more urgent.

 

Canada, with its unique geographical position bordering on three oceans, with its diversified cultural heritage, with its modern export-based engineering and industrial capacity and with its vast resource base, is one of the countries most advantageously situated to lead such an historic endeavour of rebuilding the planet.

 

This great endeavour could not work under the present axioms of free trade and globalization.

 

It is therefore imperative that Canada resolves to foresake its two decades long experiment in free trade which has resulted in increased hardships, inequalities and the continuing looting of the world’s labour force.

 

In order to acquaint Canadians with the republican constitutional principles of government and political economy which might serve them better, both in this coming period of probable “financial tsunamis” and in the longer term, the Committee for the Republic of Canada is urgently reprinting Lyndon LaRouche’s Draft Constitution for the Commonwealth of Canada for rapid distribution among the patriotic circles within the government and other institutions.

 

This draft proposal for a republican Canadian constitution was originally a gift by LaRouche presented to Canadians in 1981, accompanied at that time by the following best wishes: “may the Commonweath of Canada prosper in security and sovereignty in the present and in time to come”.

 

 

 

In LaRouche’s constitutional proposal for Canada, he situates true prosperity in the creation of a hamiltonian national bank of Canada and in the willingness to join a new community of principle of sovereign nation-states dedicated to the establishment of a more just new world economic order.

 

 

 

The soon, expected-to-be, first test of this new dedication will be the establishment of a Westphalia type of treaty agreement with the nations of Eurasia, reminiscent of Cardinal Mazarin’s famous “advantage of the other”.

 

 

 

That new adopted positive mission would certainly guaranty the security and sovereignty of a prosperous Canada in the present and in time to come.

 

 

 

Gilles Gervais

 

President

 

Committee for the Republic of Canada

 

January 1st, 2005

 

Letter of Transmittal

 

 

The International Caucus of Labor Committees, a cultural association in the adopted image of Plato’s Academy at Athens, is inclusively dedicated to the proposition that the highest quality of political development of the modern individual person is to be at once a dedicated patriot of a sovereign republic and also a world-citizen.

 

In relatively modern times, the recognition that no proper contradiction exists between the conditions of patriot and world-citizen was argued by such figures as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and by one among the modern world’s greatest poets, dramatists, and historians, Friedrich Schiller.

 

While some among us are Canadians, others are not. Yet, all among us are equally dedicated on principle to giving to Canada something of great value to its present persons and their posterity. It is our informed conviction, premised upon as intensive a collaborative reflection upon history as has been undertaken during this century, that the following proposed draft of a national constitution is the finest and most appropriate gift our efforts could offer presently to the people of Canada.

 

These are greatly troubled times. The credible perils of nuclear warfare, vast genocide of peoples, and moral anarchy and degradation pose today a greater peril to mankind generally than can be compared with any peril confronted since the so-called “New Dark Age” of fourteenth-century Europe. In these times, all mankind cries out implicitly for new beacons of hope of a better, more secure order in mankind’s affairs.

 

It is within the power of the people of Canada to fashion themselves into such a beacon of hope, to establish a living example which other peoples and nations may emulate in some fashion appropriate to their own problems, development and other circumstances.

 

In the past, each emergence of some great new nation, each admirable re-ordering of the affairs of a nation, has been an efficient beacon of hope for other nations and peoples witnessing such accomplishments. If it is true that great and good ideas are the unique source of all important accomplishments of mankind, it is the example of employment of such an idea by some people which has proven repeatedly the indispensable magnifier of the power of communicating such an idea to nations and people more generally.

 

To such a purpose, the people of Canada are among those portions of mankind relatively more advantaged to set the kind of example which this imperilled mankind of today’s world most sorely requires, It happens, as the Prime Minister of Canada has publicly echoed such a rumbling within the population of that nation, that the people of Canada appear as increasingly predisposed to establishment of a sovereign constitutional order for the Commonwealth. Such an undertaking at this juncture would represent potentially one of the great works of the present interval of world history.

 

We, each among us impassioned patriots of our respective nations, and also world-citizens, are persuaded that the Commonwealth of Canada ought to enjoy the best constitution adopted by any republic up to this time, a constitution which takes proper advantage of the lessons of past experience, which incorporates those superior features the patriots of other nations might desire for the ordering of their own affairs.

 

For reasons peculiar to the character of our own labors and experience, we are exceptionally qualified to prepare a draft constitution emphasising such advantages.

 

This draft is intended to acquaint others, not Canadians, on the meaning of “constitutional law.”

 

It is not our constitution, citizens of Canada. It is our gift to you, and therefore no longer ours, but yours.

 

May the Commonwealth of Canada prosper in security and sovereignty in the present and in time to come!

 

 

 

Lyndon H. LaRouche

 

September 5, 1981

ARTICLE §1: The Commonwealth of Canada

 

The people of the provinces and territories known heretofore as Canada establish herewith the Commonwealth of Canada to be henceforth a sovereign, federal and constitutional form of democratic republic.

 

  • 1.1 Sovereignty of the Commonwealth

 

The sovereignty of the Commonwealth is absolute, expressed in a manner delimited only by the principles of law set forth in this Constitution.

 

No condition may be imposed in limitation of this sovereignty by any foreign power, be that a foreign nation, a supranational political or financial institution, or a private interest.

 

Each and any attempt to impose a prohibited form of limitation upon the absolute sovereignty of the Commonwealth shall be judged an act of either foreign aggression or of treasonous sedition, whichever classification of the offence is more appropriate to the action or actions of the offender or offenders.

 

  • 1.2 A Federal Commonwealth

 

This Constitution establishes a Federal Government of the Commonwealth as the sole central governing authority for the nation as a whole. The powers of the Federal Government are broad, but well-defined and delimited, in the manner stipulated in this Constitution.

 

Those powers not awarded by this Constitution to the Federal Government are either delegated to local self-governments of political subdivisions of the Commonwealth, as stipulated in this Constitution, or to the persons designated by this Constitution as members of the general electorate of the Commonwealth.

 

This separation of powers among the Federal Government, local self-government and the electorate is variously detailed or identified by category, in the manner specified for each case, by this Constitution.

 

Each of the political subdivisions of Canada formerly known as Provinces is established herewith as a Federal State of the Commonwealth.

 

All other territories of Canada are defined herewith as Federal Territory.

 

Federal States of the Commonwealth shall be self-governed in local affairs by authority of a charter having the form of a State constitution. Such a charter, once adopted, shall be law insofar as it does not conflict in any provision with the Constitution of the Commonwealth or Federal laws enacted according to powers delegated to the Federal Government by this Constitution.

 

Under those terms and conditions, each of the Federal States authorizes the charters of local self-government of subdivisions of that State.

 

Federal Territory is under the complete administration of the Federal Government, and under the direct administration of the Executive branch of that Federal Government, subject to such limitations as the Constitution and Federal law may provide.

 

Insofar as laws existing prior to implementation of this Constitution are neither nullified nor otherwise superseded by this Constitution, they remain in force until amended, or repealed.

 

Except as nullified or superseded by this Constitution, or as subsequently altered by laws enacted, all institutions of the former Provinces shall be continued as institutions of the States.

 

All institutions and authorities of government not previously assigned to the governments of one or more of the Provinces are herewith assigned to the Federal Government. Each such element will be assimilated within whichever of the departments of the Federal Government its function is categorically assigned by this Constitution.

 

  • 1.3 Constitutional Law Established

 

This Constitution of the Commonwealth defines principles of law, defines institutions of self-government, and defines the ordering of the relationships among those established institutions. These features of this Constitution, taken as a coherent body of law, define the governing doctrine of the Constitutional Law of the Commonwealth.

 

In each and every instance of a conflict between all ordinary legislative and civil law, on the one side, and the Constitutional Law, on the other side, the portion of legislative or civil law which is in the area of conflict is nullified.

 

In each and every instance of conflict between the civil law and the legislative law of the Federal or a relevant State government, the portion of civil law which is in the area of conflict is nullified, except as the Federal Court may judge a relevant portion of the legislative law to be in conflict with the Constitutional Law.

 

In each and every instance of conflict between the acts of the Federal Legislature and legislation enacted by a political subdivision of the Commonwealth, the portion of the legislative law of the subdivision in the area of conflict shall be nullified, except as the Federal Court may find the relevant area of Federal law to be in conflict with Constitutional Law.

 

The Constitutional Law as a whole is both the Constitution itself and the written practice of Constitutional Law conducted within the processes of the Federal Court of the Commonwealth. The relationship among the components of Constitutional Law so defined is ordered by the following principles.

 

There are two aspects of the Constitution itself which shall not be amended. The principles of law set forth in the Constitution may not be amended. Although the composition of the entirety of the institutions of the Federal Government. might arguably have been ordered in a manner different than that stipulated in this Constitution, to alter a part of the entire institutional fabric would threaten jeopardy to the lawful functioning of the whole fabric. Consequently, for that stated reason, the Constitution may not be altered in any respect it either defines an institution of the Federal Government, or that it defines the division of functions and ordering of powers and checks and balances among the institutions of Federal Government defined by this Constitution. These elements persist as the unchanging foundation of the whole Constitutional Law, to the effect of nullifying any subsequent contrary interpretation of Constitutional law.

 

Other, amendable features of this Constitution have the force of Constitutional Law for as long as they exist and in respect to any consequence of their having existed, should one such feature be amended in the manner provided within this Constitution.

 

As stipulated in this Constitution, the Federal Court and other designated functions of the Federal Government shall act to the effect of working to perfect the coherence of the whole body of law with the law flowing directly from this Constitution. The Constitution itself is the source of Constitutional Law; written decisions as to matters of Constitutional Law’s bearing on the legislative and civil law within proceedings of the Federal Court is the process of elaboration for Constitutional Law.

 

  • 1.4 The Democratic Republic Defined

 

A republic or commonwealth is a nation self-governed under the rule of law, rather than by the caprice of an individual, an oligarchy, or episodic whims of a ruling majority of an electorate. The law to which a people submit themselves and their posterity in establishing a republic or commonwealth is nothing more nor less than what is properly termed constitutional law.

 

In the most desirable form of republic, the democratic republic, all members of the adult population of a nation who are neither criminals nor mentally incompetent constitute an electorate. This electorate chooses from among its own ranks which persons shall occupy offices of government, and by what manner of choosing. By this means of democratic selection, the electorate regulates the making of ordinary law and directs the course of the nation to those practical objectives which the majority of that electorate judges to be preferable alternatives. In these matters of choice, the electorate and its selected representatives are constrained only by the constitutional law.

 

In the reality of practice, as history and the adoption of this Constitution both exemplify that fact, it is in relatively rare intervals of the life of a people that the majority of that people are enabled to rally themselves to establish an improved order of lawful self-government. The English poet Percy B. Shelley writes appropriately of moments of history in which a people experiences a greatly increased capacity for imparting and receiving profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. In such rare intervals a great people rises for a time above preoccupation with the immediately personal and local concerns of the ephemeral mortal lives of each, and locates its most immediate sense of self-interest in the condition of the world and nation bequeathed to its posterity as a whole.

 

In such inspired moments of its existence, a great people, sensible of the fact that that inspired moment will pass all too quickly, imposes upon itself and its posterity a rule of constitutional law.

 

When that has been done, too soon the soldier forgets the perils of battle, in pursuit of immediate family affairs and career. The inspired statesmen of moments of crisis too soon become once again mere politicians. Pettier passions predominate in the majority of the electorate, passions which would erode and perhaps destroy the nation unless an efficient ordering of institutions under constitutional law held the dangerous potentialities of such pettier passions in check.

 

So, the ancient and revered law-giver, Solon of Athens, counseled the fellow-citizens of that republic he did so much to rescue from self-imposed ruin.

 

So, in an inspired and ennobled moment of their existence, the people of the electorate of Canada have chosen to establish this sovereign Commonwealth as a nation self-governed under constitutional law. They have chosen the name Commonwealth, rather than republic, to emphasise the great sixteenth-century alliance between the people of England and France, that alliance of the political heirs of Erasmus of Rotterdam whose common principles are exemplified by Jean Bodin’s Six Books of The Commonwealth.

 

The principles of law consulted by the drafters of this Constitution are by no means original to this time or place. The problem of composition of a democratic republic is the established classical knowledge of all European civilisation since earlier than those dialogues of Plato treating related problems. The treatment of the same problems by St. Augustine’s writings has been among the principled influences informing the consciences of the greatest monarchs, other statesmen, churchmen and ennobled strata of the general population of Europe and North America, among other places, for longer than a millenium and a half. St. Augustine spoke authoritatively not only in support of the Nicene doctrine of Christianity, but also in principle, for the ecumenical agreement respecting principles of natural law between Nicene Christianity and the exposition of Judaism by the great Jewish collaborator of St. Peter, Philo Judaeus of Alexandria. The emergence of the modern sovereign nation-state in forms consistent with the teachings of St. Augustine was centred around the influence of the writings of Dante Alighieri, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, and their allies among the great republican statesmen of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries.

 

This knowledge is affirmed by examining the causes for the rise and fall of nations and empires over the course of two and a half millennia of the record of the civilisation which has sprung from the Mediterranean littoral. This history permits no doubt that to neglect certain principles of constitutional law were to incur the moral and other decay, and perhaps the doom of a nation.

 

Accordingly, the people of the Commonwealth have embraced those certain principles as those which shall bind them and their posterity, and this Constitution has configured the design of their constitutional institutions of self-government in a manner to channel deliberation and its outcome as to government in directions consistent with those principles of law.

 

At the same time, sensible that the quality of government and its consequences depends upon the moral development and advancement of productive powers of the nation’s people generally, the people of Canada have affirmed in this Constitution the counsel of Dante Alighieri’s great Commedia, to ensure that as small a portion of its present and future electorate as possible shall fall into that morally degenerate state of hedonistic irrationalism, sometimes termed “philosophical anarchism,” which Dante depicts as the condition of the inmates of the “Infemo” canticle of the Commedia. The moral education of the present and future citizen of the Commonwealth, and the promotion of both the development of the productive powers of labour and fostering of opportunities for fruitful employment of those powers, are the cornerstones of policy for the day-to-day business of self-government.

 

Every adult national of the Commonwealth has the right to be registered as a member of the electorate in such locality within the Commonwealth as he or she establishes and maintains lawful personal residence. This right shall not be denied except for cause, and shall not be denied for cause except through due process of law as the Federal Legislature of the Commonwealth shall prescribe.

