Essays
Property Rights: The Fundament of Civilization
By David Frum
Sherm Ewing, Chairman:
Well, I hope you all enjoyed your dinner (applause) and now it's time for the main dessert. It's time for some fresh ideas.
As I told you CanPRRI is an idea factory where research becomes ideas, which become opinion. Ideas have consequences—I don't know where I heard that—and we live with public opinion every day. Now it occurs to me that we also live with the results of several wars—I don't know why I put that in there but—they were fought by ordinary citizens but paid for with big taxes: started, orchestrated, and finished by big governments. Propaganda, good and evil, became a very big weapon, it seems to me in my lifetime, maybe it's just because I didn't know about it before then (laughter).
Anyway, during those wars we all of a sudden had big press, big radio, and big pundits, controlled by governments—at the start. Seems to me that Big Brother is very much with us today. I'm not getting political here, it just seems to me that that's a fact of life. And in the 50 years since the Second World War we've seen the slow but steady growth of conservative press. I was going to say libertarian press or classical liberal press but I'll say the conservative press, whose free-thinking pundits hew to no party line.
Now where would we be without the post-war economists like Milton Friedman and [Fredrich] Hayek and [Ludwig] von Mises and what would we know without [William F.] Bill Buckley, [Jr.], the Byfields, Leonard Reid, Henry Hazlitt, and a whole host of other early writers and journalists. I believe such thinkers are a big control on government.
And I'm going to say that the movement started with the Freeman magazine that Marshall [Copithorne] 1 waved in my face about 40 years ago and I've subscribed to ever since. But then William F. Buckley's National Review came along. You know the talk show hosts and the journalists who speak to you: Dave Rutherford, I think, Lorne Gunter, I've heard of—maybe he's here, is he? (laughter) Ezra Levant: thank goodness for intellectuals of the right.
Now as it happens, one of those was born in Toronto in 1960. In 1982, he earned at Yale University, which happens to be my alma mater, a BA and an MA in History. Now I understand that he earned those both in one year, simultaneously—why didn't I think of that (laughter). And then he went on, in 1987, to graduate cum laude from Harvard Law School where he was president of the Federalist Society, well known to the right kind of lawyers around the world. Now this man is the author of two right books, Dead Right and What's Right, the former was acclaimed by William F. Buckley as "the most refreshing ideological experience of a generation." That's what Buckley said.
So CanPRRI is extremely proud to present, at its first Sponsors' dinner, the man who the Wall Street Journal has called "one of the leading political commentators of his generation": Mr. David Frum.
(applause)
David Frum:
Thank you, that was very generous. I am just delighted to be here to help you start off this good and important cause.
As I was arriving here I was coming up in the elevator with one of the other dinner guests—who I won't identify lest I embarrass him—but he said to me, a little nervously, "Is this supposed to be some kind of right-wing gathering?" (laughter)
And it reminded me of an observation of a friend of mine who works at the C.D. Howe Institute, where they sometimes get a little twitchy.
They got a telephone call in the last days of the Bob Rae government from someone who called and said: "Is this the C.D. Howe Institute?"
"Yes."
"Is it a right-wing organization?"
And their operators there are actually trained to deal with this kind of contingency and the receptionist said politely, but evasively: "Well, some have described us as that."
And the caller said, "Good! Because I need to join a whole lot more right-wing organizations." (laughter)
There can't be too many.
We were talking at dinner about what kind of labels we apply to ourselves.
Do we call ourselves conservatives; do we call ourselves classical liberals; do we call ourselves libertarians? I am reminded of, I think, the single best answer I've ever heard to this question, which is the answer of the British poet Phillip Larkin, who was poet laureate and a very distinguished poet. He was interviewed in the late 1970s and he was asked about his politics and he said: "I'm not really a very political man." He said, "But to the extent that I am political, I would call myself right-wing."
The interviewer who was surprised that a poet, and so eminent a poet, could be right-wing, said to him, "Well, what do you mean by that?"
