The mythology of Canada’s National Policy is a multi-layered fallacy of composition which must be addressed from the standpoint of locating Canada’s struggle for nationhood as locked in the midst of a battle between two conceptions of man and law expressed in the British vs. American systems of political economy. Before entering into any proper analysis of this problem, it must be stated at the outset that the primary fallacy of the Canadian National Policy of 1878-1885 is simply that the policy neither had a national origin, nor was Canada ever permitted by the British Empire to become a truly sovereign nation.
Understanding the true agenda behind Canada’s origins are necessary to understand why it has been the curse of Canada to be endowed with the most bountiful resources and landmass on the one side and the most underdeveloped population with only thirty three million inhabitants, strung across a 8900 kilometer border on the other, while its cousin to the south has a population of over 320 million. The average density per square mile is a mere 3.75 people per sq. km for Canada compared with 34 people per sq. km for the United States. This low density of the Canadian population is in keeping with the deliberate policy of the financial oligarchy to reduce the population of the globe from the current 7.6 billion to 1 billion people.
Today, as the world is threatened by the two-pronged threat of a collapse of world population by the destruction of food and water availability on the one side and thermonuclear war on the other, it is of dire necessity that such large scale development projects as the Bering Strait tunnel rail corridor be commenced post haste in the context of the new multipolar system being led by Russia and China.
The Bering Strait tunnel involves a U.S.-Canada-Russia-China alliance for Arctic development that would extend China’s Polar Silk Road into the Americas and touches on a policy fight which stretches back over 150 years and which I’ve written on extensively here and here and here. For this project to move forward however, it is imperative that Canada let go of its British imperial traditions.
These traditions which must be abandoned have historically defined Canada’s interests around either its “right to be left alone”, or “right to export raw materials as a hewer of wood and drawer of water”[1] and instead apply the superior form of sovereignty defined in the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia as “the Benefit of the other”[2].
Before this can be done, certain ghosts which now haunt the Canadian identity must be identified and then, promptly exorcised. These ghosts shape the cultural/political reflexes which prevent Canada from joining with its neighbours to the south and north in a common mission centering around large scale scientific and technological endeavours. This exorcism must begin with the true story of Canada’s origins and “National Policy” of 1878.
What is the Canadian National Policy?
Over the years, the Canadian “National Policy” has taken on various forms. At its origins, it received its name from the general policy applied by the Conservative Party platform beginning in 1878 under the administration of Sir John A. Macdonald. The policy again arose under significantly diluted forms with successive Conservative governments beginning with the 1911-1919 administration of Sir Robert Borden, followed by the 1930-1935 R.B. Bennett government. The policy ended once and for all after the fall of the 1957-1963 Diefenbaker government.
The National Policy was the protectionist counter-program to the typically free trade policy represented by Canada’s other major party, the Liberals.
From the time of Wilfrid Laurier, to the rise of the “Laurier Liberals” (led by C.D. Howe, O.D. Skelton, Ernest Lapointe, the confused Prime Minister King and St. Laurent), the liberals tended to move towards an economic union of the Americas.
This was a policy denounced by the likes of the Round Table leader Lord Milner and his Fabian ally Lord Halford Mackinder as a death sentence for the world hegemony of the British Empire which had to be stopped at all costs. Early Roundtable/Fabian Society operations resulted in the ouster of PM Laurier in 1911 who lamented during WWI that
“Canada is now governed by a junta sitting at London, known as “The Round Table”, with ramifications in Toronto, in Winnipeg, in Victoria, with Tories and Grits receiving their ideas from London and insidiously forcing them on their respective parties.”
The great confusion caused by the dishonest application of the National Policy’s protectionist policies by the Imperial Privy Council and Foreign Office, is to be found in the fact that rather than being applied by a sovereign nation striving for defense against imperial looting as the American republic had adopted similar measures after the 1787 framing of its Constitution, the Canadian example witnessed an empire’s use of the powerful tariff and associated investment program in order to keep its valuable colony under its iron grip. By maintaining control of the vast territory above the United States, Britain could both subvert America’s institutions more easily, while ensuring that the unification of America with their historical allies in Russia could not occur.
Then, as today, the true value of a protectionist policy of America lay in the fact that, when combined with sovereign control over public credit and a commitment to internal improvements and the general welfare, it provided the best line of defence from rapacious imperial intentions on the one side, while providing a powerful instrument for nation building on the other.
The dishonest application of the protective system during Canada’s history have achieved none of these ends.
Diefenbaker’s Misunderstanding
This Conservative National Policy was entirely scrapped after Prime Minister John Diefenbaker attempted to apply it to develop the productive powers of the nation under an honest, but naive vision for the first time in history. Diefenbaker’s policy, which threatened the Empire’s control of Canada was named the “Northern Vision”, or “New National Policy”, and was based on not merely a stroke of genius that called for the opening up of the great Arctic territories to scientific and industrial development but a new system of funding through the Bank of Canada. Diefenbaker’s failure to achieve his objective not only arose from the active nests of Rhodes Scholars within and without his own cabinet who strove to sabotage it, but from his own inability to reconcile his love of progress and creative pioneering change, with his love for his British traditions, which were derived from an intrinsic antagonism to progress and creative change. This has come to be known as the “Diefenbaker Paradox”.
Diefenbaker’s ‘New National Policy” announced in 1957 took its inspiration from a popular misunderstanding of the first “National Policy” of his idol, Sir John A. Macdonald. Although Macdonald’s policy involved the adoption of a protective tariff to favour local Canadian manufacturing and agriculture, and internal improvements vectored on the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, this policy lacked substance as it was not applied against an Imperial intention, but was rather itself an Imperial policy which desired to preserve a strategic North American colony by a dying British Empire.