 

The sole causes for disqualification of any adult national shall be these: (1) Treason or sedition; (2) Adoption of citizenship in another nation; (3) Complicity in perpetrating attempted or actual fraud in any Federal or local election; (4) A legal condition of criminal mind; (5) A condition of legal insanity; (6) A legal condition of such degree of functional illiteracy that the person is adjudged incompetent to comprehend the implications of policies and candidacies for election to office presented for votes by the electorate. The Federal Legislature shall enact legislation providing determination by due process for each and all of these causes for disqualification of a person from the roster of citizens of the electorate.

 

The Federal Legislature shall determine the legal age a national is eligible to be registered as a member of the electorate, provided the minimum age for such registration shall not be less than eighteen years nor greater than twenty-one years.

 

For such cases the applicant is not a former minor child of native-born or naturalised nationals of Canada, the qualifications of the applicant for registration shall be determined according to such laws governing this determination which shall be enacted by the Federal Legislature.

 

Only registered members of the electorate shall be eligible for nomination or appointment to any Federal, State or local public office or civil service position. Only registered members of the electorate shall be eligible for service on grand or petit juries. However, this shall not be construed to deny any person, national or other person, the right to petition government in any of the orderly methods and procedures otherwise provided for this purpose, or to enjoy the same freedoms of speech and writing afforded to citizens in their capacity as persons.

ARTICLE §2: The Composition of the Federal Government

 

The central government of the Commonwealth of Canada is named the Federal Government. This government, when identified as an entirety, shall not be designated by any other names than “Federal Government,” or “Federal Government of the Commonwealth,” or “Federal Government of the Commonwealth of Canada.”

 

The choice from among these stipulated names to be used in each legal document, or other transaction within and with that Federal Government, shall be the shortest of those three names which permits no confusion of meaning within the context of that document or transaction.

 

The Federal Government is established solely by the authority of this Constitution, and is accountable to the terms of this Constitution, as such terms are stipulated herein. No other agency, or past, present or future law or treaty shall be an exception to this.

 

The Federal Government is composed of four major divisions, called Branches. These four are the Federal Executive, or simply “Executive;” the Federal Bank, or simply “Bank;” the Federal Court; the Federal Legislature, or simply “Legislature.” Only one additional institution is to be considered respecting the ordering of relations among Branches of the Federal Government: an agency of the general electorate named the Presidential Electors.

 

Subject to the interrelationships among these five entities as ordered by this Constitution, each of the five entities is autonomous to the degree that no member of these bodies may be called to account in any other place than that body for his or her actions taken in lawful pursuit of the functions established for that entity by this Constitution.

 

  • 2.1 Federal Electoral Districts

 

The Commonwealth of Canada is divided into Federal Electoral Districts, such that each Federal Electoral District lies entirely within either a single Federal State or within the Federal Territory.

 

These Districts are determined in the following manner.

 

For the first Federal Election under this Constitution existing election-districts shall be reconfigured in the most reasonable approximation of the intent of this provision of the Constitution.

 

Thereafter, Federal Electoral Districts shall be determined by the following methods and procedures.

 

Early during the first calendar year following the first Federal election under this Constitution, the President of the Commonwealth shall submit a Redistricting Bill to the upper house of the Federal Legislature. This Bill and all calculations pursuant to its enactment and implementation shall be based on the number of enrolled registered members of the electorate at each local place of registration at the date the Bill is submitted to the Legislature. This Bill shall propose an average number of such previously registered members of the electorate for each Federal Electoral District of the Commonwealth. The upper house shall enact that Bill speedily, either in its original form or with proper amendments.

 

Neither the Bill as submitted by the President, or as enacted by the upper house of the Legislature shall violate the following Constitutional conditions. The total number of Federal Electoral Districts of the Commonwealth shall neither increase nor decrease the previously established number of Federal Electoral Districts by more than ten percent, except for the case of the first Redistricting Bill, which shall establish the reference-level to be considered in ordering subsequent redistrictings. The total number of Federal Electoral Districts shall not exceed 250 proposed Districts.

 

Unless the President of the Commonwealth shall have weighty cause to veto the Bill returned by the upper house of the Legislature, the President shall sign the enacted Bill into Law. If the President shall have sufficient cause to veto the Bill, he shall promptly resubmit the Bill to the upper house together with proposed amendments. If the upper house of the Legislature shall override the President’s veto by a two-thirds majority of its members, the Bill voted in that form shall become law.

 

When the Bill becomes law, the President shall direct the Executive to conduct the Redistricting according to law by the following Constitutional methods and procedures.

 

The determination of the number of Federal Electoral Districts in each Federal State or in the Federal Territory shall be determined by the use of two figures. The first figure shall be the number of registered members of the electorate in that State or Territory at the date the original Bill was first submitted to the upper house of the Federal Legislature. The second figure is the recommended average number of members of the electorate registered as of the date proposed by the Redistricting Bill enacted as law. The first figure shall be divided by the second, yielding a dividend composed of a whole number plus a fractional number. If the fractional number is less than or equal to one-half, the number of Federal Electoral Districts in that State or the Federal Territory is equal to the whole-number portion of the dividend. If the fractional component of the dividend has a value greater than one half, the number of Federal Electoral Districts shall be the whole-number component of the dividend plus one.

 

The average size of the Federal Electoral Districts within that State or the Federal Territory shall be the total number of the registered members of the electorate for that political subdivision divided by the total number of Federal Electoral Districts into which that State or the Federal Territory is to be divided.

 

The method for defining a District shall be the approximation of the smallest moment of number of electorate-times-distance for each District, as determined in the following manner. The distance from the place of local registration of members of the electorate to the assumed centre of the District shall be multiplied by the legally relevant number of previously registered members of the electorate in that place of local registration. The most direct and commonly traveled route from that locality to the centre of the District shall be the basis for this calculation. That product is termed the Moment of the electorate for such locality of registration. Each District shall be defined in such a manner that its boundaries provide approximately the smallest moment for the electorate in that region of the Commonwealth within the boundaries of that State or the Federal Territory.

 

The first estimate of boundaries of Federal Electoral Districts within a State or the Federal Territory shall be effected in the following manner. The First District of that State, or of the Federal Territory, shall be defined with reasonable approximation in the southwest corner of the territory. If the State or Territory requires additional Districts, the estimated Districts shall be established by the following method. The Second District shall be defined in the north-east comer of the remaining territory. The Third District in the south-east comer of the remaining territory. The Fourth District in the north-west comer of the remaining territory. This cycle shall be repeated for the remaining territory, until the State or Federal Territory is completely mapped.

 

The preliminary mapping, conducted in that manner, shall be optimised solely for the purpose of enhancing the reduction of total moments among adjoining Districts, and subject to the restriction that no District should vary in number of legally relevant count of registered members of the electorate by more than five percent for the average previously determined for the State or Federal Territory as a whole.

 

The President of the Commonwealth shall publish a report of the completed Redistricting, together with appendices reporting the steps of calculation employed. On condition that the methods of calculation employed correspond with show of good faith and reasonable accuracy to the methods and procedures provided in this Constitution, neither the Federal Court or the Federal Legislature shall order any amendment of the Redistricting.

 

Redistricting shall occur each ten years following the first Districting under this procedure.

 

  • 2.2 Federal Elections

 

No person shall be a candidate for election to or appointment to any position in the Federal Government, or to become a Presidential elector, unless that person shall have been (a) a registered member of the electorate in his or her lawful place of residence for a period of not less than ninety days prior to filing application to become a lawful candidate for such election or appointment, and (b) not disqualified by reason of non-frivolous challenge of his or her standing as a member of the electorate. No qualified member of the Federal electorate shall be a candidate for appointment to any office defined by name in this Constitution unless that member of the electorate shall satisfy the requirements of an incumbent as specified either in this Constitution or as this Constitution directs the Federal Executive or Federal Legislature to determine.

 

All candidates for election to an office of the Federal Government or to the position of Presidential Elector shall have filed all required proof of qualifications as a candidate not less than ninety days preceding the Federal election in which they seek to be listed as candidates for election.

 

A Federal general election will occur in each and every District of the Commonwealth each two years following the first such election under this Constitution. That election shall occur on the first Monday of October in that year.

 

The persons eligible to cast ballots in an election shall have been registered as members of the Federal Electorate at their current lawful place of personal residence within the Commonwealth not later than ninety days prior to such election, and shall not have been disqualified for cause subsequent to such registration.

 

All votes counted in Federal elections shall be cast by paper ballot. Auxiliary means for tallying votes may be employed. The tallies determined by such auxiliary means may be certified on condition that no candidate listed on the whole ballot in that District contests such tallies, and also that no non-frivolous grounds for requiring a thorough audit are filed with the Federal Court within one week of such election. If tallies compiled by auxiliary means are challenged by any candidate, or if some other member or members of the registered electorate present probable cause for any error or nonfeasance by equipment or persons in any part of the election a thorough, rigorous audit of paper ballots cast shall be made in the entirety of the affected unit of such election.

 

The smallest unit for audit is the entire polling-place. If more than two polling-places are shown by evidence of probable cause to be subject to error or nonfeasance, the balloting of the entire Federal Electoral District shall be audited.

 

The Federal Legislature shall enact rigorous precautions for ensuring the integrity of casting and processing of paper ballots, and shall define electoral fraud as a major crime subject to appropriate penalties for major crime on conviction.

 

The Justices of the Federal Court and all election officials are instructed herewith, that any and each alteration or dilution of the vote cast by a member of the electorate is a major crime of disenfranchisement of a citizen of the Commonwealth. The Federal Government is instructed herewith to bring the potentially crushing power of that government to bear against all such offences, and also against both toleration of such offences and laxity by officials in respect to detection, prevention and remedy of such offences. The Federal Legislature shall enact appropriate laws in this matter, stipulating punishments consistent with the title of major crime.

 

During each of the Federal elections so prescribed, each Federal Electoral District shall elect one member of the lower house of the Federal Legislature. This member shall be the sole representative of the District in that house, and shall be elected for a term of two years. The member so elected shall be inaugurated either thirty-one days following the Federal election in which the member was elected, or, if the results of the election are contested in such a manner as to prevent certification of the election of a member for that District within thirty-one days, as soon after that time as the results of the election are certified in the manner which shall be prescribed by the Federal Legislature.

 

During the first Federal election held under this Constitution, the electorate of the Federal Districts of each State shall elect three members of the upper house of the Legislature. The first shall be elected for a six-year term, the second for a four-year term, and the third for a two-year term. Thereafter, except to fill a previous vacancy in an uncompleted term of office for one of its representatives in that upper house, the electorate of that State shall elect one member to the upper house for a six-year term during each Federal biannual election. These shall be inaugurated at the same time as newly elected members of the lower house.

 

During the first Federal election held under this Constitution, and each six years thereafter, the majority of the electorate voting in each Federal Electoral District shall elect one Presidential Elector to a six-year term in office. These Electors elect the President of the Commonwealth and also the Ministers of the Cabinet. During the six-year term of the President of the Commonwealth, the same body of Presidential Electors will be reconvened to select a new President of the Commonwealth should that office become vacant, and shall also compose the jury in designated cases of impeachment of high officials of the Federal Government other than members of the Legislature. In the case of a vacancy in the upper house of the Legislature, the Presidential Electors of that State shall elect a replacement to complete the term of office up to such time as the electorate of that State shall have not less than one-hundred-twenty days notice prior to a biannual Federal Election, to elect another to complete such portion of the incomplete term of office, if any shall exist, beyond the next inauguration of new members of that house. In the case of a vacancy in the lower house, the Presidential Elector from the corresponding District shall appoint a replacement to complete the term of office, unless the position of Elector in that District shall have become vacant, in which latter case the Presidential Electors of that State shall elect the replacement.

 

The Presidential Electors are the tribunes of the electorate in such matters. They shall be elected from among members of that electorate of forty years of age or more, and shall have resided in the State or Federal Territory whose District they represent for not less than six years. The persons filing as candidates to become Presidential Electors may choose to run for election as preferring a particular lawful candidate for President or may stand for election without indicated preference for any such candidate. In the latter case, it is the business of the candidates and the electorate to determine by the means available to them respectively whether a Presidential Elector chosen will be committed or uncommitted to some specific lawful candidate.

 

  • 2.3 Election of the President of the Commonwealth

 

On or shortly after thirty-one days following the election of a new assembly of Presidential Electors, those Electors shall convene at some suitable place within or proximate to the Federal Capital for the purpose of electing a President of the Commonwealth.

 

As soon as they have chosen a new President of the Commonwealth, the President-elect shall submit to that assembly nominations for each of the Ministers prescribed by this Constitution. The Electors may elect or reject nominations submitted, but must eventually choose from among the nominations the President-elect shall submit to them.

 

When that business shall have been completed, the Presidential Electors shall recess until such time as all or a portion of their numbers are recalled to session by the Presiding Officer of the upper house of the Legislature. They shall be called only to elect a new President of the Commonwealth, to elect temporary members to fill vacancies occurring for any cause in the upper or lower house of the Legislature, or to serve as a jury in impeachment proceedings against high officials of the Federal Government who are not members of the Federal Legislature.

 

  • 2.4 Composition of the Executive Branch

 

The Executive Branch of the Federal Government is the extended person of the President of the Commonwealth. This President embodies all of the authorities and responsibilities, subject to law, for that Branch of the Federal Government.

 

Immediately subordinate to the President are those members of the President’s Cabinet whose rank as both Ministers and Vice-Presidents of the Commonwealth is established by this Constitution.

 

  • The first Vice-President is the Minister for Foreign Affairs.

 

  • The second Vice-President is the Minister for Finance.

 

  • The third Vice-President is the Minister for Defence.

 

  • The fourth Vice-President is the Minister for Justice.

 

  • The fifth Vice-President is the Minister for Education and Labour.

 

  • The sixth Vice-President is the Minister for Industry and Commerce.

 

  • The seventh Vice-President is the Minister for Agriculture.

 

  • The eighth Vice-President is the Minister for Public Works and National Resources.

 

  • The ninth Vice-President and chief political-intelligence officer for the Executive Branch is the Minister for Information.

 

The initial roster of such Ministers, inaugurated together with the President of the Commonwealth, is established by elective confirmation by the Presidential Electors. The President and the Vice-Presidents are inaugurated on the second Monday of the January following the relevant Federal election preceding. Otherwise, if the President of the Commonwealth shall have been elected to fill the vacant term of office of a predecessor, that President and a newly elected Cabinet shall be inaugurated on the first Monday thirty days following such election of President and Cabinet by the assembly of Presidential Electors.

 

After the President’s inauguration, the President may discharge Ministers, and may reassign Ministers within the Cabinet, without being accountable to any institution but bodies of opinion. The President may not fill vacancies in the Cabinet except by confirmation of his nomination to such post by a majority of members of the upper house of the Legislature, and the President may not create new positions of Minister nor alter the Constitutional composition of the divisions of the Cabinet and its functions by any means.