And he said, "As I said I'm not a political man. I don't have a worked out world view, I just associate the right with certain virtues and the left with certain vices." (laughter)
"Oh really? Well, what are those? What are the virtues?"
"Well, the virtues that I associate with the right are: reverence, tradition, respect, individualism."
"Oh, well, that sounds good. And with the left?
"Envy, sloth, and treason." (laughter)
Now, some people suggest that when you're thinking about your politics that it is always wise, maybe, or conservative to adhere to a more middle-of-the-road position. I always say the best response to this comes from the Washington cartoonist Herb Block, who is a very liberal cartoonist—and who, actually, is not really a very good cartoonist—but he did have one moment of inspiration. During the opening days of the Falklands War the United States hesitated for a while as to whether to support Britain or Argentina. Stan Evans whose work, many of you will know, saw this was indeed an excruciating question hitting his traditional support for colonialism against his fondness for Latin American dictatorships (laughter).
But the cartoonist Herb Block, while the United States was hesitating, drew this cartoon. There were a lot of captions in this cartoon. So, there was this hairy state department official with a phone on one ear and a phone on the other ear and beads of sweat pouring off his head—and if you know Herb Block you know each of them was marked with a little arrow that said "sweat"—barking into the phone: "Right chief! We are going to steer a sensible middle course between sound policy and absolute lunacy!" (laughter)
I think we want to steer straight over to sound policy.
Property rights are—as I don't have to tell anyone in this room—the fundament of civilization. Jean Jacques Rousseau said that the first man who marked out a piece of ground and said, "This is mine," was the greatest criminal in history. And that was a typically idiotic remark from that lunatic Frenchman (laughter).
In fact, the moment of the demarcation of that piece of ground was the beginning of the ascent of the human race. The moment in which we ceased to be a naked, miserable, shivering clutch of three-foot tall hominids and began our ascent to be the magnificent specimens you see in the Alberta Legislature at this time (laughter). I don't know how anyone could doubt the theory of evolution when they look at that.
This is the fundament of civilization. It is the basis of all rational calculation, the beginning of all rational use of nature's bounty: the ability to make a connection between the past and the present and the future. I don't have to explain this to you, nor do I think I have to tell you how precarious in law this right is in Canada.
We, in Canada, are often better off in fact than our laws make us think. That theoretically, notionally, there is almost nothing that within its jurisdiction that the Parliament of the federal government and the provincial government cannot do. But the fact is that thanks to hundreds of years of political evolution, governments are bound up in all kinds of conventions and habits that prevent them from exercising the full weight of their power.
But the fact is that the governments are able to do a great deal and we have seen in Canada, in recent years, in instances both big and small, some quite disturbing and troubling violations of fundamental rights of property. And governments always, of course, have their reasons. That at any given moment there is something that seems more important: some election to win, some point to make, some enemy to punish, some friend to assist. Recall, for example, the abrogation of the contract with the Pearson Airport where a duly signed contract, which cost people a lot money, upon which people relied, was summarily violated, torn up, by a government for the crassest of political reasons.
The people who were parties to that contract were then, by statute, denied any reference to the Courts. Think of the National Energy Policy, now there are many odious elements to the National Energy Policy, but I think perhaps the most— and certainly the most embarrassing as a Canadian worried about the good opinion of a candid world—the most embarrassing was the provision that permitted the government of Canada to back into 25% participation in any oilwell explored by somebody else's ability, developed with someone else's money. Once it was a success the Government would back into 25%, at least if it was located below the Arctic Circle. They did not offer to back into 25%, of course, of everyone's failures: If you lost money, that they would pick up 25% of the bill. That was on you. But [on] your successes, above and beyond the taxation, they would take 25% of the gross.
