{"id":16474,"date":"2012-08-15T09:32:55","date_gmt":"2012-08-15T14:32:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=16474"},"modified":"2012-08-15T09:32:55","modified_gmt":"2012-08-15T14:32:55","slug":"canadian-liberty-1776-2012","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/08\/15\/canadian-liberty-1776-2012\/","title":{"rendered":"Canadian liberty, 1776-2012"},"content":{"rendered":"

F.H. Buckley<\/a> has an interesting article in the National Post<\/em>, comparing the American and Canadian “flavours” of liberty from the American Revolution down to today:<\/p>\n

The Fathers of Confederation had seen the American constitution close up and didn\u2019t want any part of it. They didn\u2019t foresee just how we\u2019d turn out. Overall, however, our good fortune would not have surprised them, for they knew that they were founding a free country.<\/p>\n

On reading the Confederation debates, one is struck by how the Fathers insisted that we had real liberty in Canada, more so even than Americans. That comes as a bit of a shock, as we had thought that Americans had property rights in liberty. They owned it, and on occasion were kind enough to try to export it to lesser countries, as they did 200 years ago in the War of 1812 (where they came in a very strong second).<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

When McGee and the other Fathers looked south, they saw a country with more of Constant\u2019s liberty of the ancients but less of the liberty of the moderns. Moreover, of the former, the right of self-government had been corrupted by political machines and trivialized by elections for dogcatchers. The high ideals of the American Founders had been forgotten, and their republican virtue was now, in the era of Boss Tweed and Jay Gould, little more than American braggadocio. As for the liberty of the moderns, there was that little matter of slavery and its aftermath. True, Americans could express themselves through lynch-parties, but that was the kind of liberty the Canadians did not want.<\/p>\n

Many of the differences between the two countries remain, but Canadians no longer have more of the liberty of the moderns than Americans. In both countries, benign neglect has been replaced by the bureaucrat\u2019s officious nudges, giving us ugly light bulbs, toilets that don\u2019t flush and idiotic playground rules. Could one have predicted this 25 years ago? I think not. Back then I had legal scholar Cass Sunstein over for dinner. Until a few days ago he was Obama\u2019s regulatory czar, and over dinner in 1987 he predicted how the regulatory state would expand, in the name of risk reduction. \u201cAmericans won\u2019t stand for this,\u201d my wife told him. They prize their freedom too much. \u201cAh, but we\u2019ll change their preferences,\u201d he replied. And he was right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

F.H. Buckley has an interesting article in the National Post, comparing the American and Canadian “flavours” of liberty from the American Revolution down to today: The Fathers of Confederation had seen the American constitution close up and didn\u2019t want any part of it. They didn\u2019t foresee just how we\u2019d turn out. Overall, however, our good […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,7,10,13],"tags":[715,322,661,217,566],"class_list":["post-16474","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cancon","category-history","category-liberty","category-usa","tag-constitution","tag-nannystate","tag-regulation","tag-rights","tag-warof1812"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4hI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16474"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16475,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16474\/revisions\/16475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16474"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16474"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16474"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}