 

The President is responsible for the nomination of Ministers and for the appointment of First Secretaries and such Deputy Secretaries of each Department as may correspond to positions established by the Legislature. The President shall assign to the Ministers the. responsibility for selecting persons to fill the positions of assistants to the Ministers and Secretaries authorised by law for such appointment. The Minister of each Department is also assigned responsibility for ordering of promotions within the Federal Civil Service, as both subject to law and on basis of determination of performance and merit.

 

The President is responsible for appointments to the President’s Executive Staff.

 

  • 2.5 The Federal Civil Service

 

The Federal Civil Service of the Commonwealth is established herewith.

 

The Federal Civil Service pertains only to the permanent and provisional staffs of the Ministries of the Federal Executive, not including members of the military services.

 

The Administration of the Federal Civil Service is the responsibility of the Minister of Education and Labour. A Deputy Secretary for Federal Civil Service is the designated appointed officer responsible for the policy directives of the Executive Branch in this matter. Immediately subordinate to that Deputy Secretary is the Director of Federal Civil Service Personnel, or simply “Director of Personnel.”

 

The Director of Personnel has authority and responsibility for directing the recruitment, selection, training, and determination of qualifications of all regular and provisional Federal Civil Service personnel. The Director of Personnel shall define the correspondence among titles, qualifications and recommended compensation-scales, which the Minister, on behalf of the President, shall submit to the upper house of the Legislature for confirmation by a majority of the members of the upper house. (This is distinct from the authority of the lower house to determine the total expenditure for a category of Civil Service personnel within Ministries.) The Director of Personnel is empowered to discharge provisional personnel by such standards of severance as the Director may determine, and shall propose the methods and procedures for severance of regular Civil Service personnel and other disciplinary measures, which shall become law if submitted to and ratified by the upper house of the Legislature.

 

The Director of Personnel shall act within the law established for this purpose by ratifying action of the upper house, to upgrade or downgrade the rating of Civil Service personnel as to qualifications and merit, but has no discretionary authority as to the promotion of those personnel within the Ministries to which they are assigned, nor discretionary authority to determine what the assignments or duties of particular personnel shall be.

 

The Director of Personnel is responsible to establish methods and procedures for processing of grievances initiated from within the ranks of the Federal Civil Service. If the Director or the Deputy Secretary for Personnel can not negotiate the matter either within the body of the Civil Service itself or with the Ministry affected, the Minister of Education and Labour may employ discretion to determine whether or not the matter merits treatment at the Cabinet level.

 

Insofar as the law defines the conditions of Civil Service, members of the Civil Service have potential recourse to the Federal Court.

 

No person may be considered as an active applicant for appointment to the regular lists of the Federal Civil Service unless that person shall be a qualified, registered member of the Federal Electorate. Applicants not turned back after preliminary screening by Civil Service Personnel officers shall be submitted to at least two written and three oral examinations, as follows.

 

The first written examination will be subsumed under a topic in which the applicant is presumed to be qualified by combination of education, experience and other indicated development of potentialities. The applicant shall have no advance knowledge of the specific subject on which he or she is to be examined under the application before he or she shall have entered the secured examination room or area in which the response to a topical question is to be written. The applicant shall be provided reasonable reference-materials and tools such as calculators, as may be appropriate to the topic and shall be given a maximum of three hours to compose a literate and appropriate response to the assigned topic.

 

The second written examination will be conducted in the same manner, but will involve some topic for which the applicant has indicated no special skills. The object is to, examine the applicant’s ability to muster efficient creative insight under intellectual stress, and to express useful insights into strange topics in a literate and well-reasoned manner without resort to rhetorical devices of attempted deception or evasion.

 

The first two oral examinations, of between one-half and one hour each, shall conduct the same two kinds of examinations in the form of oral exchanges with qualified Personnel officers who are specialists in the topical areas. The final oral examination will be conducted to examine the applicant on points of interest to the Personnel department after that department shall have considered both the results of the four preceding examinations and other relevant information respecting the applicant.

 

Such examination procedures shall not be regarded as an avoidable form of cost and effort, nor shall they be conducted in a perfunctory or disinterested manner. These measures are established to compensate the Commonwealth and electorate for the inappropriateness of direct or efficiently indirect access by the electorate to the election of the particular officials of the Federal Civil Service lists, and to form part of the entire complex of measures deployed to establish the highest professional standards for that Civil Service as a body. This is related to the arrangement by which the Federal Civil Service is placed under the direction of the Minister for Education and Labour.

 

In general, all applicants for appointment to regular lists of the Federal Civil Service shall have the equivalent, as the Legislator shall determine, of the following minimum requirements of the graduate of a well-ordered secondary school.

 

  • Fully literate in English grammar, poetry and leading sixteenth through early nineteenth century prose classics.

 

  • Literate command in speaking and writing of a vocabulary of between 50,000 and 100,000 words of vocabulary in either English or French.

 

  • Literate in either at least one classical language (classical Greek or Latin) or at least one modern language other than either English or French.

 

  • Literate in principles of composition of both classical poetry and classical music, as a part of literacy in language in the proper and fuller sense of that. Literate in geometry and basic physics into the elementary calculus.

 

  • Literate in the history and geography of: Canada, the Western Hemisphere as a whole, Europe, an ancient and medieval history from approximately the time of Solon.

 

Such a basic foundation in classical education is to be considered the normal method for fostering the broader range of the future citizen’s moral and specialist potentialities through secondary-school age. Developed specialist qualifications added to these will be defectively developed unless based on such a foundation in equivalent of well-ordered secondary-school education.

 

In practice, the Civil Service shall make the best approximation of available qualified applicants, but without surrendering the principle of the matter. The minister of Education and Labour shall establish and maintain educational programs for both provisional and regular members of the Civil Service. These programs shall remedy deficiencies in the education of the person taken into the regular lists or employed as a provisional with a view to the provisional’s acquiring qualification for entering the regular lists. These programs shall also provide advanced specialist education and shall foster increase of depth in knowledge of classical culture among members of the Service.

 

The Minister of Education and Labour shall cause to be developed proposed programs to this effect, utilising options of educational programs conducted with cooperation of existing educational facilities, as well as the establishment of in-service educational institutions. With the concurrence of the President, the Minister shall submit proposals for confirmation by the upper house of the Legislature. If proposals are confirmed they shall become law.

 

The Director may cause provisional members of the Civil Service to be employed temporarily without tenure as the Federal Government may require this. For this purpose, the category of provisional employee of the Civil Service shall not be confused with the initial twelve-months’ probationary status of applicants taken newly into the regular lists.

 

Provisional employees shall be nationals of the Commonwealth, but need not be members of the Federal electorate and need not possess any special qualifications for their employment except those required for the form of employment to which they are assigned.

 

  • 2.6 The Federal Bank

 

The Federal Bank of the Commonwealth is the central bank of Canada, accountable to no agency but the Constitution and the Federal Government as a whole. It is subject to direction by the President of the Commonwealth within the limits imposed upon the President’s direction by law.

 

The chief policy-making officer of the Bank is the Chairman of the bank’s Board of Directors. The Chairman is appointed and recalled by the President of the Commonwealth, subject to confirmation of appointment by the upper house of the Legislature. This Chairman has the governmental rank of Minister within the Federal Executive, but is not a Vice-President of the Executive Branch, nor a member of the Cabinet.

 

In addition to the Chairman of the Board, the President of the Commonwealth shall appoint, and may recall, six additional Directors of the Board. Two of these shall represent Industry and Commerce, and at least one each shall represent banking, agriculture and labour. There shall be no additional Directors.

 

All Directors, including the Chairman, shall be appointed for a term of six years, not necessarily or even desirably concurrent terms. Each appointment to fill a vacancy shall be for a new, full term of six years.

 

The Board of Directors of the Bank shall appoint and recall the President of the Bank, who shall be deemed a qualified specialist and executive officer in banking matters, and whose appointment is subject to confirmation by the upper house of the Legislature. The Board of Directors, with the concurrence of the President of the commonwealth, shall propose the establishment of such statutory operating vice-president’s positions of the Bank as is indicated to be warranted. If the creation of such positions is confirmed by the upper house of the Legislature, those positions shall be filled and occupations recalled by the President of the Bank with the concurrence of a majority of the Board of Directors. Positions of lower rank than statutory Vice-President shall be established by the President with approval of the Board of Directors, and the President shall have the authority, responsibility and duty of competently staffing and supervising those functions.

 

  • 2.7 The Federal Court

 

The Federal Court is the defender of the Constitution as to proceedings at law.

 

The Federal Court is constituted principally of seven Permanent Justices, including one Chief Justice. The Chief Justice shall be appointed to that position by nomination of the President of the Commonwealth, as shall each of the six additional Permanent Justices. The term of office to which a Permanent Justice shall be appointed is life. These appointments are subject to confirmation by the upper house of the Legislature.

 

The Federal Court shall be augmented by such Regional Courts and by Federal Courts subordinate to one or another Regional Court as the President of the Commonwealth shall propose on recommendation of the Chief Justice, and as shall be confirmed by the upper house of the Legislature.

 

Regional Courts shall consist of a three-Justice Tribunal. Federal Courts inferior to a Regional Court shall be staffed by panels of assigned Justices. Justices of the Regional Courts such be appointed for a term of fourteen years, and Justices of inferior Federal Courts shall be appointed for a term of eight years. All appointments of Justices to these courts shall be by nomination of the President of the Commonwealth and by confirmation of nomination by the upper house of the Legislature.

 

The only offence for which a Justice of the Federal Court shall be impeachable on grounds of defective conduct as to matters of law shall be proposing or condoning either a corruption of the absolute sovereignty of the Commonwealth or an evasion of the principle of Constitutional Law. A Justice may be called to account outside the internal disciplinary methods and procedures of the Federal Court itself only if the violation is a prima facie violation of such provisions of law, either in written form, by oral statement from the bench, or some other verifiable act or acts in which the Justice’s actions in question have the effect of a Justice of the Federal Court aiding the subversion of these cited cornerstones of the Constitutional Law of the Commonwealth.

 

The only other circumstance under which a Justice may be subjected to disciplinary action for incompetent conduct in matters of law are those prescribed by the Permanent Justices of the Federal Court. In this and other matters of the Federal Court’s internal affairs, the Chief Justice is the chief executive and policy officer of the Federal Court, establishing policies by concurrence of a majority among the Permanent Justices.

 

The Justices of the Regional Court are the executive officers for that Court and inferior branches of that Regional Court.

 

In only one way can a decision of the majority of the Permanent Justices of the Federal Court be overruled as to law. The President of the Commonwealth may submit a Bill to the upper house of the Legislature opposing the decision of the Federal Court in a particular case. If this bill is enacted with support of not less than two-thirds of the members of the upper house, the decision of the Federal Court in that particular case is overruled. However, this shall not be a binding precedent in law respecting other cases, although such action must in fact have significant colour of influence over the future deliberations of the Federal Courts in related kinds of matters.

 

A Justice may be removed from term of office by voluntary withdrawal, may be removed by the Permanent Justices on basis of finding of incompetence as to practice at law, or may be impeached for reasons not directly bearing on the Justice’s conduct as to matters of law.

 

  • 2.8 The Federal Legislature

 

The Federal Legislature is divided between an upper house, called the Legislative Court, and a lower house, called the General Assembly.

 

The members are elected either by direct election in a regular, biannual Federal election, or by appointments made by the Presidential electors, to fill a vacancy which may occur.

 

Each house shall elect its own Presiding Officer, and shall not be accountable for this or any other measures of internal organisation of its composition as to special functions and committees by any other body, insofar as this does not infringe in efficient effect upon some constitutional prescription.

 

Each house may expel a member for cause, if the charges presented in a bill of impeachment enacted by a majority of the members of the house shall be substantiated by two-thirds of the members after hearing accusers and the defence before the full body of that house.

 

In the case a member is expelled once on grounds, and the member were returned to the Legislature by the electorate after such expulsion had occurred, the alleged acts for which the member was previously charged publicly in any place shall not constitute competent basis to introduce a bill of impeachment.

 

  • 2.9 Qualifications of Officials

 

The President of the Commonwealth shall be not less than forty years of age at the time of his inauguration to that office and shall have been a citizen of Canada for not less than nineteen years prior to that inauguration.

 

Ministers occupying the positions of the first three Vice-Presidents of the Executive Branch shall have the same qualifications as the President.

 

Other Ministers shall be not less than thirty-five years of age, and shall have been each a citizen of Canada for not less than fourteen years prior to that inauguration.

 

Permanent Justices of the Federal Court, Justices of the Regional Courts’ Tribunals, the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Bank, and members of the Legislative court shall have the same qualifications as the President.

 

Other Justices of the Federal Court, Directors of the Bank other than the Chairman, shall be not less than thirty-five years of age and shall have been citizens of Canada for not less than fourteen years at the time of their inauguration.

 

Members of the General Assembly and Secretaries of Ministries shall be not less than thirty years of age and shall have been citizens of Canada for not less than nine years at the time of their inauguration.

 

No exception to these requirements shall be made for the positions of President, the first three Vice-Presidents of the Executive branch, or Permanent Justices of the Federal Court. In other cases, requirements for a specific person may be reduced by majority-vote for a private Bill to that effect enacted by the Legislature.

 

In respect to other points of qualification of candidates for election or appointment, the Federal electorate shall determine what qualifications it requires by the act of voting, and by efficiently expressing its displeasure with appointments which displease the majority of the citizens.

ARTICLE §3: The Legislative Process

 

All legislation is assorted among four general classifications.

 

Priority Legislation: Declaration of a State of War, Condition of Hostility Between the Commonwealth and some Government or Governments, State of Insurrection, State of Disease or Pestilence Emergency, State of Catastrophe, or any legislation or other proposed action of the legislative bodies directly related to implementation of governmental measures under one of the aforesaid conditions.

 

Privileged Legislation: Any legislation required to be drafted and enacted by this Constitution.

 

Ordinary Legislation: Any proposed or enacted general laws of the Commonwealth which are neither Priority nor Privileged Legislation.

 

Private Legislation: Bills of Impeachment, Legislative Presentiments which address as their specific object some person, particular persons, class of persons defined as a class, or which afford Legislative Relief above and beyond that explicitly required by laws otherwise provided to some person, persons or class of persons defined as a class.

 

In respect to the legislative process, the distinctions and separations of powers, duties and responsibilities of the Legislative court and General Assembly are these.

 

The upper house of the Legislature, the Legislative Court, is the legislative arm of the Constitution itself. The Legislative Court expresses this typically by its exclusive legislative authority, duty and responsibility to:

 

Approve or reject treaty-agreements negotiated with foreign governments by the Executive Branch.