Lorne Gunter has brilliantly pointed out, in fact, that our gun control issues in Canada are also ultimately about the regulation of property. My father-in-law's father was a very gallant officer in Canada's First World War and a general in the Second. And he left behind, as a momento, his WWI service revolver. It's a completely obsolete, huge, heavy piece of machinery that would be about the last thing that any housebreaker would ever take and certainly about the last thing that you would use in a crime. I mean you'd have to have an overcoat made out of racoon skins if you were to use it as any kind of concealed weapon (laughter).
But the fact is that he, as a law-abiding Canadian, made the mistake of complying with some earlier law in letting the government know that this weapon of his father's was in his possession. He has now had to expend hundreds of hours of his time [and] thousands of dollars in legal bills in an effort to keep this family heirloom. Theoretically you are supposed to be able to do it, but of course the onus is on you to prove that you are entitled to keep something that you have inherited from your father and that meant a great deal and that poses no threat to anybody.
To what do we owe this alarming state of affairs, this insecurity and precariousness of the right of property in Canada? Again, I think you all know the answer to that. We owe it to the arrogance of a set of federal politicians and the fecklessness of a set of provincial politicians who, when at a time when Canada had decided the time had come to write fundamental rights into the law of the land, omitted—omitted—the right to property and omitted the right to contract as well. And this was not a casual decision, they didn't forget. There was not some horrible moment of awakening after June 1982: "Oh my goodness! You'll never believe what we left out!"
It was discussed, it was proposed, and the premiers at the time said, "But if we include this it will be just an enormous inconvenience. I mean, there are so many things we'd like to do. So many voters who we'd like to reward with property taken from some, so many regulations we have in mind to do that we will not be able to do if this right exists."
Well of course that's right, I mean, that's what rights are for. The right to criticize government officials in newspapers is tremendously inconvenient to the efficient operation of government. The ability to present grievances to the state is a tremendous hampering to the smooth flow of the state's regulatory ambitions. The right to have a lawyer to face your accusers again makes the war on crime immeasurably more difficult but in every one of these cases we say, well, that these difficulties are all true. They are all present. But civilization does not always mean doing things in the simplest, easiest, and most direct way: Slicing off the heads of everyone who was in the vicinity of the crime and counting on the law of probabilities to make sure that one of them actually committed it (laughter).
That is not how people are to be treated. But the federal government arrogantly insisted that this right be left out and the premiers fecklessly agreed including, I am sorry to say, premiers who labelled themselves as conservatives. And when we are doing our honest evaluation of the careers of men like Bill Davis, Peter Lougheed, Stirling Lyon, we have to look back and say at a crucial moment in Canadian history these men failed—and failed dismally—to make sure that the fundamental law of the land would reflect the fundamental principles of civilization.
What makes this more astonishing and more outrageous in a way, is that this failure occurred at precisely the moment when people's eyes were being opened as never before to the vitality and centrality of property rights in the operation of a civilized society. It was not so long ago that intelligent people, thinking people, believed that you could actually run a modern society without these things. There were elaborate projects for a socialist commonwealth for solving the problem that was first pointed out by the man on your tie (to Sherm Ewing) Ludwig von Mises, of the total impossibility of arriving at any kind of sane, sensible use of resources in a centrally planned system. And there were in those days lots and lots of clever plans: in terms of ergs of energy expended and there'd be some state planning board and there'd be continuous Dutch auctions involving managers of state enterprises. But by the early '80s the complete folly of this had been exposed for all to see. With the breakdown—they had been breaking down for a long time—but with the undeniable breakdown of the economies of Eastern Europe, it became clear that this was essential. [Property rights] could not be omitted. And the case, the intellectual case, for property rights and their importance gained ground, gained ground, and gained ground.
You know, I had the privilege of meeting a little while ago Vaslav Klaus, the Prime Minister of Czechoslovakia, who was then the Finance Minister in the Reformist government. Vaslav Klaus deserves great distinction for being one of the first people in Eastern Europe to see that the hope that their might exist some Third Way between a market economy and a socialist economy, between capitalism and socialism, between good sense and nonsense: that there was no such alternative.