Although similar in outward form to the Hamiltonian American System adopted a century earlier by the founding fathers of the United States in order to achieve economic independence from the British Empire, the Canadian version lacked all of the substance. It was rather the case that Macdonald’s “progressive” policy was nothing more than an illusion designed to break Canada off from any unification of mission with an America then being shaped by Abraham Lincoln’s nation building dynamic.
The Shadows of a Fraud
The period of 1865-1871 remains one of the densest in terms of potential for the establishment of an evolutionary phase shift in human history that had begun with the success of the American Revolution and the Renaissance view of man over the bestial dark age view embodied in British imperial traditions.
A quick overview of a timeline of the sweeping events following 1865 will provide the historian a valuable reference point in which to expose the principled drama shaping those dates and events.
April-May 1865: Lincoln’s victory over British sponsored Confederacy. Lincoln is assassinated by John Wilkes Booth via an operation run out of British Canada [3].
March 30, 1867: Alaska is purchased from the Russians by Secretary of State William Seward, a firm believer in Manifest Destiny. The Russians had earlier saved America in 1863 by Czar Alexander II’s deployment of the Russian fleet to the coasts of America in San Franciso and New York. Major allies from both nations recognized the vital extension of rail between the continents even during the Civil War.
March 1867: The first British Columbia annexation movement petition for leaving the British Empire and joining America is presented to Queen Victoria.
July 1, 1867: The British North America Act is established creating a federation of four Canadian provinces under a British-modeled constitution. B.C. resists joining due in large measure to the vast expanse of land separating it from the eastern confederated colonies.
July 18, 1868: Rupert’s Land (the vast private territory separating B.C from the eastern colonies) is purchased from the Hudson’s Bay Company by an Act of Parliament in British Canada establishing this territory as “crown land”.
May 10, 1869: The U.S. Trans-Continental Rail line is completed (begun by Lincoln in 1863) establishing the world’s first rail line crossing a continent and opening up both the middle of America to Manifest Destiny and providing a link to California from the Atlantic. The Colony of British Columbia benefits enormously from the increased access to trade.
June 10, 1869: B.C.’s anti-Confederation Governor Frederick Seymour dies under mysterious circumstances.
December 10, 1869:a 2nd Annexation petition from B.C. merchants and politicians is delivered to President Ulysses S. Grant. Grant and his colleagues make their interest known to the public.
July 20, 1871: Arrangements for B.C’s entry into Confederation are streamlined.
Penetrating Deeper into the Cause of Shadows
By the time of Lincoln’s 1865 victory over the British-financed Confederate South, events were moving at great speed. The continued application of Lincoln’s American System practices of protectionism, public credit and internal improvements was resulting in the greatest potential for growth in world history. British Canada’s failure to break free of the mother country almost 100 years earlier had resulted in a stagnant and underdeveloped economy which was both divided internally, and rift with annexation movements exploding from British Columbia to Nova Scotia in eastern Canada. Former leaders of the Rebellion of Lower Canada of 1837 such as Louis-Joseph Papineau became ardent leaders in the Annexation movement of Quebec that peaked with the Annexation manifesto of 1849 and whose currents were still strongly felt across Quebec… especially among the Eastern Townships largely settled by Americans.
In the United States America, awareness of British-Canada’s pro-Confederacy policy of terrorist operations, hosting the Confederacy Secret Service and even the assassination of Lincoln from Montreal were much better understood than they are today.
The Annexation Bill of 1866 introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives stated:“from the date thereof, the States of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Canada East, and Canada West, and the Territories of Selkirk, Saskatchewan, and Columbia, with limits and rights as by the act defined, are constituted and admitted as States and Territories of the United States of America.”[4] The Bill also authorized $10 million dollars to be used to purchase the vast private territory of the Hudson’s Bay Company, known as Rupert’s Land and the North West Territories. Vast public improvement programs were also authorized in the bill centering around canal building, and rail through the Maritimes from New York.
The Hudson’s Bay Territory was a strange phenomenon in North America. From 1670 until 1869, the vast largely unexplored and undeveloped wilderness was the private property of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who, having received a Royal Charter under King Charles II, had the duty as a subsidiary of the British East India Company’s global operation, to maintain an operation of a vast corrupt fur trade on the one side while blocking American ventures into continental development on the other [see figure 1]. The Colonies still in the possession of Britain, north of the United States, had very little opportunity to develop into anything more than “hewers of wood and drawers of water” because of this fact.
The second important post-Civil War development took place on March 30, 1867 with the Alaska Purchase.
Lincoln’s Secretary of State William Seward and his close ally Senator Charles Sumner, Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, advanced a bill for the annexation of the Russian territory in North America for the fire sale price of $7 million dollars. It was after all, the Russian Navy under Czar Alexander II that had worked with Sumner and Seward to tip the balance of the Civil War in Lincoln’s favour, by extending their entire fleet to the Atlantic and Pacific Coasts of America as a warning to European powers not to aid the Confederacy in the conflict [5]. This purchase (popularly called by modern fools as “Seward’s Folly”), suddenly made British Columbia very hot real estate. During this 1867 purchase, Lincoln’s Trans Continental Railway, begun in 1863 at the height of the Civil War was a mere two years from completion, linking the Pacific to Atlantic for the first time in history and thus destroying the British monopoly over maritime shipping routes.