 

Veto and to amend within Constitutionally prescribed limits Bills submitted by the Executive Branch establishing or dissolving functions of the Federal Government other than those explicitly established by this Constitution.

 

Veto appointments of officials of the Federal Government, including both those titles and categories stipulated in this Constitution and all titles and categories of officials of created functions other than those explicitly established by the Constitution.

 

Veto drafted Charters of the governments of the States of the Commonwealth, and Temporary Charters of self-government of local communities established within the Federal Territory.

 

Conduct impeachment proceedings against officials of the Federal Government in all instances but those of internal discipline of the General Assembly. Have sole power to conduct trials of incumbents of any office created by this Constitution, both respecting indictments premised on Federal law, and offences defined as major crimes in which indictment has been effected within a State.

 

Veto bills of the General Assembly by a simple majority of votes cast for the veto within the upper house, except if the bill shall have been reenacted after any earlier veto by a two-thirds majority supporting that bill in the lower house: then, a two-thirds majority of the upper house shall be required to veto such a bill.

 

Be the sole legislative authority for privileged legislation respecting methods and procedures of composition of the Federal electorate and matters pertaining to preparation and conduct of Federal elections.

 

Be the sole legislative authority for all law providing protection of those individual rights of citizens and other persons, as stipulated by definitions provided in this Constitution.

 

Be the sole legislative authority as to the institutional implications, but not the general features bearing upon regular and capital budgets of the Commonwealth, for all contractual agreements, other than treaties with foreign governments, undertaken by the Executive Branch.

 

In such instances, the Bill respecting the contractual agreement is first presented by the Executive to the Legislative Court, which vetoes or amends and certifies the elements of the contract and contract as a whole as to its institutional implications. If such Bill shall pass, either as presented or in amended form, the Bill shall be passed to the General Assembly for legislative disposition as to its budgetary implications.

 

Enact such laws and procedures it deems appropriate and warranted for ordering the internal affairs of the Legislative Court.

 

All other legislative functions, insofar as they are within the bounds of the principles of law provided by this Constitution, are the authority, duty and responsibility of the general law-making body, the General Assembly.

 

The General Assembly has legislative authority, duty and responsibility to:

 

Determine the authorised quantity of new issue of currency of the Commonwealth by the Executive Branch; and make laws governing the price and stocks of new purchases of monetary gold used as a reserve for settling imbalances in the foreign payments accounts of the Federal Bank.

 

Establish such laws as the Constitution permits for the ordering of national banking respecting the authorised capital and operating policies of the Federal Bank.

 

Authorise the level of the national debt of the Commonwealth, on condition that such consequences of this as debt-service obligations and payments and debt-retirement obligations and payments incurred by such legislation shall be acknowledged by the General Assembly explicitly to be exact or estimated sums of present or future items of expenditure of either the regular or capital budget of the Commonwealth, to whichever budget each of the items most appropriately applies.

 

However, the General Assembly shall discourage the accumulation of a large fixed debt for financing the operating budget of the Federal Government, except for temporary short-falls of revenues of the operating budget below authorised operating expenditures. The cumulative debt of the Commonwealth shall be preferably for fruitful capital investments, either by the Federal Government or in the forms of capital-investment loans taken as debt to the Federal Bank or Ministry of Finance by States or performance-worthy private entrepreneurs for fruitful undertakings in the interest of the Commonwealth.

 

Enact laws empowering the Ministry of Finance to regulate the accounting practices and reserve-requirements of private banks, insurance companies, and other private financial institutions.

 

Amend the regular operating budget of the Federal Government, with the restriction that the sums provided by law for the existence of institutions which have been established either by this Constitution or by authorisation of the Legislative Court may not be reduced in part or whole.

 

To amend the regular capital budget of the Commonwealth.

 

To veto or amend supplementary operating and capital budgets of the Commonwealth.

 

To amend or to enact on its own initiative such taxation as is in the form prescribed by this Constitution.

 

Enact all statutes respecting those Federal crimes which are not the privileged authority of the Legislative Court.

 

Enact all other ordinary law not the privileged authority of the Legislative Court.

 

Enact all private Legislation, except those Bills of Impeachment reserved to the upper house.

 

Enact laws and procedures respecting the ordering of the internal affairs of its own house.

 

No legislation may be enacted which subsumes matters of two distinct subjects of this Constitution, except as the matters of currency, credit, banking, debt, operating budget, capital budget are directly interconnected aspects of the whole monetary and economic functioning of the economy of the Commonwealth. No bill shall be drafted or amended in such a manner as to render the will of the legislature on one subject conditional on the will of the legislature on another subject, unless what might appear to be different subjects are proven to be inseparable in some immediate sense of connection.

 

The sole exception to this foregoing rule shall be omnibus legislation enacted solely for the duration of a national emergency period.

 

The distinction between the two categorical legislative functions, of Legislative Court and General Assembly, is between the function of creating, improving and maintaining the Ship of State as capital, and the steering of the Ship of State. In all matters pertaining to the first of these functions, the Legislative Court is the sole legislative authority. In the second, the General Assembly is the original legislative authority, subject to veto by either or both the Legislative Court and President of the Commonwealth.

 

A two-thirds vote in support of any Bill previously enacted by the General Assembly and reintroduced to that Assembly after veto of an original Bill by the Legislative Court, President of the Commonwealth, or both, shall uphold that Bill unless the Legislative Court shall affirm the previous veto by a two-thirds majority of its members.

 

The Legislative Court is a deliberative body of matured representatives of the electorate, relatively freed of the more exuberant passions and hurly-burly of the business of the General Assembly.

 

The members of both houses are the directly elected representatives of the Federal electorate for the States and Federal Electoral Districts each is elected to represent, and are subject to recall by the appropriate section of the Federal Electorate as well as replacement at the conclusion of the term of office of each elected member of those houses. The acts of the Legislature, in whole or part, may not be overridden in the haste of momentary popular passion, but the power of the Federal Electorate is retained, to control the composition and prevailing opinion of each house after due deliberation and through deliberate courses of action.

 

The obstacles which the constitutional process places in the pathway of hasty decisions are obstacles whose intent and necessary function is to oblige representatives and the electorate to force their respective attentions to the general interest of present generations and posterity combined, and to inhibit the expression of those heteronomic impulses of local or special-interest passion which threaten to undermine the rule under law, and which threaten to degrade the condition of the processes of self-government to heteronomic irrationality or even moral anarchy. The true rights of both the individual person and his or her posterity are protected against the crushing oppression of episodic passions of a heteronomic majority. To each citizen and other person, the constitutional process so ordered affords a well-founded sense of dignity and security in the pursuit of a meaningful individual life under a self-government by law. Thus, the principle of rationality embedded in the constitutional specifications of law, law-making and governmental actions that any error of government, if it is indeed error, will be righted and remedied by the processes of lawful self-government. The citizen or other person is rightly assured: “My government commits errors, but it corrects and remedies such errors as the ordering of constitutional law affords it latitude to err.”

 

  • 3.1 Order of Precedence of Legislation

 

At the moment any proposed Act of Priority legislation shall be proposed to either house of the Legislature, the prompt disposition of that proposed Act shall have precedence over continuation of any other business of that house, and over any other matter but another matter of Priority Legislation waiting to be heard in that house.

 

In establishing and maintaining the calendar of each house, Privileged legislation shall have precedence over Ordinary legislation and Private Legislation, except for the special case of proposed bills of impeachment.

 

In some cases, the facts of the matter will warrant the General Assembly’s judgement that a proposed Act of Private Legislation (other than impeachment) should not be delayed. Otherwise, during any session, Ordinary Legislation introduced at the beginning of a session shall have precedence over Private Legislation introduced at that time. This shall not be construed to signify that most Private Legislation must wait until the hurly-burly of the closing moments of a session of the General Assembly; rather, Private Legislation should be settled at the first occasion a hiatus can be located amid the calendar’s Priority, Privileged and Ordinary legislation.

 

The first precedence among proposed acts of Privileged Legislation in the Legislative Court for each session shall be the veto or confirmation of appointments made according to law by the President of the Republic, which nominations shall be placed in consideration before the members and then resolved as speedily as due reflection implies.

 

The second order of precedence among Privileged Legislation presented to the Legislative Court shall be Privileged Legislation presented to the upper house following its enactment by the General Assembly.

 

Precedence among Privileged Legislation in the General Assembly during each year’s calendar shall be afforded certain fixed matters of recurring legislation which the President of the Commonwealth must submit to the General Assembly by not later than the closing business day of February each year. The closing business day shall be the last day of that month which is neither the Sabbath-days of Sunday or Saturday, nor a date established as a national holiday by law.

 

These certain items of recurring legislation are:

 

Bills concerning the issuance of new amounts of currency.

 

Bills concerning changes in the level of authorised public debt of the Federal Government.

 

Bills concerning the Federal Bank.

 

Bills proposing the Federal capital and operating budgets.

 

Bills respecting taxation.

 

The regular bills of this description submitted prior to or on the closing business-day of February each year shall bear the prefixed term “Annual” plus the names or numbers of the fiscal year for which they are submitted in the name of the Bill. All bills of this description submitted after the indicated date, or after an Annual bill of the same category has been previously submitted for that designated fiscal year, are Supplementary bills for that fiscal year, and shall be so identified in the prefixed elements of the name of the bill.

 

Supplementary items of Privileged Legislation have a lower order of precedence than regular, Annual items. However, the General Assembly may choose to combine an Annual and supplementary such Bill into one, common bill, if Supplementary bills have been submitted prior to the date of either mandatory disposition or prior to the date of disposition by the Assembly, whichever date is earlier.

 

Annual bills concerning matters of currency and banking shall be processed by the General Assembly within thirty calendar days of the date the President of the Commonwealth will have presented them to that house. All other annual bills concerning the monetary and fiscal matters of the Federal Government and banking shall be processed by the General Assembly by not later than the last business-day of June of the calendar year.

 

Bills respecting currency, increases of public debt, and banking either may be rejected or may be amended prior to enactment. Bills respecting budgets and taxation may be amended, but not rejected.

ARTICLE §4: Currency & Banking Law

 

All law of the Commonwealth pertaining to the production and distribution of goods, and to matters of currency, credit, debt, and banking, is subsumed under the purpose of existence of the Commonwealth. The purpose of the Commonwealth of Canada is to promote the development of the individual, both the living and posterity, in respect to those divine potentialities imago vivo Dei which distinguish all true persons immediately from all beasts.

 

The security of the individual in such forms of fruitful pursuit of realisation of such development is therefore incorporated into the purpose of the Commonwealth, insofar as the development and pursuits of the individual are consistent with that purpose.

 

 

In that manner, the Federal Government of the Commonwealth becomes the instrument of this purpose, and shares in enjoying the protection of law afforded by that purpose.

 

The relationship of the Commonwealth to other nations is not heteronomic. Those sovereign nation-states which are dedicated to the same purpose respecting their own existence as is this Commonwealth, and which are governed by that perceived congruence of purpose in their efficient intent, constitute an implicit community of principle together with this Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is a sovereign individuality within such a community of principle; we seek to extend such community to include the greatest portion of humanity, and to act to that purpose in the conduct of our relations among the nations and peoples of the world.

 

Those purposes and associated elaboration of purpose govern the ordering of monetary and economic affairs within the Commonwealth and in the external affairs of the Commonwealth.

 

  • 4.1 The Currency of the Commonwealth

 

The legal tender of the Commonwealth shall be only the currency issued by the authority delegated to the Minister of Finance for this purpose. The specifications of the currency shall be determined by law, through legislation presented to and enacted by the Legislative Court. The amount of each new issue shall be determined by law, by enactment of legislation presented to the General Assembly for this purpose.

 

Laws affecting the form and amount of the currency shall be presented to the Legislature by the Minister of Finance, as directed by the President of the Commonwealth.

 

The currency issued by the government of Canada and its laws prior to the inauguration of the first government under this Constitution shall be honoured as legal tender, as if it has been authorised for issuance under this Constitution. The possession of such currency of earlier issue by the Federal Bank shall automatically empower that Bank to present such currency as a claim for payment against the account of the agency which originally issued it. This shall be a claim for payment, or for consideration of value equal to payment, against private banks which may have issued such currency or other form of tender, or shall be a bookkeeping adjustment for the case of currency or other form of negotiable tender issued by the government prior to establishment of government under this Constitution. All further specifications of withdrawal of such earlier currencies from circulation shall be defined by laws enacted to this effect.

 

The currency issued by the Commonwealth shall consist only of either coin or gold-reserve notes of the Ministry of Finance. Monetary stocks of gold possessed by the Ministry of Finance for this purpose shall be priced at the current market-price on world markets for purchase of replacement-stocks of gold bullion from mines selling on the world market. Disbursements of such gold stocks of the Ministry of Finance shall occur only for settlement of shortfalls in the Commonwealth’s foreign balance of payments, and such disbursements shall be made only to governments or central banks which have entered into agreements to settle international payments among themselves at such a prevailing world-market price for purchase of gold bullion from mines.

 

The prevailing market-price of gold shall be determined as a parity price, determined as the aggregate of a standard cost of production by mines plus a competitive margin of gross profit to miners. Standard cost shall be determined according to the estimated effects of bringing into production mines on a scale sufficient to satisfy world requirements for new stocks of gold over an extended period.

 

The Federal Government is awarded the power to regulate tariffs and foreign commerce of the Commonwealth to the purpose of regulating the shortfall in the national balance of payments on foreign account. This is to be understood as the authority to protect private agriculture and industry. of the Commonwealth against efforts to dump goods or services into the internal market of the Commonwealth at prices below a fair determination of a parity price.

 

COMMENTARY

 

As a matter of economic fact pertinent to law, the following cautionary statements are interpolated as advice respecting the interpretation of this Constitutional provision.

 

The use of “parity price” has had its broadest and usually most-impassioned occurrence in connection with agricultural production. The problem has been that the fostering of increased yields per hectare and per man-year in agriculture since our earliest knowledge of Mesopotamia and Egypt has been broadly inseparable from the family-owned and family-operated farm, in which a family or group of families share ownership, and functions as entrepreneurs, technologists, and skilled labour as one and the same person. For related reasons, such farms are easily looted and destroyed by the action of powerful combinations of purchasing agencies which create artificial degrees of competition among individual farmers and groups of farmers. At issue in such a development is not only the unjust victimisation of the farmers, but a peril to the nation’s supplies of food and fibre. Hence, on those two grounds of argument in law, wise governments have intervened to regulate the conditions of the market for agricultural product in nations as a whole and in respect to world trade.

 

The application of the “parity price” policy of law to agriculture has proven both its feasibility and general merit, despite some vehement objections from impassioned ideologues of the “free trade” variety of pagan religious profession.