I was then working at the Wall Street Journal and he came to our editorial offices and there were a few of us meeting there and some coffee came in and I was the most junior person there so I offered to pour. And I said, "Mr. Finance Minister, may I offer you a cup of tea, may I offer you a cup of coffee, or perhaps we have some decaffeinated here, would you like some of that?" And he very emphatically said, "I have been clear. I do not want a Third Way!" (laughter)
He took the coffee with caffeine.
But so far I have told you nothing that you don't already know. So let me deal with something that I think is maybe some new ground that we need to think about.
The fact is that property rights are omitted from the Canadian Constitution and the fact is that this has had enormous negative impact and we all know that. It is tempting to think that the answer must be to inscribe a property right into the Constitution. But what we also know is that the Canadian Constitution is, for all intents and purposes, unamendable or at least none of us could ever predict that there will ever be a moment at which it can be amended.
So is the task, is the project that you have embarked on here futile? Is it hopeless? Do we just have to except that this is the way things are going to be in Canada and there is nothing you can do? I think not. I think that there is, in fact, a series of concrete steps that you can take that will make a great difference. That will, in fact, help to solidify and make permanent and strong the right to private property in Canada.
Let me suggest some things that I think you might want to think about devoting your energies to.
The first is to raise the profile of this issue. To make people understand that it is an issue. I was with some quite sophisticated people in Toronto a little while ago and knowing I was going to be talking to this group I asked them—they were not lawyers but they were sophisticated people—"What do you think the Canadian Constitution says about property rights?" There was not a person in this group of 14 who did not believe that there was some defence of private property in the Canadian Constitution. And to whom it came as total news to discover that there was no such thing. I think the first thing you need to do is to publicize how ignorant we are in fact about what is in our own Constitution. One thing that I think you may want to consider doing is doing some polling and to show what Canadians think is in their Constitution. Then perhaps to do some follow-up polls to begin to generate some kind of sense of a public demand. What do Canadians think should be in their Constitution? How do they feel about this? The state of polling in Canada is surprisingly primitive: Governments and political parties know very little, in fact, about what people think. Polling is expensive and when you're out of government there is a great constraint on your ability to raise money and to spend money. And for some reason, the present government doesn't seem interested in doing much polling on the question of property rights. So the first thing you have to do is to identify the scope of the problem: how unaware are people, in fact, of the problem? How do they feel?
The second thing is to generate publicity. I think one of the things that you know is that in a society without legislated property rights, even with a society with some commitment to liberal principles as our society has got or to principles of freedom, there are horror stories again and again and again. Some, as with the Pearson Airport, become national scandals. Some, like the National Energy Policy, become international scandals. But many others are just quietly noted in their local communities. I think that the publicization of those horror stories of people who find they are unable to use the family farm because of some government regulation, of people who face an expropriation hearing and are maltreated. That publicizing those stories, bringing them to people's attention, making people aware of how it is that such a thing could happen in Canada. Of how there is no, in fact, Constitutional safeguard against that—that is a powerful, powerful message. You need to collect those stories, you need to find those people, you need to put a face on what otherwise sounds like an abstract issue.
It's very easy, always, for the socialist premiers around the table to say this is an issue that simply pits the public good against the selfish interests of a few. It's important to make Canadians understand that that's not true. This is an issue that does indeed pit the selfish interests of a few against the common good. But the few who are selfish are the people who presume to take from their neighbor in order to put into action some scheme they have that their neighbor would not assent to. Against which their neighbor has no protection except the good will of a few bureaucrats and politicians. The publicization of these horror stories. The constant drawing of attention to them.
Then, I think you need to make—beyond the individual horror story—a broader case. You need to make people understand that so many of the things people in modern life are worried about, especially in the area of the environment, are directly linked not to the use of property rights, but to their absence.