With students of Lincoln’s program to be found among the intelligentsia of Russia, led by Count Sergei Witte and Dimitri Mendeleev, the American modeled (and largely American-built) Trans-Siberian Railway’s construction was not far away, and the linking of rail across the two continents was discussed as a real possibility by republican visionaries the world over.
Although the annexation bill of 1866 had the support of men such as William Seward and his ally Senator Charles Sumner, it never entered the Senate and was not voted upon. This Bill’s appearance, combined with the Alaskan purchase, and the growing independence and annexation movements across Canada, did however give Britain the sense of existential urgency to consolidate its territories under some form of imperial federation beholden to the British Crown at all costs. The Colonies of Canada, so close to Britain’s mortal enemy were far too geopolitically important for the Empire to lose at this moment in history.
The Fraud of the BNA Act
The first vital maneuver conducted by the British as a response to these developments, merely three months after the Alaska purchase, was the speedy completion of the confederation of the four easternmost colonies under the British North America Act of July 1, 1867 [6], renaming Upper and Lower Canada as “the provinces of Ontario and Quebec”. The BNA Act was the consolidation of 72 resolutions hammered out in two 1864 conferences which were designed to thwart the dynamic of American Annexationists on the one side and honest Canadian Nationalists such as the President of the Executive Council Isaac Buchanan (under the Macdonald-Cartier government) who worked valiantly not only to unite Canada with Lincoln’s America, but also fought to keep Canada out of any further wars with Great Britain [7]. Buchanan had lost this powerful position by a coup inside of his party run by his nemesis George Brown and John A. Macdonald. While Brown and Macdonald appeared to public view as enemies, the reality was that they were both beholden to the City of London’s interests for the entirety of their lives, and chose to adapt themselves to a rigged game of free market “Grits” on the left (Brown) and “protectionist” Tories on the right (Macdonald). This is the root of the Liberal and Conservative parties of Canada.
The fraud of the BNA Act merits a greater analysis, but for the present purposes, it suffices to demonstrate that it did not establish a “sovereign nation of Canada” as is popularly held. Rather, the architecture merely maintained a framework of pure British Privy Council control of Canadian affairs, permitting only an illusory degree of democracy. By establishing its foundations not upon a Principle of the General Welfare, nor acknowledging the existence of unalienable rights as embodied in Canada’s southern cousin, the Canadian Constitution is a very different beast. Its preamble literally states:
“Whereas the Provinces of Canada, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick have expressed their Desire to be federally united into One Dominion under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, with a Constitution similar in Principle to that of the United Kingdom: And Whereas such a Union would conduce to the Welfare of the Provinces and promote the interests of the British Empire”[8]
According to this preamble, the “raison d’être” of Canada is not the defense of the general welfare of its people, but rather the promotion of interests of the British Empire!
The BNA Act used the old British trick of the “fur blanket” bribe used first in 1774 to keep Quebec from joining the rebellious 13 colonies under the “Quebec Act”[9]. The Act gave the Dominion of Canada increased legislative control over its local affairs by forming for the first time, a federal structure around a Parliament, Judiciary and Senate which would have the appearance of power only, while the true power always remained in the powerful office of the Crown and its agents in the Privy Council Office and Governor General. This fact is laid out in several sections within the act:
“The Executive Government and Authority of and over Canada is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen.”
Since the Monarch herself could not be in every Dominion at the same time, provisions were made to ensure that her absolute authority would be actively arranging the affairs of state modeled on the British Privy Council system:
“There shall be a Council to aid and advise in the Government of Canada, to be styled the Queen’s Privy Council for Canada; and the Persons who are to be Members of that Council shall be from Time to Time chosen and summoned by the Governor General and sworn in as Privy Councillors, and Members thereof may be from Time to Time removed by the Governor General.”
Peppered throughout the Act are ongoing references to the importance of the Queen’s Privy Council of Canada to “advise” the government under the absolute authority of the Governor General, who is still legally recognized as the only head of state and legal representative of the Crown. Responsibility to keep the individual provinces under coordinated control was left to the power of the Lieutenant Governors assigned to each province. The real seat of power ensuring optimal control of Canadian federal policy by its London masters, especially in the field of economic warfare has been from this time on, the Privy Council, of which every single Prime Minister of Canada has been a member [10]. And just in case one might think that the Canadian military would be exempt from this control, the Act goes on to read:
The Command-in-Chief of the Land and Naval Militia, and of all Naval and Military Forces, of and in Canada, is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen [11]
In order to ensure that Canada was to remain as fragmented as possible and no strong federal structure of checks and balances modeled on the American System could occur, the Act also laid out in Section 92, a framework which gave the largest possible power to the provinces to control their own resources, taxation and internal policy outside of any federal structure.
Sir John A. Macdonald, the Aryan Anglophile
Sir John A. Macdonald, the primary father of Confederation, was appointed Canada’s 1st Prime Minister by the Governor General and knighted on the day of its passage for services rendered to the British Empire. In his last election campaign speech before his death in 1891, Macdonald, now celebrated as the great nationalist, stated
“A British subject I was born; a British subject I will die”… strange words for the “founding father” of a supposedly “sovereign” nation.
On closer examination, it may come as no surprise to some that this Anglophobe “father of Confederation” was little more than a racist bigot who also advocated for an ‘Aryan Canada’, cleansed of the Asiatic races, then being used as slave labour to build the Canadian Pacific Rail into the west [12].
