00:00:51.340Good news is, I'm going to give the Liberals a hard time.
00:00:55.200The bad news is, it's the classical Liberals.
00:01:00.260The Canadian Confederation was based on liberal ideas.
00:01:04.920In nature, every person has the right to life, liberty, and property, and these rights precede government.
00:01:11.860Classical Liberals believe that governments like Canada were constituted by consenting individuals to protect these rights and to minimize conflict in enforcing them.
00:01:23.500Confederation gave the Canadian state a monopoly on individual rights and using force to do so.
00:01:30.880Liberals knew this authority was dangerous, so the ability of the Canadian state had to be limited in many ways, but we'll focus on three.
00:01:39.940Limit the size and scope of government, operate under known general rules, and be held accountable through democratic representation.
00:01:49.280The authority to compel obedience and levy taxes leads toward unrestricted growth.
00:01:57.820So the Canadian state needed to be limited to things like external defence and the administration of justice,
00:02:04.540the types of public goods that Liberals incorrectly believed that markets struggle to supply.
00:02:11.920Anything beyond this was outside of Ottawa's mandate.
00:02:15.120Canada was not created to redistribute wealth or to regulate industry.
00:02:21.760The justification for Confederation was to make private property and voluntary cooperation more secure.
00:02:29.180The Canadian state had to stay minimal because additional power increased the capacity for abuse,
00:02:36.580and the greatest threat to ordered liberty is an unrestrained state.
00:02:41.100but even a minimal state requires further discipline. Individuals need to plan and they
00:02:49.620need their property to be secure, so liberals demanded that governments operate by known
00:02:55.140general rules. Documents like the BNA Act, the Statute of Westminster, and the Federal
00:03:01.320Reconstitution in 1982 express this demand. A constitution is meant to fix the boundaries of
00:03:07.940authority and bind politicians to those boundaries which are derived from natural rights and
00:03:13.920pre-exist government. Legislation was meant to be general, equally applicable, and subordinate
00:03:20.240to higher law. Courts were expected to enforce these limits. A liberal constitution is not
00:03:27.680a grant of power. It is a recognition of pre-existing natural rights and a set of
00:03:34.940constraints meant to keep the Canadian state within its mandate. Since the authority of the
00:03:41.360state originated in this consent of the governed, that consent needed to be renewable and reciprocal,
00:03:48.820so it made sense that representation through democracy be used to select the delegates of
00:03:54.480the Canadian state. Regular elections and legislative confidence were intended to keep
00:03:59.880the rulers dependent on the ruled. If they aggressed against persons or property, or expanded
00:04:06.260beyond their mandate of protection, the people could withdraw their support. Liberals did not
00:04:12.140treat democracy as an end in itself, or as a channel of unlimited authority. They believed
00:04:18.500it was an imperfect instrument for enforcing the Lockean bargain, that the state remains legitimate
00:04:25.520so long as it protects people's rights and retains their consent.
00:04:30.660Now, none of this worked, and that's basically why we're all here today.
00:04:36.780Alberta separatists have many valid reasons to leave Canada,
00:04:40.480but at its core, it's because a limited state is a utopian fantasy,
00:04:49.120The state possesses two features which no other firm in Canada has.
00:04:53.160a monopoly on ultimate decision-making, and the power to impose compulsory payment, tax.
00:05:00.900It faces no competitive pressure to keep its prices low or its quality high.
00:05:05.460It defines the scope of its services and the meaning of the rights it claims to protect.
00:05:11.320It is funded by compulsory taxes, so it grows without consent. There is no residual owner,
00:05:17.760so there is no long-term interest in restraint. All of this makes Canadian politics subject to
00:05:25.860the tragedy of the commons. Private property and voluntary cooperation become less secure.
00:05:33.340In this way, every minimal state, even an independent Alberta, contains the seed of
00:05:39.640a totalitarian one. A written constitution does not restrain the monopoly, because the state
00:05:47.220itself interprets and enforces the document. Judges, legislators, and the executive are all
00:05:53.900agents of the same apparatus whose power the Constitution is supposed to limit.
00:05:58.880Over time, jurisdiction and residual powers expand to serve the central authority. Emergency powers
00:06:05.860turn constitutions into flexible policy, and individual rights become negotiable.
00:06:11.520We've seen it here. The problem is not poor drafting. The fact is that a state cannot be
00:06:18.180bound by rules it alone has the authority to interpret. Democracy does not check this
00:06:23.820expansion, it accelerates it. Politicians operate on short electoral timelines. The
00:06:30.580incentive is to transfer resources from less populous places like Alberta to larger voting
00:06:38.100blocks like Ontario and Quebec, and to impose uniform regulations whose costs fall disproportionately
00:06:45.720on places like Alberta, with benefits that fall on places like Ontario and Quebec. In this way,
00:06:53.260majority rule is in direct conflict with private property, because unproductive people can simply
00:06:59.840outvote productive people, and long-term capital can be sacrificed for immediate political gains.
00:07:06.360The liberal hope that democratic representation would reinforce consent becomes inverted because democracy legitimizes expropriation and centralization, and elections replace longer time horizons with short-term opportunism.
00:07:25.060The result is increased growth of the state, higher taxation, and more invasive regulation, the opposite of a limited government.