 

The attempts to extend the same policy of law to other sectors of production of goods have been less pleasing in results, a misfortune which is not lacking in ascertainable political causes. The danger is that the specific methods and procedures employed by government to determine parity price for a category of goods produced may foster obsolescence in affected sectors of production, both as to techniques of production and design of goods produced. This arises as a problem of government not because a fair and workable parity price could not be determined; such a price could be determined. It arises because of the cupidity of politicians and political parties, which attempt to buy votes in effect through fostering distorted values of parity price.

 

The most practicable remedy for potential abuses is found in the area of taxation-policy. If a high, graduated rate of taxation of income at levels above a certain base-level exists, but with general investment tax-credits to farms, firms, holders of paid-in equity and savers represented by unpaid balances of loans, and if investment tax-credits are directed to promote technological progress in production and transport of goods, “parity price” or “fair price” protection for industries will tend to serve its proper purpose, and standard direct costs of industries so protected will decline progressively.

 

Insofar as competition is determined only by the amount of investment, technology, skill and diligence of an industry in respect to both methods of production and quality of product, it is generally undesirable that government intervene by regulation of price-environment. The only general exception to that is the fostering of the development of some new industry whose development is in the national interest, but which can not reasonably achieve internationally competitive standards during less than some medium-term period.

 

In general, the government should restrain itself from employing its implicit power to intervene except to either defeat efforts to introduce unfair forms of competitiveness or to introduce anarchy into the market of a sector of production or distribution, or to foster the development of some new branch of industry for which latter case a clear determination of national interest to this effect exists.

 

The cases of the English colonies in eighteenth-century North America and the young United States are an appropriate case-study, as is the case of post-1868 Japan, or the case of the successful industrialisation of Germany through measures typified by the work of Friedrich List during the nineteenth century. Where reasonable measures of protection were employed, the United States prospered in development, as it did under Presidents George Washington, John Adams, Monroe, John Quincy Adams and Lincoln. Where rampant “free trade” policies prevailed, as under Jefferson, Madison, Jackson, and Van Buren, economic catastrophes ensued directly from this.

 

The relatively successful transformation of the economy of France, under Charles de Gaulle’s leadership of the Fifth Republic, is exemplary of relevant cases for study, as are certain features of the relatively more successful periods of progress in prosperity among nations within the European Community.

 

The limited application of the power to defend a determined parity-price, as suggested in this commentary, serves the nation well. Although, from the standpoint of economic science, parity prices could be accurately and usefully determined for a greater range of applications, the tendency for cupidity among political parties and politicians forewarns us against permitting governments to employ parity-price methods more broadly than the clearest evidence of national interest as a whole requires.

 

END OF COMMENTARY

 

 

The currency issued by the Minister of Finance shall be distributed only through the Federal Bank. The Bank, in turn, shall issue such currency only through secured loans, as the Bank is authorised to make loans of such assets by law.

 

The Federal bank shall issue such currency in three categories of transactions, as it is directed to do so by law or is afforded the discretionary power to do so by law.

 

The Bank may be the direct lender to the Federal Government, the government of a State, a municipality, or to such business undertakings in which the Federal Government conducts business as a matter of Public Works or as an investing partner associated with private interests.

 

The Bank may participate in a portion of the total amount of a loan granted by a private lending institution to a borrower.

 

The Bank may issue loans to private lending institutions by discounting securities pledged to the Federal Bank for this purpose.

 

The circumstances and manner in which each such action shall or may occur shall be determined by law enacted by the General Assembly. The General Assembly is limited explicitly in its powers in this matter only by the relevant provisions of this Constitution.

 

The General Assembly shall determine which categories and sub-categories of lending by the Federal Bank are authorised by law, and shall determine also the maximum amount of lending authorised during a specified period as new issues of lending.

 

Borrowing from the Federal Bank on this account by the Federal Government is determined solely by the regulation of the authorised public debt of the Federal Government by the General Assembly. However, the accumulation of a large public debt to meet requirements of the operating budget of the Federal Government is to be deplored in the clearest and strongest terms, as has been emphasised in another part of this Constitution.

 

The Federal Government shall borrow from the Federal Bank at the Federal Government’s discretion, within the limits established for the public debt by law. The Federal Government, with aid of the advice of the Directors of the Federal Bank, shall determine what proportions of borrowing from the Bank and from the public market are. the most prudent recourse.

 

The Federal Government shall not borrow against the public debt from foreign lenders without explicit consent by act of the General Assembly. The General Assembly shall determine whether or not the Federal Government shall be authorised to borrow from foreign sources, and in what maximum amount. The Federal Executive shall determine from whom to borrow, with aid of advice from the Directors of the Federal Bank.

 

The Federal Bank shall issue loans against deposit of new issue of currency by cashier’s check of the Bank. Such check shall be drawn on authorisation of a loan agreement which has been negotiated with the borrower by authorised officers of the bank. At the time the loan-agreement has been signed by the authorised parties and countersigned to reflect approval by empowered loan-review committees, the designated officer of the bank shall issue a disbursement-order causing the proper cashier’s check to be drafted and delivered to the borrower.

 

These loan-agreements shall bear a borrowing charge within a range established by law. The President of the Commonwealth shall include in appropriate privileged legislation proposed ranges of borrowing costs for stipulated categories of lending against the issue of currency notes. The Bank shall exercise its discretion in selecting the applicable borrowing cost within lawfully established ranges.

 

The currency shall be placed into circulation through issue of cash to the banking institution in which the borrower maintains that account to which the cashier’s check of the Federal Bank is deposited.

 

The general purpose of such loans shall be to cause the utilising of goods-producing capacities which would lie fallow without the margin of lending represented by these modes of new issue of currency. Such loans represent sums which are used principally for purchases of materials, semi-finished goods, new, improved items of goods-production or goods-transporting capacity, and employment of goods-producing labour. The supply of credit directed to fostering commerce in sales of goods and services, except for the transportation of produced goods, should be chiefly, and usually supplied by private lending-channels, and not new issues of currency.

 

The general effect of such loans shall be to promote increases in the average national productivity per capita in production of useful goods, with emphasis upon capital-intensive modes of technological improvement of the production of goods.

 

What is to be avoided and abhorred is the employment of the credit-creating powers of government for funding of expansion of non-goods-producing categories of employment and commerce. In such ill-advised practices lie the viruses of inflationary credit-expansion.

 

All loans on capital account to entities of or controlled by the Federal Government shall be entities under the direction of the Minister of Public Works and National Resources. These entities shall be authorised to borrow by means of relevant items of the Federal capital budget. The loan issued to such an activity under direction of the Minister of Public Works shall be repaid from all or some combination of (a) income earned by the entity, (b) public sale of the entity as a public-stock corporation, (c) public sale of bonds of the entity, (d) disbursements allotted to that purpose by the Federal budgets.

 

In this connection, it is to be stressed that the Federal Government may properly use its powers to create entities for any among three categorical purposes. (a) To create a public work which the Federal Government intends to operate and maintain for the foreseeable future period, (b) To establish an entity intended to be sold to a private interest, under those conditions in which the existence of the entity is in the national interest and in which the creation of the entity in time cannot be reasonably expected to occur without such intervention by the Federal Government, (c) To assist a State government or to assist a municipal government which the State government has authorised to seek such assistance from the Federal Government. In the last of these three instances, it shall be the agreed intent of the parties that the State or municipal government shall purchase the entity from the Federal Government.

 

Capital expenditures for facilities of the Ministry of Defence, as well as all other capital expenditures in buildings and other physical assets, shall be under the title of Public Works and National Resources, to whose control such assets shall revert if and when another element of the Federal Government shall cease to require their use. In principle, other elements of the Federal Government shall be tenants in possession of such assets for the period such assets are assigned for the use of said elements.

 

 

  • 4.2 Other Federal Bank Functions

 

The Federal Bank is the bank of deposit and disbursement accounts for the Federal Government, which accounts shall be designated as accounts of the Minister of Finance, and otherwise designated in each case by a name and number indicating the function of that specific account with respect to receipts and disbursements of the Federal Government.

 

The Federal Bank is also the central clearing-bank for the Commonwealth of Canada, and shall earn an amount determined by the Legislature for this service.

 

The Federal Bank is empowered to negotiate and receive such loans of capital from domestic and foreign sources as the Bank is authorised to do categorically by laws enacted by the Legislature and subject to the direction of the President of the Commonwealth.

 

The Federal Bank is empowered, as the President of the Commonwealth may direct and as the Legislature shall provide by appropriate authorising acts, to lend in international markets. It shall act, to the limit it is authorised to do so, as the Federal Export-Import bank of the Commonwealth, either as sole lender or prime lender for the export and import of goods. It shall make loans to foreign governments under the same categorical restrictions when instructed to negotiate such lending by the President of the Commonwealth.

 

The Federal Bank is also the day-to-day regulatory agency with respect to all banks, insurance companies and related financial institutions of the Commonwealth. In the same way, the Bank also supervises the transparency of foreign-based financial institutions seeking or continuing business with or within the Commonwealth. In these matters it acts as the agent of the auditing functions of the Ministry of Finance, subordinate to and complementing those functions of the Ministry of Finance.

 

All exchange of foreign currency, claims against foreign currency, export of currency of the Commonwealth or claims against that currency shall be processed through the foreign-exchange clearing-facilities of the Federal Bank, and implicitly subject to such regulation by the Bank as the Bank may be directed to employ mandatory or discretionary use of such powers by the President of the Commonwealth according to laws on this subject enacted by the Legislature.

 

This shall not be construed to prevent nationals or persons of foreign nationality travelling in the Commonwealth from transporting amounts of currencies appropriate to their personal convenience across the border of the Commonwealth. The General Assembly shall enact appropriate legislation in this matter at its discretion.

 

Under the title of Annual or Supplementary legislation pertaining to the Federal Bank, the General Assembly shall enact appropriate legislation pertaining to the regulation of a well-ordered private banking system for the Commonwealth, which shall include all savings institutions, insurance companies and related varieties of financial institutions under such regulation.

 

Legislation regulating banking shall not prevent State governments of the Commonwealth from authorising the establishment of private banks within the border of that State, nor from regulating private financial institutions within that State, excepting branches of the Federal Bank operating within that State. The general principles of precedence of categories of law-making powers under constitutional law otherwise apply to the discretionary powers of the governments of States in this and related matters.

 

The included purpose of legislative acts regulating financial institutions shall be to restrict the general power to create credit within the nation’s financial institutions to (a) credit created by the Federal Government’s new issues of currency, and (b) credit generated on the basis of paid-in deposits currency to lending institutions. It is the creation of “book money” by domestic or foreign lending institutions or complexes of financial institutions which is to be suppressed.

 

COMMENTARY ON “BOOK MONEY”

 

Assume the hypothetical case, that a foreign bank issues a check to a person or national public or private institution of the Commonwealth, and in return obtains a debt from the Canadian recipient. Later, it is discovered that the bank’s check was to one degree or another an unsupported I.O.U., later supported by the Canadian’s debt listed as an asset on that foreign bank’s books. One would cry havoc! “A swindle!”

 

Precisely so. Over the course of the 1970s, especially following U.S.A. events of August 1971, such a “swindle,” or approximation thereof, became commonplace international practice, and a principal cause of the deadly global inflation afflicting so many nations during the relevant period. The ratio of deposits to lending of certain complexes of such unregulated, “offshore” financial groups was often in the vicinity of an order of magnitude less than was required of the banking systems of nations which became those “off-shore” bankers’ debtors.

 

The Commonwealth of Canada is now to issue a gold-reserve backed currency, in which the gold value of that currency reflects the wealth-producing powers of Canada’s economy and people. Are we to exchange our good currency, so founded in true value, for a relatively valueless scrap of paper issued by whatever small islands are generating such fictitious assets under the auspices of financial lawlessness in such places?

 

We oblige foreigners, therefore, to provide credible transparency of the relevant features of deposits and other assets of their financial institutions before we honour their financial paper under our laws.

 

Meanwhile, with respect to domestic financial institutions, the Federal Government takes the constitutional responsibility to forestall monetary inflation, both by regulating its own conduct and by preventing private interests from subverting the value of the currency by means related to the production of “book money.”

 

END COMMENTARY

 

  • 4.3 Fostering Technological Progress

 

The Federal Government is given authority and responsibility to be the sole creator of increased volumes of credit, in excess of both the credit extended by sellers to buyers and credit generated on the basis of paid-in cash deposits to lending institutions. To this end, the Federal Government is given authority and responsibility to regulate financial institutions established within the nation or doing business within or with the nation.

 

Except as stipulated, there should be virtually no creation of credit within the nation’s economic life.

 

This places upon the Federal Government a two-fold responsibility for providing adequate sums of well-regulated credit, to the effect that productive labour be afforded optimal opportunities for employment, and that no worthy public work, farm or firm shall fail for reason of want of adequate credit at reasonable prices to all credit-worthy borrowers; yet, this credit must be issued in such a manner as to prevent inflationary credit-expansion.

 

To compose the relevant institutions and practices of the Federal Government in the manner these functions require, we have restricted the lending of newly created Federal Government credit to a combination of public works, hard-commodity foreign trade, and to participation in loans extended in expanded production of goods and distribution of newly produced goods.

 

By fostering technologically progressive investment in production and distribution of new goods produced by farms and firms, we foster the expansion of productive employment and the currency-base of the economy in the manner which provides adequate generation of credit by sellers and depository institutions for other needs but those of production and distribution of newly produced goods.

 

This restrictive lending policy of the Federal Government enables that Federal Government to saturate the banking-system with credit, without generating inflationary modes of credit-expansion.

 

The regulatory authority of the Federal Government in these matters is to ensure not only that newly created credit serves its intended function but also that no inflationary or other debasement of national currency and credit erupts within the private financial community of the nation or through action of foreign agencies.

ARTICLE §5: The General Law

 

In the history of Mediterranean-centred civilisation, over a span of more than 2,500 years, the meaning of the term law for practice has meant predominantly either the oligarchical or republican doctrine of law. The oligarchical law is epitomised by such cases as the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle and Roman Law. The opposing tradition of law, republican law, is associated with Solon of Athens, Plato, St. Augustine, Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, the Erasmians of England and France, and such German authorities in natural law as Leibniz and the Prussian law-commentator Puffendorf.

 

The general interpretation of law for the Commonwealth of Canada is the standpoint of republican law, and hostility to the oligarchical current running through such exemplars as Aristotle and Roman Law.