A paradox is here presented. If Britain has traditionally kept its Colonies consciously underdeveloped in order to maintain fixed, and thus easy-to-control systems of equilibrium, then under what intention did the British Crown and Privy Council mandate the construction of a rail system from the east coast of Canada all the way to the coastal limit of British Columbia in the west unleashing vast rates of increase in prosperity of the nation? The opening up of the Prairies to development had been something which the Empire, using its Hudson’s Bay Company had been working for over 200 years to prevent… so why did this policy change during the period of Macdonald?
A clue to this question can be found in Macdonald’s famous 1867 quote: “I would be quite willing, personally to leave the whole country a wilderness for the next half century, but I fear if Englishmen do not go there the Yankees will.”
The Historical Dynamic leading up to B.C. Bribe of 1870
Up until 1870, the fate of the new BNA Act was still highly questionable. The Nova Scotian annexation movement had risen to new levels of influence with the post 1867 collapse of their fisheries dominated economy. This collapse was shaped by 1) new binding free trade treaties with Britain which the new Confederacy was subject to and 2) the 1865 cancelling of the U.S.-Canada “Reciprocity Treaty of 1854” by the Americans in response to the British support for the southern rebels during the Civil War. No other path to survival could be seen by the republican Nova Scotians but changing its alliances and breaking out of the 1867 BNA Act. If they would do so, then it was all but guaranteed that New Brunswick would do the same. Meanwhile turmoil in the Red River Settlement (located in today’s Manitoba) had also imbued deep concerns in the British Empire.
Of far more strategic significance to the continuation of the British Empire’s interests than the Red River Settlement or east coast annexation movements, was the troubling developments occurring in the colony of British Columbia. After the 1867 American purchase of Alaska, British Columbia had become very hot real estate. Lincoln republicans in America led by William Seward and Senator Sumner, made their intention of annexation of B.C. well known.
Frustrating matters for the British was the reality that the deep economic depression in B.C. [13], combined with the colony’s vast geographical separation from of its confederated sister colonies on the east coast had resulted in a massive yearning in its inhabitants for annexation into the United States, some on principle and some simply for survival.
Out of sheer desperation, leading merchants and politicians of the colony sent the first Annexation Petition to Queen Victoria on July 2, 1867 which laid out a politely worded ultimatum:
“Either, that Your Majesty’s Government may be pleased to relieve us immediately of the expense of our excessive staff of officials, assist the establishment of a British steam-line with the Panamas, so that immigration from England may more easily reach us, and also assume the debts of the colonies, Or that your Majesty will graciously permit the colony to become a portion of the United States” [14]
In response to this petition, no formal response was given beyond an appeal for the colony to join the confederation. Knowing this was impossible, Governor of the Colony of B.C., Frederick Seymour, who was also a powerful opponent of Confederation, wrote to the Duke of Buckingham later that month describing the situation:
“There is a systemic agitation going on in this town in favour of annexation to the United States. It is believed that money for its maintenance is provided from San Francisco. As yet, however, nothing else has reached me officially on the subject, and should any petition on the subject, I will know how to answer it before I transmit it to your Grace. On the mainland, the question of annexation is not moot.” [15]
As the subsequent year passed, with still no traction on either side, the tension grew more feverish with greater quantities of British loyalists defecting to the annexation camp out of sheer despair. An April 20, 1869 Letter to the Editor of the British Columbian expresses this sentiment well:
“With a depleted treasury, revenue falling off, and the Colony suffering from a depression beyond all precedent, with no prospect, either present, or remote, of immigration, what are we to do? … Were the inhabitants of British Columbia a thriving community, the question of annexation would not be popular; for the people are loyal and patriotic. The force of circumstances alone compels them to advocate a change in nationality… I am a loyal Briton, and would prefer living under institutions of my own country, were it practicable. But I, like the rest of the world of which we are each an atom, would prefer the flag and institutions of the United States with prosperity, to remaining as we are, with no prospect of succeeding as a British Colony”. [16]
Such sentiment, resulted in a second, more powerfully worded petition signed by 100 influential leading citizens, now directed both to the Queen as well as the President of the United States. It read:
“We are constrained by the duty we owe to ourselves and families, in view of the contemplated severance of the political ties which unite this Colony to the “Mother country”, to seek for such political and commercial affinity and connection, as will insure the immediate and continued prosperity and wellbeing of this our adopted home…
That we view with feelings of alarm the avowed intention of Her Majesty’s Government to confederate this Colony with the Dominion of Canada, as we believe such a measure can only tend to still further depression and ultimate injury for the following reasons, viz:
That Confederation cannot give us protection against internal enemies or foreign foes, owing to the distance of this Colony from Ottawa,
That it cannot open to us a market for the produce of our lands, our forests, our mines or our waters.
That it cannot bring us population, (our greatest need) as the Dominion itself is suffering from a lack of it.
That our connection with the Dominion can satisfy no sentiment of loyalty or devotion.
That her commercial and industrial interests are opposed to ours.
That the tariff of the Dominion will be the ruin of our farmers and the commerce of our chief cities.