The irrational use of water: this is an American problem as well as Canadian. You may remember during the free trade debate there was great hullabaloo that one of the things that free trade would mean is that somehow the Americans would come in and take our water. It was such a fantastically ignorant and paranoid thing to believe but it was a time when a lot of fantastically ignorant and paranoid things were said. "There was no unemployment insurance in the United States": you'll remember in that country they had it, of course, 30 years before we did. "There was no Workman's Compensation!" "There were no minimum wages!" But one of the things that was said was that they were going to take our water. It was very hard to make Canadians understand that in fact the cause of the apparent shortage of water in the United States was not that God had not been bountiful to the United States, it was not that there wasn't enough water there. It was that, of course there was going to be a shortage of water if you price something at a fraction of its actual value and then allow it to be allocated purely on a seniority system. Of course you were going to have insane uses of water. But the degradation of the environment that results is the result not, in fact, of special interests but of the absence—well, it is a result of special interests—but of the absence of clear and determined rights of property. And this is again and again and again true. This is the cause of air pollution; it is the cause of water pollution. These assets don't belong to people, no one has a claim on them, and as a result they get abused as in the famous "tragedy of the commons."
I think it is then the next step is to show people that there are alternatives. I was very interested to see Danielle Smith's work on an alternative Endangered Species Act. People need to understand that they are not offered a choice between anarchy and regulation. They are not offered a choice between environmentalism and the paving over of every beautiful thing. The choice is between achieving public welfare goods in a way that respects fundamental human rights, in fact, that it is done better because it respects fundamental human rights. And attempting and often failing to achieve those same public welfare goods in a way that is centralized, that is bureaucratic, that is arrogant, that is reckless, that is wasteful. So you need to draw up clear and simple and readily comprehensible alternatives—alternatives that a reporter can understand—to show how important goals, goals that everybody shares, and especially environmental goals can be advanced while respecting human rights.
We would not in any other area of life say that we have something important to do and that therefore we feel entitled to abrogate rights of speech; rights of assembly. That should be the case here. But people would feel very differently about those rights of speech and assembly if they imagined that they had to starkly choose between rights of speech and assembly and efficient government. We know that that's not true, that needs also to be true in the case of environmental preservation.
Then, I think—now this is not going to be something that a think tank could strictly do. But people who have the ideals of private property in mind and are sympathetic to the goals of the Institute can start thinking about, well, short of the Constitution is there anything that can be done through political action to make a difference? And I think there can [be].
As I said Canada is, to a great extent, still a common law system. It's true that if you pass an ordinary statute of the Alberta Government proclaiming a right to property or an ordinary statute of the Federal Government proclaiming a right to property that it doesn't trump other statutes. But that doesn't mean that it's useless. That doesn't mean that it doesn't have an impact.
Prime Minister John Diefenbaker's Canadian Bill of Rights Act had no effective legal power [buy] it nonetheless had a great deal of moral power. It changed the way people thought about what government should be allowed to do. Ultimately the real control, the real restraint on government in a democratic society, is opinion. It's not those paper Charters, it is opinion and always opinion and really nothing more than opinion.
Putting things on the record, issuing statements of where the public opinion is, can be very powerful even if they are not justicial. And one should think of that as really a two-step process: In the first, the passage of General Declarations of the importance of the property right and of its value to the people of the Province of Alberta or Ontario or Saskatchewan or the people of Canada. And the second, and I think something that is feasible, is the inscribing of property rights into provincial Human Rights Statutes.
Now, you may shudder a little bit at that. Because, of course, you know that human rights statutes are in fact anti-human rights statutes. The human rights statutes do not reflect the true human rights that have evolved through our political traditions but are, in fact, claims upon people that often involve the trampling of true human rights. Human rights statutes are laws to cramp the exercise of the right of free contract; to cramp the exercise of the right of free association.