 

  • 5.1 Separation of Church & State

 

Although modern republican law traces its literary origins from the work of the Seven Sages of Greece and Plato, the form in which that law has been transmitted into the development of European civilisation since the Irish renaissance and Charlemagne has been Apostolic Christianity as identified by the Nicene doctrine and the commentaries of St. Augustine. Western republican civilisation is consequently Christian civilisation. If and only if the separation of church from state is situated in the context of Christian civilisation is the whole matter of constitutional and ordinary law properly understood by courts and other institutions occupied with the profession of practice at law.

 

The key reference on which one usefully focuses, to resolve the apparent paradoxes of separation of church from state is the work of the fifteenth century’s Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa, beginning with Cusa’s Concordantia Catholica. Special emphasis in study and application of law is to be placed upon Cusa’s formulation of the ecumenical doctrine, including such of his writings as De Non Aliud and De Pace Fidei. The principles underlying law which are common to the Nicene doctrine, the Judaism defended by Philo Judaeus of Alexandria, and the Islam of Ibn Sina’s Metaphysics are common principles of those religions, so defined, and of any body of law which is congruent with such an intersection of the cited three.

 

This is the reference-point for defining the proper basis for separation of church from state. Any body of professed religious belief which is congruent with such principles is a protected right of private choice of practice, but no one body of such professed belief may acquire any of the privileges of an established religion or church.

 

  • 5.2 Natural Law

 

The notion of natural law, opposed to Aristotle, consistent with republican law, is centred for human understanding in the following terms of reference.

 

The rational individual locates the source of that rationality in the individual’s perception that each individual life is mortal, a mere ephemeral in the breadth and duration of humanity and within the universe as a whole. To rise above the moral condition of a mere beast, the individual must contribute to an enduring Good beyond the limits of merely any immediate benefit to his or her mortal passions, to some Good which radiates from the practice of the individual into the breadth and duration of humanity and the universe in which humanity as a whole is situated.

 

It is only as the individual rises above hedonism and hedonism’s intrinsic irrationalism, to become the instrument for a higher purpose greater than the individual’s mortal life, that morality, rationality, and true law become possible for mankind.

 

The problem confronting each moral individual is the problem of discovering in what way the consequences of the individual’s acts, and acts of omission, are ordered in respect to the breadth and duration of reality outside the scope of the ephemeral mortal life of that individual. To this end, there can be no efficient morality or law, unless the individual is governed by knowledge of the lawful composition of cause and effect in the universe more broadly.

 

It happens, that mankind proves the efficiency for good or bad of the policies of societies in the rise and ebb of cultures and nations over thousands of years. Mankind proves the appropriateness or failure of adopted policies by the effect of those policies in determining what is most efficiently named the potential relative population-density of mankind, man’s progress in greater mastery of nature, expressed as an increase in the power of the individual, an increased power expressed as an advancement of the individual’s knowledge of practice.

 

These advances prove that certain directions of improvement in knowledge governing practice are in greater agreement with the lawful ordering of the universe. Although man’s knowledge at any time is always imperfect, always waiting to be superseded by the next scientific revolution in technology of human productive practice, there is a facet of such progress which endures all such scientific revolutions: the provable principles of discovery which order a succession of advances in such knowledge.

 

Thus, although we usually view technological progress as a source of increased material benefits to the nation and its individual persons, accompanying the possibility of such benefits, there is something divine. That divine correlative is the increase of agreement between man’s actions of Creation and the lawful ordering of Creation. Man becomes in this way, equipped to be the more efficient Gardener in the service of the Creator, ordering changes in the universe according to those lawful principles embodied in the lawful composition of Creation.

 

The Erasmian tradition in education has demonstrated that a classical education in literate language, accompanied by classical principles of poetic and musical composition, painting, sculpture, architecture, and geometry, produces in the graduate of secondary schools so ordered an individual in whom all of the potentialities have been cultivated, an individual empowered, in the words of Shelley, to impart and receive profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The superior aptitude of the person benefiting from such a classical education for science is but an inseparable facet of a larger whole. Technology is man’s duty, man’s day-to-day work. It is the whole individual’s divine potentialities which are the self-evident object served in an indispensable manner by technological progress.

 

It is the coherence of scientific progress with the conceptions of great poetry, music, drama, painting, sculpture, and architecture, which the people of a great nation seek to perfect and to celebrate in common, as a reflected expression of the Goodness of which man’s divine potentials render mankind capable. It is that Goodness for which the constitutional republic is properly the instrument.

 

The special significance of the Golden Renaissance for mankind’s present comprehension of these conceptions of natural law is the emphasis placed upon the development of the sovereign nation-state republic. A people speaking one of a collection of relatively brutish local dialects or argots is a brutalised people, morally incapable of self-government. The development of the individual in terms of a literate form of language, in the power to think and to impart and to receive profound and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature, is the necessary basis for ordering the affairs of mankind. The proper ordering of human affairs must be based on sovereign nation-states among peoples sharing appropriate moral principles in common and also deliberating matters of self-government in a common literate form of language.

 

We republicans of today are the heirs of St. Augustine, of Italy’s Golden Renaissance, and of the great Erasmian movements of sixteenth century England and France, typified for France by Henri IV, Richelieu, Mazarin, Colbert and the Oratorian teaching-order. It is only by avowing the unity of an English-speaking and a French-speaking population in terms of that Erasmian heritage that the Commonwealth of Canada finds a basis for a unity that may endure.

 

O, Canada, let the common use of a literate English and French for national affairs be the rule, but this can be durably accomplished only if the noblest form of the English and the French languages are the standard of popular literacy, and if the rich contributions of your immigrants from numerous parts of the world are lovingly assimilated as the shared heritage of all of your people. Where two languages exist as they do in Canada, the differences arising from language must be bridged by a powerful unity in conscious perception of shared moral principles, and in which each of the languages is raised to the highest degree of literacy of which it is capable.

 

  • 5.3 Morality & Law

 

In Plato’s writings, the writings of St. Augustine, of Dante Alighieri’s Commedia, the most essential secrets for ordering of ordinary law and judicial decisions is provided, in connection with the three qualitative levels of moral development of which the individual is capable.

 

On the lowest moral level, the individual represents the “Inferno” of Dante’s Commedia. The individual is an irrational hedonist, a philosophical anarchist, an existentialist or structuralist. Legal arguments from the philosophical stand-point of judgement of hedonism, anarchism, existentialism, structuralism, or such derivatives of these as fascism have no standing in the general law of the Commonwealth of Canada.

 

Unfortunately, only a rare few individuals have succeeded in locating their sense of personal identity in being a useful instrument of the Logos, as Dante portrays such development within the “Paradise” canticle of his Commedia. This does not signify that the individual does not eat, does not enjoy certain forms of pleasure. It signifies that the individual requires such mortal means as those means are the mediation of accomplishing self-development and practice to a higher purpose.

 

Most of the moral persons within societies belong to the moral categories Dante portrays in the various cantos of his “Purgatory” canticle. Such persons are men and women of good will and of conscience. Although these men and women are seized from moment to moment of life by pursuit of gratifications and security of ephemeral mortal life, they restrain those impulses which they recognise to be in contradiction to a higher ordering of natural law in Creation. These are, generally, the citizens of a republic, a rational citizenry to the extent their knowledge and mortal passions permit them to act as rational persons.

 

The Commonwealth of Canada is not St. Augustine’s City of God, a “New Jerusalem” standing midway between Heaven and Earth. A republic based on a rational citizenry recruited from the ranks of Purgatory can only hope to be what Plato describes as the “second-best form of republic,” a constitutional republic, in which the constitutional ordering of affairs and constitutional law mediates the force of wisdom to the conscience-informed practice of the general citizenry.

 

This three-canticle ordering of the moral development of the individual has many reflections in the shaping and application of ordinary law, including law as it bears on the maturation of the child into adult, on the definition of criminal mind, and the definition of insanity.

 

The child is born as an irrational hedonist but with a divine spark of potentiality to become a human adult. The irrational hedonism of the infant is the form in which the law recognises the doctrine of “original sin.” It is the child transformed into an adult, weaned of irrational hedonism and of dependency upon parents, assuming the full responsibilities of a rational adult, who is qualified to be a citizen.

 

It ought to become the standard, that successful matriculation through a secondary institution, after an assimilation of classical education, ought to be a formal precondition for full rights of citizenship, although defects in qualifications for citizenship do not necessarily disqualify the individual in respect to rights of an adult person.

 

The criminal mind and insanity are both expressions of “infantile regression.” The criminal is the irrational hedonist who asserts actions against the law in defiance of the lawful requirement that the person order behaviour by intent to submit to dictate of a rational conscience. The insane person is one who has disassociated his or her consciousness from significant aspects of rationally ordered reality in order to assert in practice the impulses of an infantile irrational hedonism. Both expressions of irrational hedonism are to be denounced as immorality, and their effects to be contained efficiently with aid of humane efforts to rid the person afflicted with infantile regressions of domination by infantile, or by irrational hedonistic impulses and beliefs.

 

The further obligation of society is to order the development of the child, especially through education and through influencing the cultural environment to which the child is exposed, to uplift the child to rationalism with aid of a classical education and classical culture as rapidly as is determined to be possible by all reasonable means.

 

There is no right to expression of or cultivation of irrationalist hedonism in a constitutional republic.

 

  • 5.4 Rights of Persons and Associations

 

The development and propagation of ideas other than irrational-hedonistic incitements is the subsumed purpose of society’s activity from day to day, together with the freedom to practice attempted contributions to the improvement of society and individual condition according to moral forms of ideas.

 

The principle governing this is efficiently illustrated by the proper view of the meaning of “free press.” Freedom to communicate ideas is constrained by the law’s abhorrence of irrational hedonistic incitements and by the authority of truth. Any statement or interpretation of fact which is publicised orally after being contrived in good faith and promulgated to some morally acceptable purpose must be a privileged ‘ statement under the law, unless it be clearly defined as irrationalist-hedonistic incitement. This must be the only standard for proceedings in libel and slander under statute and civil law.

 

Association is governed by the same principle of privilege as public communication, on condition that the practice of that association is not criminal under law, nor a violation of constitutional law.

 

COMMENTARY

 

The sensitive area for judgement under law in matters pertaining to associations is the problem of balancing necessary forms of regulation of associations against the risk of infringement on the privilege of association itself. This matter is simplified by dividing between ordinary business associations, not including associations engaged in publishing or distribution of publications, and other associations.

 

Financial associations warrant the relatively greatest degree of supervision of their standards of practice. Other businesses less so categorically. Other, non-business associations, should be broadly viewed as either political associations or bodies tantamount to political associations.

 

The sensitive areas for publishing activities are typified by the case of pornography. Pornography has been afforded far, far too much license during the course of the recent two decades. It is a dangerous form of irrational-hedonistic political incitement, most dangerous as such political propaganda when directed to susceptible adolescent youth. Any contrary opinion by any court has been a plain error in respect to judgement of fact, and hence as to law. The close association of pornography networks, such as that linked to Playboy, with the promotion of mind-destroying recreational substances, is not coincidence, nor is there a coincidence in the links of the porno-drug lobbyists’ network to violence-prone associations such as the U.S. Yippies and pro-terrorist political associations internationally.

 

The problem of law in matters which some persons might regard as pornography is that the judgement as to law must be premised on determination of fact as to purpose of the act being reviewed. If the purpose is shown to be preponderantly, explicitly or implicitly, the promotion of irrational hedonistic impulses, the action is objectionable.

 

The fact that a borderline problem as to judgement exists is illustrated efficiently by the cases of Chaucer and Boccaccio’s Decameron. The latter is a powerful attack against the degeneracy it portrays, was intended so and had such a political benefit. Whereas, Henry Miller, or modern “naturalistic” or “realistic” entertainment produced for a purely commercial purpose clearly falls into irrational hedonistic propaganda either explicitly (Henry Miller) or implicitly (the “pandering” quality of commercial-only materials employing pornographic elements).

 

Some regulation of petitioning and election practices may be required, apart from ballot-security measures. These should be limited to providing both the association and society an orderly means for exercise of a privileged activity in an efficient manner. (Permitting an organisation to hold political rallies only in a swamp several miles from the nearest centre of population is clearly an unlawful measure.)

 

In general, except as the Constitution provides categorical guidelines for regulation of associations, the Legislative Court and Federal Court should strongly discourage any attempt to regulate against anything but criminal association and irrational hedonistic incitement.

 

END OF COMMENTRARY

 

 

  • 5.5 Criminal Justice

 

The primary function of law-enforcement bodies of the Federal Government and States is not that of detecting and punishing offenders after the fact of an offence. The primary function of law-enforcement bodies is to prevent the occurrence of crime and to minimise the impact of criminal associations and criminal acts upon society. The means required for this proper purpose include the detention of perpetrators of offences.

 

The regular functions of law-enforcement are chiefly twofold, to keep the peace among and in defence of the general body of citizens and other persons, and to wage war against what are properly to be viewed as criminal associations and their influence.

 

COMMENTARY

 

For purposes of constituting law-enforcement institutions and ordering the functioning of courts and places of confinement, we distinguish broadly among professional criminals and offences perpetrated within the context of families, other close personal associations, and drinking-places, sports exhibitions, and so forth. Among persons usefully classed as habitual criminals, we have neighbourhood criminals, such as one or two thieves operating together in some “territory” for a period of time, living in the vicinity of that neighbourhood or visiting it for criminal purposes. We have more serious forms of criminal associations, up to the level of drug-rings and terrorist-support groups, the latter coordinated internationally.

 

The first sort of criminal activity, typified by “family crime,” is the duty of forces of ordinary peace officers. The second category, professional criminals and criminal associations, require law-enforcement capabilities analogous in quality to a national secret intelligence service.

 

A good law-enforcement structure might be built up as follows. The primary peace-keeping units are local police units, each with its own self-contained headquarters. Walking neighbourhood patrolling officers are supported by mobile units (today, using radios carried by foot officers). The local headquarters has its own staff of detectives and administration of case-processing. At a higher echelon, a number of local units are commanded by a regional headquarters, in which special task-forces and criminal-intelligence functions are based. Independent local law-enforcement organisations are coordinated on a State and national level by law-enforcement intelligence networks, with aid of a State-wide and Commonwealth-wide law-enforcement intelligence agency. The State-wide and Commonwealth-wide agencies must avoid becoming a “national police force” except for categories of organised crime operating on a scale beyond the resources of law-enforcement agencies of local governments, and as forces which supply detachments to aid local law-enforcement agencies on basis of request and need. It is the national-intelligence function which is crucial.

 

The problem posed by criminal associations is to prevent the necessary measures of crime-control and crime-prevention from evolving into an intrusion on the privileged associations and individual rights of persons. This problem appears more difficult than it is in fact.