… The only remedy for the evils which beset us, we believe to be in a close union with the adjoining States and Territories, we are already bound to them by a unity of object and interest; nearly all our commercial relations are with them; They furnish the Chief Markets we have for the products of our mines, lands and waters; They supply the Colony with most of the necessities of life; They furnish us the only means of communication with the outer world;…
For these reasons we earnestly desire the ACQUISITION of this Colony by the United States.” [17]
A copy of the petition was given to Vincent Collyer, the great American painter and Indian Commissioner of Alaska which he personally delivered to President Ulysses S. Grant. The press dispatch from the office of the President printed in the British Colonist of January 11, 1870 read:
“Washington D.C. December 30, Vincent Collyer yesterday handed to the President [Grant] a memorial signed by a number of property holders and businessmen in Victoria to be followed by another which will contain the names of all the British merchants and others at Victoria, Nanaimo and other places, in favor of the transfer of British Columbia to the United States. The President today returned Collyer a verbal reply that he had received it with great interest and sent it to the Secretary of State. Collyer also showed a memorial to Senator Sumner, Chairman of the Committee on Foreign Relations, who, after reading it, said the movement was important and could have but one termination. Meanwhile, the government waits to movement of England which is fast seeing the uselessness and impracticability of European Empire on this hemisphere. Both the President and Sumner desired their replies to be made known to the memorialists” [18]
By now, it was a race against time. The colonists knew that Britain was preparing vigorously to regain control of their colony. In July of 1868, the Crown mandated that an Act of British Canada’s parliament allocate funds to purchase Rupert’s Land and the Northwest Territories from the Hudson’s Bay Company, which occurred that same month erasing one major obstacle to British negotiations. On the other hand, by May 10, 1869, the American Transcontinental Railway was completed, linking for the first time an entire continent by rail from coast. A ferry system already existed from B.C. to California, bringing a boom of prosperity to the poor colony and making the feasibility of a rail extension from America into the colony that much more realistic.
The deadly mistake made by the author of the press dispatch, including President Grant was their assumption that England’s intention could be accessed by the loud voices of some of its members of parliament calling for a release of British Columbia. It was and still is the case that the true seat of power of Britain is located far above the parliament in the form of the Queen’s Privy Council and Foreign Office which then had no intention whatsoever of losing this vital possession. Although Sumner and Seward were far less naïve on this matter, the majority of leading Americans, the President included, didn’t fully “get it”. The British Minister in Washington writing to his London associates is useful in providing insight into the British oligarchy’s perception of events:
“The circumstance, the existing disturbance in the Hudson’s Bay Settlement [Red River Colony –ed], and the asserted disaffection in Nova Scotia, are much commented upon by the newspapers of this country, and are looked upon as the beginning of a separation of the British provinces from the mother country, and of their early annexation to the United States. This view of the matter is put in connection with the settlement of the differences with us arising out of the “Alabama Affair”, and senators are evidently indulging in the illusive hope that England has it in her power, and might not be unwilling to come to an amicable settlement of those differences on the basis of the cessation of our territory on this continent to the United States” [19].
The greatest tragedy of patriots everywhere in dealing with the British have been their tendency not to look upon the true nature of its evil soul. This letter demonstrates clearly the disdain that British imperialists have felt towards the naïve idealism of the victims whom they intend to destroy. An evil intention animated by a passionate desire to destroy the good will go to any ends of deceit in order to turn any obstacle against their power into a weapon against their naïve enemies. A case in point can be found in the reference made by the British ambassador to the “Alabama Affair”.
The Alabama Affair
By the end of the Civil War, Sumner and Seward led American patriots to go on the offensive against the true instigator of the war… not the southern confederacy, but the British Empire. The powerful flank which they chose to use as their weapon was the open fact that Confederate Warships used against Lincoln’s forces were built and supplied by the British under direct orders of Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell. The most famous and destructive of the British-made war ships was the “C.S.S. Alabama”.
These American patriots began an international fight over Britain’s obligation to pay reparations for damages incurred during the war known as the “Alabama Claims”. Upon Seward’s purchase of Alaska, Senator Sumner began mobilizing for the demand of $2 billion from Britain or the annexation of its North American territories. Although Seward was highly favorable to the plan, British stalling tactics kept the Alabama Claims fight on hold for years. During these important years, America had lost much of its powerful bargaining chips and British control of its territories had advanced too far. By March of 1871, Grant’s appointed Secretary of State Hamilton Fish worked out an agreement with Britain on the Alabama Claims resulting in a mere $15.5 million dollars and an end to all similar disputes regarding Britain’s role in sponsoring the Southern Confederacy during the Civil War. This became known as “the Washington Treaty”. Much of the potential that was alive two years earlier had by then been sabotaged. It is of interest that one of the key arbitrators of the Alabama Claims was also Canada’s very active Prime Minister Sir John A. Macdonald.
The Elimination of Governor Seymour
During the months preceding the 2nd B.C. Annexation petition, a major tragedy befell the republican cause with the untimely death of Governor Frederick Seymour, who had been a long-time enemy of Confederation. In the short months before Seymour’s death on June 10, 1869, he had enraged the highest echelons of the Empire’s civil servants such as Sir Frederick Rogers, Undersecretary of State for the Colonies who, upon discovering that Seymour had suppressed information for months from the Colonial Office that a vote in favour of Confederation had occurred in the B.C. Legislature wrote “it appears that on March 28 last, the Council passed a Resolution in favour of admission which however Governor Seymour only now [November 4] sends through in his March telegram he said he would write.” [20]
What Sir Rogers is also revealing is that the British had two confederacy plans for the Continent of North America: one in the South of the United States and one in the North of the United States.
When the next opportunity to vote on Confederation occurred in February 17, 1869, Governor Seymour again sabotaged the pro-confederacy supporters and the British Crown, as he now convinced the legislature to postpone as no details were worked out on the settling of the Hudson’s Bay Company land purchase.
John A. Macdonald wrote in anger on May 15 to the Governor General of Canada saying “the first thing to be done will be to recall Governor Seymour if his time is not run out” [21], and on the same day he wrote to the pro-confederation Premier of New Brunswick, Sir Anthony Musgrave informing him that Seymour would be recalled: “as being perfectly unfit for his present position, under present circumstances. From all I hear, he was never fit for it” [22].