You know all of that but not everybody does. In fact, very few people do. Most people see human rights statutes as statements of aspiration of the kind of society that we want to live in. They believe that they are, in fact, freedom-enhancing documents. We know otherwise, but that's what people think. And because that's what people think, there is no good denying it or telling them that they are wrong, you have to work with them, and you have to cooperate with them and say, very well then, if you believe this is the place in which the fundamental rights of human beings are enshrined, we're missing one. Let's put it in. That's feasible, that can be done with the majority of a provincial legislature, with the majority of a federal Parliament. And it's also powerful, because one of the things that we see with our increasingly out of control judiciary is that again and again and again when looking to understand how to parse our rather opaque Charter of Rights, the judiciary has reference to the human rights statutes of the federal government and especially the provinces as means of interpreting what the Charter of Rights should be. Because, remember, the Charter of Rights constantly makes reference to the community's standards; the community's expectations. How does the community signal to the Court what those expectations are? The courts say—at least when the human rights statutes say something that the courts want to do anyway—that the human rights statute is a powerful indicator of what those standards are. Very well then, change the human rights statute and in a way, on the second hand, you'll have amended the Constitution.
Now, I say this myself with some trepidation because I do not like living in a judicial democracy; I want to live in a real democracy. Lee Qwon Yui calls Singapore a "guided" democracy and I'm afraid that that is what Canada is in danger of becoming. But the fact is that the fight to control the judiciary, the fight to make sure that our democratic system is in fact a representative democratic system, was to a great extent lost by those same men who threw away the right to private property. This is the way that Canada is, and barring important institutional changes that we can't now foresee, barring Constitutional changes and barring some strange and completely unlooked for outbreak of humility in the judiciary, this is the way it is going to continue. Since this is the way it is going to be, this is the reality that people who want to defend human rights are going to have to adapt to.
I think amending these human rights statutes in ways that signal the court about the direction of the Charter is a powerful, powerful, powerful tool.
I've gone on to the point where I actually feel my voice beginning to break, so I'm going to have a glass of water and then maybe we should—rather than my endlessly prattling on at you—maybe we can talk back and forth a little bit about what can be done, what should be done, and what comes next.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Question:
Yes, David, I'm wondering how you see, in the future, the judiciary of this country—which in my mind is certainly to the left of centre—ever changing in the foreseeable future?
David Frum:
Well, the judiciary is berserk, and it's berserk for two reasons. One is, and maybe the less important, is the nature of the appointments process. Where you have seemingly endless Liberal government and the Liberal government makes liberal appointments. And not just any old liberal appointments but because the Chretien government has, at least until this last throne speech, had to bob to the right on fiscal matters it is constantly looking for things to toss to its left to keep its left happy. Its left is very angry about the way that Canadians' money is being spent—basically it thinks that not enough of Canadians' money is being spent—and so it's looking for other things to do that don't come out of the federal fisc. And so judicial appointments, not so much at the Supreme Court level because those are very visible, but lower down, are powerful ways of appeasing them.
But worse, and more important, I think, is the way you become a judge in Canada is by demonstrating great expertise on issues of insurance law, or patent law, or admiralty law. Then, you get appointed, and also at that point you're maybe at a point in your life where you want to slow down a little bit so this expert on insurance law, or patent law, or admiralty law gets on the bench and then somebody says to him, "Your honour, may women walk around without their shirts on?" Now the judge's response is, "Beats the heck out of me, I mean, I've never thought about that question!" (laughter) But happily, happily there is some 26-year-old graduate from the Osgoode [Hall] Law School who's sitting there doing secretarial work but who's mind is stuffed and furnished by the completely one-sided faculty of our law schools. The power of the law schools, through the clerks, is very great.
What can one do about this? Well, you have to change the climate of the law schools. I think we also have to wait. I think what will happen is that, over time [there will be], a generation of judges who, unlike the current incumbents, actually came of age post-Charter and who understand that part of the job of a lawyer is to think about these questions. It shouldn't be—presumably the town counsellors of Guelph are perfectly competent to decide whether women in Guelph may or may not take off their clothes when they go to the municipal swimming pool. But since we are now presuming they are not competent to do that, well then lawyers are going to have to start thinking about that. Then people who think that decisions like that are wrong are going to have a bit more of a foothold.