 

Case in point: “The sympathisers of international terrorism.” These sympathisers have been conclusively demonstrated in fact to be an integral part of the functioning of a hideous form of criminal association, terrorist gangs, providing logistical and political support for the terrorists, and assisting the terrorists in realising the political intent of the acts of terrorism. A surgically precise law-enforcement-intelligence surveillance of the associations of political sympathisers of the terrorists is clearly warranted, and incurs no colour of infringement of rights of persons who have not associated themselves with advocates of a hideous crime: terrorism aimed at destabilising the lawful order of government itself as well as murder.

 

The principle of law-enforcement action for such cases is elementary. Act on the basis of the nature of probable cause for action. A group which is avowedly sympathetic to terrorists or the use of unlawful recreational substances should be appropriately surveilled for intelligence, without any other law-enforcement action except as probable cause of preparation of or commission of a crime in progress demands this.

 

In the recent practice of the United States under such arrangements as the “Levi Guidelines” and “Civiletti Guidelines,” we have seen the same Attorney-General Civiletti who protected terrorists and drug-advocates from surveillance jealously engaged in organising elaborate political frame-ups against labour, business and political figures hostile to the Carter administration. The use of the law and colour of law for politically motivated harassment of honest persons has been accompanied by virtually condoning terrorists and related criminals of the “left wing.” When the law is enforced for the sake of the law, abuses tend to be endemic errors usually corrected by good administration of law-enforcement.

 

END OF COMMENTARY

 

 

Punishment of convicted offenders shall not be construed by design or interpretation of law as retribution. The function of punishment is to:

 

Remove from society for as long as due process of law permits, the insane, the criminal mind, and the dedicated adherents of criminal associations.

 

To maintain the majesty of the law, not to make the penalty for a lesser offence greater than for a larger offence.

 

To prefer contribution of remedies to victims, when the offender is not insane or a criminal personality, to prolonged imprisonment.

 

Offenders should be classified as follows:

 

Ordinary Offenders: Neither an habitual criminal nor member of a criminal association, and also neither insane nor of criminal mind.

 

Criminal Offender: Neither insane nor of criminal mind, but otherwise either an habitual offender or member of a criminal association.

 

Pathological Offender: Diagnosed as perpetrating offences under the influence of an anarchistic philosophy.

 

Insane Offender: A dissociation from reality, either persisting or recurring, which is relevant to the perpetration of the offence or to the accused’s capability to undergo trial.

 

None of any of the four classes of offenders should be incarcerated at a place of confinement holding members of other classes of offenders, except for pre-trial confinement. No two persons of different classifications should be confined to the same cell or equivalent housing during pre-trial confinement.

 

COMMENTARY

 

Places of confinement for ordinary offenders should plainly be predominantly educational institutions of minimum security, at which a regular week’s goods-producing or technical-specialist labour should be performed and compassionate family visiting arrangements provided to inmates who have passed a probationary period and have not violated reasonable standards of good behaviour.

 

For Criminal Offenders, similar programs should be provided under stricter standards of security, including rigorous precautions against homosexuality.

 

The last two classes of offenders are maximum security problems, and psychiatric problems as well, but subject to psychiatric classification for this purpose, a work-regimen and educational development orientation should be supplied, the latter in hope of fostering a breakthrough to qualitatively improved personalities.

 

The sentences should tend to follow obvious lines of differentiation within the upper and lower limits required by regard for the majesty of the law.

 

The blend of emphasis on rehabilitation and of “destabilising” pockets of criminality and criminal associations should be the governing considerations in sentencing and penal administration. Since, in most cases, members of categories two and three must be returned to society, it is important that the work habits of productive labour be developed in them, with emphasis on goods-producing employment of skilled to semi-skilled competence.

 

END OF COMMENTARY

ARTICLE §6: The National Defence

 

War is the pitting of the will and in-depth logistical and war-fighting capacities of the population of one nation against the will and in-depth war-fighting and logistical capabilities of an opposing nation. If both nations sustain an equal-will to fight, the war is won by the nation which musters a relative advantage in depth of logistical and War-fighting strength in the course of war. The conduct of war combines development of one’s own national will and in-depth capabilities while acting to weaken decisively the relative in-depth capabilities and will of the opposing nation.

 

The capacity to wage war, if necessary, in such terms is an expression of the sovereignty of a nation. The maintenance of a national-defence capability is not to be viewed merely as a matter of preparing to fight a possible war. It is also the organisation of the people of a nation around a patriotic determination to secure the enduring sovereignty of that nation.

 

Consequently, the scale of expenditures and other mobilisation for national defence is properly governed by estimates of the international situation. The establishment of the basic organisation of the institutions of defence is properly a matter independent of any present features of the international situation. Even if we are never required to use it, it must be there. Our willingness to maintain a competent institution of defence measures the efficiency of our commitment to the principle of being a truly sovereign republic.

 

It is impossible to conceive that the conduct of war could ever have any conclusion but the successful, unopposed occupation of the territory of a defeated nation by the armed infantry of the victorious nation. Whatever development occurs in the technology of the arms of warfare, it is the strength of the infantry in depth around which the development and deployment of other arms is properly shaped. It is possible that a war might be aborted by agreement among the warring parties before the territory of one nation were occupied by another; in principle, in any war fought to its ultimate conclusion as war to the finish, it is the delivery of one’s armed infantry to occupy the territory of the opponent which is the end-game of warfare. Whoever is not prepared for the end-game of war, must lose the war against a qualified adversary either in the middle-game or at the beginning.

 

Therefore, the defence of Canada begins with the matter of the infantry. This shall consist of two parts: the regular and reserve military forces of the Federal Government of the Commonwealth, plus a general civilian militia ready to be inducted into military service only under conditions that induction is required by war, military hostilities not formally defined as war, or insurrection.

 

The President of the Commonwealth is the Commander in Chief of the regular and reserve military forces, but exerts no command over the general civilian militia except under emergencies in such manner as the Legislative Court shall determine by law.

 

  • 6.1 The General Militia

 

The general civilian militia is composed of nationals of the Commonwealth who shall receive training in arms, tactics and relevant specialities in such manner as the Legislative Court may determine by law.

 

The general civilian militia may include persons who have received commissions as officers of that militia, as the Legislative Court may authorise by law, but commissioned officers in that militia shall have the status of the regular or reserve military forces of the Federal Government except at such time they are inducted as temporary commissioned officers into the military forces, or the units with which they are associated are inducted as units into military service.

 

The general civilian militia shall be organised into units. Each unit shall be established within a State or the Federal Territory, and shall be based upon an area within that State or the Federal Territory which includes the regular place of residence of the member of that unit.

 

Although the standards for training and promotions within the militia shall be established by the President in such manner as the Legislative Court shall establish by law, the militia remains an entity of the State or of the Federal Territory in which the specific units are located. Those units remain militia units of that State of the Federal Territory until such time those units may be inducted temporarily into military service.

 

  • 6.2 The Military Service

 

The Federal Government shall establish and maintain a sufficient number of commissioned officers, suitably qualified, to meet national requirements for full-scale national mobilisation. This shall include combined officers in active service and in reserve rosters. Reservists may be assigned to training duties with militia units and should be encouraged and aided otherwise to secure civilian employment of a sort consistent with the maintenance of their specialist qualifications in the military service.

 

The Federal Government shall also establish and maintain a combined active-service and reserve roster of non-commissioned officers above the rank of corporal to meet the requirements of full-scale national mobilisation. Some of the reserve non-commissioned officers should be assigned to training duties with the militia, and specialists encouraged and aided to find civilian employment consistent with their military specialities.

 

The programs of military academies and other training activities should be inclusively directed to provide a regular commissioned officer’s corps with a classical and scientific education, in addition to specific military skills. Emphasis in training must stress logistics, including competence to direct the rapid development of functioning economy in occupied regions previously substantially reduced to rubble.

 

To keep military capabilities as intact as possible, under conditions significant portions of trained forces are not required as budgeted standing forces, stress should be placed on productive engineering-projects and analogous assignments, to maintain and enrich so the non-combat aspects of basic war-fighting skills.

 

The general policy is to develop and maintain as great a war-fighting potential in depth as possible without reliance upon a large standing military force to accomplish this.

 

 

  • 6.3 Military Technology

 

In military and other respects, the Commonwealth must maintain itself in the forefront of scientific and technological advancements. Except for special requirements of design of military equipment, all advanced technology of military relevance has an economical realisation in non-military aspects of the economy.

 

The Minister of Defence has the included duty of putting proper military interest in scientific research and applications into the balance, insofar as the budget permits, to foster research and development in all areas of potential interest to military applications.

ARTICLE §7: Local Self-Government

 

All functions of government not assigned to the Federal Government by this Constitution are reserved to the people of each State or to local political units of self-government established within the Federal Territory.

 

  • 7.1 The State Charter

 

The government of a State is established by a charter having the form of a constitution. This charter is established as law if and when it is approved by the Federal Legislative Court.

 

Thereafter, except as the law of a State is subordinate to Federal law and the Federal Constitution, the State functions as an autonomous self-governing body subject to review of its action as to matter of law by the Federal Court.

 

Each State Charter shall establish an executive branch of State government, a legislature of two branches, and a system of state courts.

 

The State shall define its powers to collect taxation and to set tax-rates and establish assessments of taxable valuations, and also its power to delegate taxing and assessing powers to local self-government within the State.

 

The State may not tax the income of residents of the State, except as the Federal Legislature shall elect to return to each of the States a portion of the tax-revenues collected from residents of that State. The State may not tax property in possession and use of the Federal Government, of the Government of another State, or of foreign governments for such cases as the Federal Government may determine by treaty or other law.

 

The State may tax the real estate within the State, determine the rate of taxation to be applied, and determine the manner in which assessments of valuation of real estate are to be made. The State may impose excise taxes as delegated the authority to do so by the Federal Legislature.

 

The State shall conduct all aspects of criminal justice and keeping of the public peace within its territory, except as Federal law may take precedence.

 

The state courts shall be the original courts for legal actions in all private matters but those involving the Federal Government or a foreign government, subject to review of decisions of state courts as to law by the Federal Court.

 

The State is authorised to establish banks within its territory by issuance of charter, and to regulate those banks, subject to Federal Government regulation of all financial institutions.

 

The State shall have authority to conduct public works in all categories delegated to it by act of the Legislative Court, on condition that no Federal public work conflicts with a public work projected by the State, in which case, the Federal public work shall have precedence.

 

The State shall have the power to licence and regulate such categories of professions within its territory as this power is given to it by the Legislative Court.

 

  • 7.2 Municipal Charters

 

Except for local self-government within parts of the Federal Territory, all charters of self-government are issued by the government of the respective State.

 

Local self-government within the Federal Territory is chartered by the Ministry of Public Works and National Resources, subject to law governing a class of such chartering by the Legislative Court.

 

ARTICLE §8: Federal Law

 

Federal Law is the sum of this Constitution, Acts enacted by the Federal Legislature and signed by the President of the Commonwealth, and final opinion by the Permanent Justices of the Federal Court which amends Acts of the Legislature by judicial finding respecting the constitutionality of such Acts.

 

Subsumed under Federal Law are Orders issued by the President of the Commonwealth and Directives Issued by Ministers and by Secretaries and Deputy Secretaries of the Federal Executive and the Chairman of the Board of the Federal Bank. These Orders are Federal Law insofar as they are subsumed under the Constitution or enacted statutes in effect, and insofar as the President of the Commonwealth has delegated the authority to issue Directives by Presidential Order.

 

Foreign Treaties, once approved by act of the Legislature, are also Federal Law.

 

ARTICLE §9: Amendments to the Constitution

 

No Amendment of this Constitution should be entertained which nullifies the entire Constitution on the pretext of professing merely to amend a part of this Constitution. The definitions of the Commonwealth of Canada as a sovereign, constitutional democratic nation-state republic, as defined herein is a provision which cannot be amended in whole or in part without destroying the Constitution as a whole. The process of composition of the Federal Government, and the specified division of authorities, duties and responsibilities among the elements of the Federal Executive and among the Executive, Legislature, Bank, Federal Court and States cannot be altered in part without destroying the composition of government as a whole.

 

Otherwise, this Constitution may be amended by the lowing procedure for enacting a Bill of Amendment.

 

A Bill of Amendment must successfully pass a second hearing after having previously successfully passed a first hearing, on condition that a Federal election intervenes between that first and that second hearing.

 

A Bill of Amendment originates in the Legislative Court. If and only if that bill is upheld in the Legislative Court, the General Assembly and by the President, it passes a first hearing successfully. If it fails to pass a first hearing, it may not be reintroduced in the effort to secure passage of a first hearing until after the next intervening Federal election.

 

The proposed Bill must first secure two-thirds majority in the Legislative Court. It must next secure a simple majority in the General Assembly. If it fails in either place on first presentation, the Bill is dead. If the Bill passes both branches of the Legislature in that order and with those majorities, it is presented to the President of the Commonwealth. If the President vetoes the Bill, the Bill is dead unless the General Assembly overrides the President’s veto by a two-thirds majority.

 

A dead bill is one treated as if its had never been submitted for legislative action. Any favourable vote in either the Legislative Court or the General Assembly is dead as if that vote had never occurred.

 

The Legislature can consider any bill, included a Bill of Amendment as vetoed by the President of the Common wealth, after the President has possessed that Bill for fifteen calendar days without returning it, and may act to override the veto.

 

If the Bill of Amendment passes a first hearing successfully it may be submitted to the Legislative Court for a second hearing after the next Federal election. If the second hearing fails, the Bill is retroactively dead, and cannot be introduced until after the next Federal election, when it may be introduced in the effort to pass a first hearing of the Bill.

 

If the Bill passes both a first hearing and a second hearing, without becoming dead in either effort, the Bill of Amendment becomes law, and is an amendment to this Constitution, so designated by becoming attached as an appendix to this Constitution.

 

 

 

Why Canada Needs The Bering Strait Tunnel, or Philosophy of Railroads for the 21st Century

 [available in a pdf dossier here]

The relationship ofCanada to its railways has always been an existential one; this was true in 1849, the great launching point for 19th century Canadian railroading, as it is true today.

There are even parallels between the two eras, such as the resistance to change that confronted Canada’s early patriots, as it confronts anyone today, who has a greater vision for Canada than the narrow strip and isolated patches of civilization, currently hugging the U.S. border. The future of Canada is the Northwest, with its untold resources and vast supplies of freshwater; it is one of the final terrestrial frontiers.