Within two weeks of Macdonald’s writing these two telegrams, Governor Seymour was dead. The official story holds that Seymour was sent to the harsh northern tip of B.C. to mediate a conflict between two warring native tribes. Upon his success, Seymour was struck with dysentery and died within days. Seymour was immediately replaced with Macdonald’s ally, Sir Anthony Musgrave, and the annexation movement lost its secret defender. Musgrave immediately set to work preparing for B.C.’s entry into Confederation with the March 1870 “Great Confederation Debates” begun in the legislature and culminated on April 6 with 16 clauses and Resolutions voted upon. Delegates were sent to Ottawa to negotiate these Resolutions while the republican movement in B.C. could only watch helplessly. Final appeals were made during this dark hour by leading citizens to the American Government, evidenced by the following letter of August 17, 1870 written by H.F. Heisterman [23] a leading merchant of the annexation movement:
“Understanding that you are likely to have his Excellency President Grant among you some time this month and that you will likely have an opportunity, I herewith hand you a further list of names to the memorial presented in December 1869 by Vincent Collyer. It would have been sent then, but owing to the hostility shown to it by the Canadian newspaper here it was not sent. I therefore transmit it to you, to make whatever use of it you see fit in the premises. It is exasperating to me and my fellow citizens, to see a country aggregating 405 000 square miles, of which 11 000 square miles comes upon Vancouver Island and 6000 upon Queen Charlotte Island and the balance 388 000 sq. miles upon the mainland of British Columbia, shut out as it were from the prosperity around it. The people of the colony are too few to make an armed resistance to confederation which seems on all accounts intended to be forced on us unless some countenance were given to parties who desire annexation to the United States by the government of President Grant, in a proposal to settle the Alabama Claim by the transfer of this colony, I don’t see how we can move in the matter.” [24]
The B.C. Bribe is Finalized
Musgrave’s agents advanced negotiations at breakneck speed. Ottawa negotiations began on June 7, 1870 and within weeks nearly all resolutions and clauses were agreed upon. The two biggest impediments to B.C.’s entry into the Confederacy were dealt with by the payment of all of the colony’s debts by Ottawa and the promise made by Macdonald to construct a rail line linking the new province with Montreal and Quebec “within ten years”. This promised rail line was necessary in order to sabotage the intention of the American Manifest Destiny policy.
Sir Alexander Galt, a fellow father of Confederation and proponent of Canadian expansion, speaking to a crowd on May 22, 1867 in Lennoxville Quebec described his views on the need to extend confederation and rail to the Pacific:
“We cannot close our eyes to what is happening in the West… I for one look upon the acquisition of Russian America by the United States as their answer to the arrangements we have been making to unite among ourselves… If the United States desire to outflank us on the west, we must accept the situation and lay our hand on British Columbia and the Pacific Ocean. This country cannot be surrounded by the Unites States- We are gone if we allow it… “From the Atlantic to the Pacific” must be the cry in British America as much as it has ever been in the United States”
Another Father of Confederation George Brown, who ran the influential Toronto Globe and heavily promoted Canada’s trans-continental railway, wrote on July 10, 1867 that
“Seward’s attempt to coerce Canada by the purchase of Walrussia has brought down upon him the laughter of mankind and has not altered one white the determination of the people of British America from Prince Edward Island to Cancouver to stand by the old flag to the last man and the last cartridge”
Sir George Etienne Cartier stated in 1865 dreaded the immanent annexation of Canada by saying “We must either have a Confederation of British North America or else be absorbed by the American Confederation.”
With these arrangements agreed upon (paralleling similar arrangements in the former Red River Settlement), British Columbia was admitted into Confederation as the 6th Canadian Province [25]. Within the coming decades, as Canada was increasingly turned into a wedge blocking US-Russian collaboration and arctic development. Saskatchewan and Alberta were formed as provinces where there had formerly been Hudson’s Bay land.
After eight years, still no progress had been made on the construction of the promised rail linking the Dominion and again, British Columbia continued to feel the painful grip and despair of isolation and economic depression. This pain was made that much worse, as the republican neighbour to the south was witnessing unheard of prosperity under the effects of Lincoln’s Trans continental Railroad and vigorous pioneering of the west. The American System’s continuation of John Quincy Adams’ Manifest Destiny policy, led by Lincoln’s economic advisor Henry C. Carey had resulted in the greatest explosion of wealth in the United States, and become a model for the whole civilized world with the 1876 Centennial Celebration in Philadelphia.
The superiority of the American System to the failure of the wicked British System of Free Trade resulted in America becoming the world’s leading productive power.
Converts to the American System were made by all lovers of progress from around the world who came to the Convention. Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck vigorously applied American System practices of high protective tariffs and vast internal improvements. Czar Alexander II and his close circle of Russian advisors applied the American model for the vast modernization of Russia vectored around the Trans-Siberian Rail with the great scientist Dimitri Mendeleev chairing the Committee on Protectionism [26]. Even Japan under the Meiji Restoration applied the American model to escape feudalism and enter the modern age.
In light of this dynamic, leading voices for progress in Canada again began to clamour for real independence from the trap of the British System that they had fallen into. Even some among the greatest enemies of the late Governor Seymour were gripped by this frustration of progress, exemplified by Amor De Cosmos, then a Liberal MP for Victory, who in May 1878 arose in parliament and warned that if rail development did not begin immediately, then British Columbia would annex into the United States!