But I don't think that one should underestimate the power of positive statutes actually to limit the freedom of judges. You can never do it completely, but judges use for a lot of their more reckless acts their construction of what human rights statutes, particularly provincial ones, say. And those statutes can be amended by ordinary votes of the legislature.
I think it is a grave, grave mistake for conservative governments to say well, that's something that left-wing people care about so we'll give our Treasury Department to the right and our human rights statute to someone on the left. In fact, right now what I might almost suggest that a prudent government might want to say is, since the pressures on the fisc come independently of anything that we might do, you might as well put a lefty in charge of the Treasury. Because his ability to do harm is going to be limited by the international bond markets, by people's tax fatigue. And put our real raving right-wingers in charge of these traditional soft ministries, because that's where the harm is being done.
Question:
I'd just like to make a little comment before I ask my question. It involves our last round of Constitutional talks, the Charlottetown Accord, as it was better known as. We had a little meeting up in Drayton Valley one day, it's a little oil town in central Alberta, and on a Sunday afternoon we were graced with the presence of the then Leader of the Opposition. It was Chretien and Joe Clark and they were on a cross-Canada tour trying to convince us all to go along with this thing. When we got to the question period, as we are right now, I got to the microphone and I asked why, since we were going to amend the Constitution, why we didn't want to entrench property rights? And Joe Clark stood up and he said, "Keith, it's because nobody's asked us."
"You went right across Canada and nobody asked you?"
Then he went on to make some kind of statement about Americans buying up Cavendish Beach in Prince Edward Island and what a bad thing that would be (laughter).
I mean, that's the state of it, but nevertheless, I want to get to my question. It seems to me that individual rights, and the natural outflowing from that of property rights, are an extremely misunderstood thing and very few nations in the world actually understand what it is that we're talking about here tonight. The Americans who are our closest, most trusted friends, understood what that was—at least [John] Madison and [Thomas] Jefferson and those people did and they had read [John] Locke and [Thomas] Paine and the rest of those people first. But what happened between what the Americans founded their nation on, and I realize they fought for their nation and we negotiated ours, [and us]? Why is it that those ideas never made it to Canada? I mean, we were basically settled by the same people from Europe—What happened there?
David Frum:
I don't think it was that the ideas didn't penetrate, I think they penetrated all too well. Alexander Hamilton, the author of the Federalist Papers, which was a pamphlet to defend the Constitution, observed there that "the power over a man's purse was the power over a man's mind." The Founders of the American Republic knew that and wanted government not to have that kind of power over men's minds. The people who run our government know it too. They are not unaware of this thing. I mean Joe Clark's answer I'm sorry to say, was completely, as you know, was completely disingenuous. They don't fail to call him "Honest Joe" for not a reason (laughter). There's a reason that didn't become his nickname.
They know perfectly well that if you have power over people's livelihoods you have power over their minds: That's what they want. That's exactly what they want. And because we did not have, in fact, a formal Charter when the country was set up, which may be just as well, we had a series of conventions and codes, and in those conventions and codes property rights stood very high, as high as all of the others. What happened in 1982 was we adopted a model of "preferred" rights: that some rights were more equal than others. And some were left out in order that others might be put in their place and many of these new rights are not, in fact, rights at all, but they're—to come up with a linguistic distinction—they're "claims." A "right of non-discrimination" isn't a right, it's a claim. Now maybe it's a valid claim, it's an important claim, it is something we want to grant, but nonetheless it is a claim that says other people may not use their rights of property, and contract, and association in ways that disadvantage this group of people. That might be something well worth doing but you have to be clear about what exactly it is that you are doing: that you are sacrificing liberty for equality, not, as we are constantly being invited to believe, enhancing liberty.