Canada is now faced with this era’s existential choice: either to develop or collapse. As these words are written the entire international financial system is breaking apart in a series of banking crises, which are only a slight foretaste of what imminently approaches. In the meantime, the condition of the country’s infrastructure grows increasingly wretched; our industries continue to disappear, our companies to be seized by thieving hedge and equity funds, while sovereignty seems no more than a quaint dream. Fortunately, however, Russia, taking up Lyndon LaRouche’s visionary Eurasian Landbridge proposal of the early 1990’s, has offered, both to the US and Canada, to trilaterally build a Bering Strait Tunnel in order to connect the Americas with the entire Eurasian landmass. The Tunnel is in actuality part of a Russian offer of a new relationship between the two great powers, to lead the reorganization of the global economy. A new strategic alliance is in the offing, and the basis for solving the economic crisis is now at hand. A great moment has found us: shall we rise to meet it, or fall victim to our propensity for national littleness? The government of Canada has answered: it claims to not know of Russia’s proposal. Thus it falls to the people to organize themselves and attain to the objective, which their currently elected representatives are too cowardly or incompetent to dare.

When nations take it upon themselves to consider such weighty questions – questions which will undoubtedly affect the entirety of the human race and its posterity, it seems proper that a moment or two be taken to reflect upon the less obvious reasons – at least for the current generation – for this project’s overwhelming importance. It would also be fitting to add to my own voice that of the man who, perhaps more than any other, was responsible for Canada’s first rapid expansion of railroads, an expansion that saved Canada from certain economic ruin beneath the yoke of British rule. The man was Thomas Coltrin Keefer, Canada’s “Prophet of Progress.”

Keefer was born in 1821 into a family of civil engineers, growing up immersed in the construction of one of the greatest infrastructure projects of the period: the Welland Canal, which circumvented the previously indomitable Niagara Falls. Keefer’s father was the first President of the Welland Canal Company, and a close friend of the driving force behind the project – the man who was also the mentor of young Keefer, William Hamilton Merritt. At 17, Keefer left home and spent two years, 1838-40, working on the Erie Canal, the preeminent American engineering school of its day, digesting American System methods and philosophy. Keefer then spent the 1840’s working on the Welland Canal, as well as on other engineering jobs, until 1849, when Merritt, who had just attained one of the top posts in Canada’s colonial government, commissioned him to compose a pamphlet promoting railroad development in Canada, at a time when all of Canada had no more than sixty miles of railway. The pamphlet was entitled Philosophy of Railroads; and it was a direct attack, not only upon the domineering British System of free trade, but also that depraved and bestial conception of man so beloved of the British oligarchy, as well as their philosophers and economists.

The pamphlet’s success was immediate and astonishing. In less than a year Philosophy of Railroads was in its third printing, had been reprinted in scores of Canadian newspapers, and was circulating throughout the United States as well. By 1853 there was also a French edition. One contemporary biographer claimed that Keefer contributed more than any other to the building of railroads in Canada, even though he himself would never actually supervise one’s construction; rather, Keefer’s power was located in his capacity to convey ideas, and to overcome the colonial axioms within the people themselves, which prevented the adoption of American System policies in Canada. As a direct result of his political intervention and the work of Merritt in passing crucial railroad legislation, over the course of the 1850’s Canada’s patriotic circles would build several thousand miles of track, adopt American System protectionism, and lead an attempt during the U.S. Civil War to break Canada away from the British System.

Keefer would go on to play a leading role in the construction of water management systems in a number of cities, as well as to found the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering, serving as its first President. Moreover, he is the only Canadian to have also served as President of the American Society of Civil Engineers. In 1878, as his crowning achievement, Keefer was named the executive commissioner for Canada at the Paris Exhibition, assembling a greater show of domestically produced machine tools than any nation save Germany and the United States. He was one of the first Canadians to agitate for a continental railway; he also had an ecstatic vision for Canada’s economic future when, in 1898, he spoke of a future of high-speed, electrified trains, running silently between clean, well-lighted cities.

Now, to return to the issue at hand. As every true humanist and national patriot has understood, the issue of development is not merely one of balance sheets and cost-benefit analysis; nor is it simply about the expansion of trade and production; but rather, it is a question of the very nature of man: that we have the capacity not only to improve ourselves, but nature as well; that nations must be dedicated to the improvement of their people; that the Hobbesian nightmare of globalization is not inevitable; that we may forge instead that prescient vision of Franklin D. Roosevelt – a community of sovereign nation states, working together for the welfare of all. For this reason is it necessary to speak of the Bering Strait Tunnel not simply as an infrastructure project, but as an idea, as a transformative process with profound economic, cultural and moral implications. Similarly, Keefer himself often referred to the railroad as “the iron civilizer;” or as one of his biographers, H.V. Nelles, wrote, “as a train of consequences as opposed to a simple line of track,” that “the aim of Philosophy of Railroads was to establish a direct linkage between the railroad and the noblest ideals of the age, and to illuminate the process through which steam technology would necessarily advance the material improvement and the moral perfection of man.”

Today we may not speak of “steam technology”, but we surely speak of nuclear fission, thermonuclear fusion, and magnetic-levitation trains. These represent, as Lyndon LaRouche has repeatedly pointed out, the metaphorical fire of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, for the giving of which to humankind the immortal Prometheus is eternally punished by an oligarchic Zeus. As Keefer argues, and as the testament of history proves, great projects have the effect of elevating an otherwise backward population out of their often self-imposed cultural darkness, such as the “Sleepy Hollow” that was early 19th century Canada (see appendix and below). Speaking before the Montreal Mechanics Institute in 1853, he asked,

“is there not reason for belief that the regeneration of the dark corners of the earth is to be accomplished…by a practical elevation of the people, to be brought about by a rapid development of commerce and the arts? Ignorance and prejudice will flee before advancing prosperity. Wherever a railway breaks in upon the gloom of a secluded district, new life and vigor are infused into the native torpor – the long desired market is obtained…the hitherto useless waterfall now turns the laboring wheel, now drives the merrier spindle, the cold and hungry are now clothed and nourished.”

Keefer understood that without economic prosperity, peace and stability would be impossible: whether it was the development of North America then, or the prospects for peace today in the Middle East, the same principle applies. He observed that, “the steamboat and the railroad…have diffused a degree of comfort and prosperity unprecedented in history. Every new manufacture, every new machine, every mile of railway built is not only of more practical benefit, but is a more efficient civilizer, a more speedy reformer, than years of declamation, agitation, or moral legislation.”

But what was it that Keefer and Merritt recognized in the culture that required their intervention? In Philosophy of Railroads Keefer observes, of revolutionary projects and systems, that, “their origin and maturity are the work of the well-informed few, whose foresight has been rewarded frequently before it has been acknowledged… who have contended with the chilling influences of popular apathy, ignorance, and incredulity.” Could Keefer not just as easily be speaking of the national malaise of today? The railway system of Canada was once a source of pride for Canadians – it was a demonstration of our command over nature. We had straddled the vast continental expanses with an iron belt of power; the railways were the sinews and the great commercial arteries of the nation. There was a time when Canada hummed with the excited energy of national expansion, there was nothing that could not be overcome; and yet today, beneath the tyranny of the Baby Boomer generation’s anti-progress ideology, we no longer build, we no longer produce, we only desire to consume, and increasingly the future has become our fare.

Keefer’s answer, which is the central feature of Philosophy of Railroads, is to paint a comic miniature of Canadian society, as true today as it was in his time: a little town called ‘Sleepy Hollow,’ where nothing happens and there are no railroads to trouble the residents with “the hideous screech of the steam whistle;” where the people believe they have “attained the limit of improvement. If they have no waterpower…it is clear to their minds that they were never destined for manufacturing; …it is still more evident, from their position, they are not to become a commercial people and build up large cities; they, therefore, jog along with evident self-satisfaction – the venerable churchyard is filling up with tombstones – and the quiet residents arrive at the conclusion that they are a particularly favored people in having escaped the rage for improvement.” Of course all this changes when the railway comes to town, though first the people suffer from terrible visions of “bloody skirmishes” with railway workers, of “plundered poultry yards and abducted pigs,” of children “‘drawn and quartered’ on the rail by the terrible locomotive”, while the railway engineers and surveyors “are met with curses both loud and deep.”

These terrible visions come to an end, however, when the townspeople begin to realize the manifest benefits that the railroad brings with it: the population is enriched and elevated, for while “our little hamlet [is] undergoing such a wonderful transformation, the moral influence of the iron civilizer upon the old inhabitants is bringing a rapid ‘change over the spirit of their dreams.’” The citizens become worldlier, they become wealthier, more educated, their politics take on a national scope. Progress, “that invisible power which has waged successful war with the material elements, will assuredly overcome the prejudices of mental weakness or the designs of mental tyrants. It calls for no co-operation, it waits for no convenient season, but with a restless, rushing, roaring assiduity, it keeps up a constant and unavoidable spirit of enquiry or comparison; and while ministering to the material wants, and appealing to the covetousness of the multitude, impels them to a more intimate union with their fellow men.”

Keefer playfully finds a way to outflank the culture’s axioms. The individual can look at the silliness of the townspeople and their response to the “terrible locomotive,” and chuckle at finding that same silliness in him or herself; but Keefer does more than that, for he is not just concerned with poking fun at the population – he wishes to uplift the reader to a nobler conception of human potential, and to establish a mission of national progress. There is an urgency to his tone, when, at the close of the pamphlet, he writes,

“…We are placed beside a restless, early-rising, ‘go-a-head’ people – a people who are following the sun westward. …We cannot hold back…we must use what we have or lose what we already possess – capital, commerce, friends and children will abandon us for better furnished lands unless we at once arouse from our lethargy; we can no longer afford to loiter away our winter months, or slumber through the morning hours. …But when once the barriers of indifference, prejudice and ignorance are broken down, no physical or financial obstacle can withstand the determined perseverance of intelligent, self-controlled industry.

We submit the foregoing view of the railway system and our position to it, to the generous and patriotic consideration of every intelligent merchant, manufacturer, farmer, and mechanic – to every Canadian, native or adopted – and ask them: Shall we have Railroads in Canada?”

There is another point of consideration in the case for the Bering Strait Tunnel and great projects in general: the geopolitical and strategic implications, which are understood much more clearly today than in Keefer’s time, thanks to the tireless work of Lyndon LaRouche: the kernel of which is human creativity – the great fear of every imperial or oligarchical system. In his recent paper, Man & the Skies Above, LaRouche writes:

“The great paradox which oligarchism represents, is that the ability of the human species to maintain a level of population above that of the great apes, depends absolutely on those creative powers unique to the human individual mind through which scientific and related discoveries produce the means for increase in both the potential size of population, and its life-expectancy. If the population were permitted to share, freely, the knowledge and freedom to employ such knowledge corresponding to presently knowable scientific and related skills, where would there be inequality on which the oligarchical systems depend?”

“If the capabilities for scientific and related discoveries, which advance the standard of life and power over adversities, make societies stronger, per capita and per square kilometer of territory, why hold back scientific and technological progress? Why insist on wildly hedonistic, irrational entertainments, rather than Classical culture which enhances the individual’s power to think, and sweeten the social relations with other persons? Simply, because the power which such means promote among the generality of the population would bring an end to the system of oligarchy.”

Herein lies the fundamental issue of the Bering Strait project; just as World War I and II were organized by the British oligarchy to destroy Russia and Europe (documented extensively by Executive Intelligence Review), now today these same British networks, typified by BAE, and their lackey, U.S. Vice President Cheney, are driving for expanded war throughout Eurasia.

Thus, the struggle for Eurasian development and a new international financial system, free of oligarchical control, is the latest phase in this Promethean contest for the minds of humankind: the very question of whether the citizens of the world will have the opportunity to participate in scientific and technological progress, whether they will have the opportunity to develop themselves and make positive contributions to the advancement of civilization. These are the issues of statecraft that drive men such as Lyndon LaRouche to make the breakthroughs in science and economy that he has made, and then organize the population to see them implemented; these are the issues that drove Keefer and his collaborators to mobilize Canada around an idea of the future potential of what were still a collection of impoverished British colonies, clinging to the verge of an awesome wilderness of nine million square kilometers. For Keefer, as for LaRouche, the greatest gift that can be given a human being is access to his or her own immortality – something that Globalization denies the vast majority of human beings. In the same 1853 speech, Keefer concluded with this idea of immortality, in the spirit of the ‘pursuit of happiness’ clause of the U.S. Constitution:

“I venture to believe that, as mechanics we may devote some moments to a consideration of the tendencies, the prospects, and the utility of the great enterprises, which give character to the age, and in the execution of which we are in a greater or lesser degree the agents – that this feeling of being useful in our day and generation will while away with a diminished degree of weariness the many hours of labor – that as you ply the busy hammer or wield the heavier sledge, some of you may dream that you are fast driving nails into the coffin of prejudice, of ignorance, of superstition and national animosities; that as you turn down the bearings or guide the unerring steel over all the 500 parts of a locomotive engine, fancy will picture you cutting deep, and smooth, and true, into obstacles which have so long separated one district, one family, one people, from another – and that you may exult in the reflection that those huge drivers will yet tread out the last smoldering embers of discord, that those swift revolving wheels – by practically annihilating time and space and by re-uniting the scattered members of many a happy family – will smooth the hitherto rugged path, fill up the dividing gulf, break through the intervening ridge, overcome or elude the ups and downs of life’s checkered journey, and speed the unwearied traveler upon his now rejoicing way.”

 It is this joyful Promethean impulse which has built Canada into one of the most prosperous nations in the world, not the British imperial legacy. That Canada even exists today is in spite of Britain. This nation – though restrained by British philosophical dogmas, such as Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations or Theory of the Moral Sentiments, in which Smith claims that humans have no capacity to think beyond their sensual appetites, acting only in their immediate self-interest, and that the greater issues of the common good are to be left to the (hopefully) munificent designs of some unknowable deity – has still managed to do many great things. The inspiration for those deeds came not from Britain, but from the U.S. Republic and the republican tradition that found its beginnings in Ancient Greece. Prometheus, the fire-giver, the ennobler of mankind, is the only true identity of Canada’s historical nation-builders. It is this same latent impulse, which the Bering Strait Tunnel calls upon today. Entire peoples await the enlightening force of nuclear power, the rushing sound of the maglev, and the sight of bounteous fields, laden with well-watered crops, where desert once had reigned. Canada has a great role to play in this dawning era, if it so chooses. Canada’s mission and purpose is to be sought not only within the bounds of our own lands, but deep below the arctic sea, across and beneath the Siberian steppe, and in the deserts of Asia and Africa. It begins with the Bering Strait. Thus, as Keefer once before, now again the Canadian LaRouche Youth Movement submits this treatise, to all manufacturers, farmers and people of commerce, Canadians born and newly landed, of all who would see a single nation, dignified and beneficent towards others, and we ask: Canada, shall we build the Bering Strait Tunnel?