A Clone is Born without a Soul
The threat of losing Canada to the United States having once again resurfaced, Sir John A. Macdonald was brought back into power after a five year role in opposition under a dysfunctional Liberal Government. The new platform which the Privy Council used to steamroll him back into office was called “The National Policy”. This program was based on a perverse copy of the American Policy of high tariffs, the speedy construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway, the creation of new agricultural zones, open immigration and other internal improvements, yet with one caveat… it’s governing intention was aimed not at building a sovereign nation of Canada, but rather the ultimate destruction of America and a reconstruction of global British imperial hegemony.
The National Policy featured a sweet deal with the Canadian Pacific Railway which was incorporated in 1881 and was granted a generous $25 million subsidy from Ottawa along with 10 million hectares of rich land. The CPR was also exempted from paying taxes for the next 20 years. Five years later, on June 28, 1886, the first CPR train left Montreal and, like a slap on the face to all republicans in Canada, and at the same time demonstrating its true anti-American intention, was timed to arrive on July 4, 1886 at Port Moody in British Columbia.
Due to the inability of American System patriots to continue the trajectory of progress unleashed by Lincoln’s victory, the unification of intention of Russia and America was never finalized, the material division which fed a spiritual disease later capitalized upon by the British Foreign Office architects of the wars of the 20thcentury (including the Cold War which was only unleashed over the dead body of FDR).
Similarly, Berlin to Baghdad rail developments as well as similar rail programs planned between Germany and France and both to Russia had resulted in a dynamic of division which the British capitalized upon to instigate the irrational meat grinders known as World Wars I and II. Due to similar frauds, the birth of a sovereign Canada was derailed, and a population, occupying one of the richest and largest territories in the world, was subject to a dynamic which has left it vastly underdeveloped, with the lowest population density in the world of 34 million for a land area of almost 10 million square kilometers. A single state of California alone sustains over 38 million inhabitants while most of that is desert!
The Conclusion of a Fallacy. Let the Truth Begin Again.
The paradox of “Canadian Nationalism” can only be efficiently addressed by first recognizing the power of progress as a universal phenomenon, expressed both in biological evolution of species, and human evolution of civilization which Lincoln’s advisor Henry Carey referred to as the “increasing powers of association of labor, producer, and consumer”. This power towards increasing self-conscious creative thought actively with an intention to perfect the universe, is so powerful that even those regressive policies expressed by the oligarchical principle must submit and adapt to it.
The power of this anti-entropic capacity of human creativity to leap outside of closed systems of material/intellectual limits in order to discover a higher organizing principle and willfully act in conformity with it, is expressed most clearly in recent history by the American Constitutional System and its affiliated view of man as a creature made in the image of its Creator.
The adoption of momentary progress in order to annihilate a greater good was considered a necessary evil on the part of the leading strategists of the British Empire’s Privy Council, then centered around Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston of the powerful British Foreign Office. The influential pro-American System faction of Canadian patriots operating under the leadership of Isaac Buchanan was removed from power with the full adoption of the “National Policy” which followed the British North America Act of 1867. These policies stymied the birth of a true sovereign nation.
To the horror of the British Empire in 1958, John Diefenbaker and his collaborators were inspired by the progress achieved during this period of rapid Canadian development, and attempted to reproduce this process once again except with an important ingredient lacking in Sir John A. Macdonald… a devout love of unbounded progress without ulterior motive for destroying America. This approach of an active “nationalism” whose aim was to effect an increase of national power, was about to clash directly with the passive “New Nationalism” then being artificially crafted by the nest of Rhodes scholars working for the British Foreign Office’s Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA) under the likes of Vincent Massey, Georges Henri Levesque, and Walter Gordon.
This perverted “Nationalism” was merely a conduit selected to promote cultural irrationalism, and the acceptance of fascism masquerading as “zero-technological growth”, otherwise known as the “New Cult of Eugenics” or “environmentalism” aimed at destroying the whole continent of North America.
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Matthew Ehret is the Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Patriot Review , a BRI Expert on Tactical talk, and has authored 3 volumes of ‘Untold History of Canada’ book series. In 2019 he co-founded the Montreal-based Rising Tide Foundation.
Notes
[1] This historic economic identity has been re-embodied in recent years with the nation-killing North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
[2] The Treaty of Westphalia of 1648 not only ended the 30 Years War that ravaged Europe, but also established the basis for the modern form of sovereign nation state defining international law for the subsequent 350+ years. The pre-amble of the Treaty read in part: “That this Peace and Amity be observ’d and cultivated with such a Sincerity and Zeal, that each Party shall endeavour to procure the Benefit, Honour and Advantage of the other; that thus on all sides they may see this Peace and Friendship in the Roman Empire, and the Kingdom of France flourish, by entertaining a good and faithful Neighbourhood.” And can be read as a whole here: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/17th_century/westphal.asp
[3] Anton Chaitkin, Why the British Kill American Presidents, Executive Intelligence Review, December 12, 2008, http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2008/2008_50-52/2008_50-52/2008-50/pdf/26-35_3548.pdf
[4] The full text of the bill can be viewed on http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Annexation_Bill_of_1866
[5] Known as “the Great Liberator”, Czar Alexander II was so inspired by Lincoln’s vision that he followed the American program of emancipation when he liberated the serfs in 1861. His life was cut short by an assassins’ bomb in 1881.
[6] The belief that the 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms replaced the 1867 BNA Act is nothing more than a mythology. As section 60 of the Charter clearly lays out: “This Act may be cited as the Constitution Act, 1982, and the Constitution Acts 1867 to 1975 (No. 2) and this Act may be cited together as the Constitution Acts, 1867 to 1982”… meaning the 1867 Act is still in full force to this day.
[7] Buchanan’s famous December 1863 speech provides a clear insight into his principles: “The adoption by England for herself of this transcendental principle [Free Trade] has all but lost the Colonies, and her madly attempting to make it the principle of the British Empire would entirely alienate the Colonies. Though pretending to unusual intelligence, the Manchester Schools are, as a class, as void of knowledge of the world as of patriotic principle… As a necessary con-sequence of the legislation of England, Canada will require England to assent to the establishment of two things: 1st, an American Zollverein [aka: Customs Union]. 2nd: Canada to be made neutral territory in time of any war between Eng-land and the United States”. Cited in Isaac Buchanan’s Relations of the Industry of Canada with the Mother Country and the United States, 1864, p. 9-22
[8] This is especially ironical since the United Kingdom does not have a written constitution. Such a document does not exist. See Professor Helmut Weber’s 1999 paper “Who Guards the Constitution?”, Center for British Studies of Humboldt University, Berlin http://www.gbz.hu-berlin.de/publications/working-papers/downloads/pdf/WPS_Weber_Constitution.pdf
[9] Pierre Beaudry, The Tragic Consequences of the Quebec Act of 1774, The Canadian Patriot Special Edition, 2012, www.committeerepubliccanada.ca
[10]Today the oath of office which every single Prime Minister has taken upon entering office reads: “ I, __________, do solemnly and sincerely swear (declare) that I shall be a true and faithful servant to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, as a member of Her Majesty’s Privy Council for Canada. I will in all things to be treated, debated and resolved in Privy Council, faithfully, honestly and truly declare my mind and my opinion. I shall keep secret all matters committed and revealed to me in this capacity, or that shall be secretly treated of in Council. Generally, in all things I shall do as a faithful and true servant ought to do for Her Majesty. So help me God.” http://www.gg.ca/document.aspx?id=316
[11] This 1867 mandate was re-affirmed in Section 14 of the National Defence Act of 1985 with the words: “The Canadian Forces are the armed forces of Her Majesty raised by Canada and consist of one Service called the Canadian Armed Forces.”
[12] During the 1885 Commons debates on the Electoral Fran-chise Act, Sir John is quoted with the following racist state-ment: “The Aryan races will not wholesomely amalgamate with the Africans or the Asiatics… the cross of those races, like the cross of the dog and the fox, is not successful. It cannot be and never will be.” He also went on to say that “if the Chinese were given voting rights then “the Aryan character of the future of British America should be destroyed”. [citation from Tim Stanley’s Ottawa Citizen article: “John A. Macdonald wanted an ‘Aryan’ Canada”, August 2012]
[13] The depression then being suffered by B.C. was caused by the collapse of the speculative bubble of the 1857-58 gold rush wherein over 30 000 settlers stormed into town alongside 20 000 prospectors. Entire towns sprung up over night, and land speculation soared. The bubble popped in the mid 1860s leading to the deepest recession in the colony’s history.
[14] Annexation Petition, July 1867, enclosed in Allen Francis to F.H. Seward, July 2, 1867, Consular letters from Victoria to Vancouver Island, Dept. of State, archives, Washington D.C., vol. 1
[15] Letter of Seymour to Buckingham, July 26, 1867 cited in William Ireland, The Annexation Petition of 1869”, British History Quarterly, vol. 4 1940, p. 268
[16] Letter cited in William Ireland, Annexation Petition of 1869.
[17] Ibid. p.270
[18] The British Colonist, Jan. 11, 1870. Cited in William Ireland, Annexation Petition of 1869, p.271
[19] Minister Thornton to Clarendon, January 3, 1870, cited in Ireland’s Annexation Petition of 1869, p.285
[20] Sir John A. Macdonald to Sir John Young, May 25, 1869, PAC., Macdonald Papers, Letterbrook 12 972, cited in Frederick Seymour: The Forgotten Governor, Margaret Ormsby, B.C. Studies no. 22, Summer 1974, p. 20
[21] Ibid p. 21
[22] Heistermann was also the Grand Secretary of the Provincial Grand Lodge of British Columbia
[23] F.H. Heisterman to W.H. Oliver, Aug. 17, 1870, cited in William Ireland, The Annexation Petition of 1869, p. 274
[24] The Red River Colony became the Province of Manitoba on May 12, 1870 with the Manitoba Act.
[25] Both Saskatchewan and Alberta joined confederation as provinces in 1905
[26] This is the same Mendeleev who had recently discovered the ordering principle, now called the “Periodic Table of Ele-ments”. While Chairing the Commission on Protectionism, Mendeleyev astutely annihilated the argument for free trade ending with the following remarks in an 1891 Tariff paper: “Belonging to the small circle of Russians who have given their entire lives to science, who own neither factories nor plants, and knowing that contemporary science has uncovered crude untruths and omissions in the “classical” and “orthodox” teachings of the free trade school, and, finally, seeing that the historical and experimental–that is the real–path of study of political economy leads to different conclusions than those of the free traders, which are taken on faith as “the last word in science”–I consider it my duty, partly in defense of truly con-temporary, progressing science, to say openly and loudly that I stand for rational protectionism. Free trad-ism as a doctrine is very shaky; the free trade form of activity suits only countries that have already consolidated their manufacturing industry; protectionism as an absolute doctrine is the same sort of non-sense as free trade absolutism; and the protectionist mode of activity is perfectly appropriate now for Russia, as it was for England in its time….” cited in Barbara Frazier, Scientist-Statesman Fought British Free Trade in Russia, Executive Intelligence Review, Jan. 1992 http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/mendel1.htm
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