As for Joe Clark. He knew perfectly well that had he tried to put property rights in the Constitution that he would have lost the support of Bob Rae with the Charlottetown agreement. That's what it was all about, it was about Bob Rae's vote. One of the things that I really blame the Mulroney Government for is, having lost Meech Lake—the exit is a little too far away for me to admit that I favoured Meech Lake, but I did. But having lost that they then said, "Well, let's try to salvage it by making it even worse by "gunking it up" with all kinds of other things that are going to make it even more difficult to run the country in a sensible fashion."
I'm not optimistic or not pessimistic, I don't know which I even would call it, about the outcome of the next round of Constitutional talks. I ultimately think that what we ought to have learned from Meech Lake and Charlottetown is that the gap between the expectations of English Canadians and French Canadians has grown so great that it can't be covered over with some form of words. That the job of diplomats is to stop people from fighting by making each of them think that he's got what each wants even when it is completely incompatible. But there does eventually come a time when it becomes no longer possible. As I said, I don't think that we are going to amend the Constitution anytime soon. I don't think that—at any rate if we do none of us could predict it, we shouldn't expect it, that's not where our energy should be focussed. But good and important work could be done non-Constitutionally.
Question:
The environmental movement, the green movement, seems to have worked on this no property rights thing, maybe everyone is not aware of it, when indeed if property rights were entrenched they could do so many more things better. Do you agree?
David Frum:
I do. The Environmentalist Movement is an example of how many people on the ideological left hook onto things that people care about and use them to import a vast and sweeping new ideology. If what the environmental movement were saying, is that clean is better than dirty and lovely is better than ugly—who would disagree with that? Everybody thinks that's right. And that is hardly a new thing. It is not as if we needed Ralph Nader to come along and tell us to build National Parks. The National Parks were here long before Ralph Nader was born and pure food laws and pure air and pure water laws go back further even than that.
What Environmentalism has become is the last justification for central planning. You'll remember that, long ago, when central planning was a livelier idea, that it was argued on the grounds that it will make you richer. That a socialist system, or a centrally allocated system, is more efficient, more prosperous than a capitalist system. That was the argument that was used in the 1930s: look at Russia after all, look how successful it is.
When that argument became incredible there was a new justification that was provided: Okay, it is not true that central planning will make you richer. What's good about it is that it will make you poorer, you will have smaller cars, less choice in what you eat, less choice in what you wear and that's good. That's what we want, that's just what we want: we want the economic system to fail.
The point has always been the attachment to central planning as an ideal regardless of the result. Whatever the result is, that has to be taken as it is, but it is the desire simply to exercise power over other people. I think of anyone who has encountered sort of daily environmentalism of the people in your neighbourhood: the neighbourhood blue box people. I cannot help but be impressed by just the sheer bossiness that lies at the bottom of all this. When the desire to go out and tell your neighbour that he should be scrubbing his beer bottles on the inside before putting them out on the sidewalk. It's nobody else's business what you do with your leftover beer bottles, but that is a very powerful and real impulse in human nature and Environmentalism, I think, gives it license. That's why it attracts people.
Question:
I'm just wondering, David, when you think about the average citizen, or anyone you meet. You talked about property rights being a "fundament" and the importance of them. When I go and talk tomorrow to friends and neighbours I'm just wondering how to put it in good terms to them why property rights are important. How would you describe to them why they should get behind this and why they are so valuable?
David Frum:
I think, what you can say is, and this goes with the program certainly. What you want to be able to say to people is, "The government can take your house and not give you any money."
And when they say, "Oh, it would never do that!" You want to be able to say, "Well, it did it to this guy."
That's part of the two-step argument. "Here he is! They took away his house and they didn't give him any money."
I think that the moment that you show that to people they will say, "But that's outrageous! There should be a law."
And that's the third step. Then you need to think, okay, in a country with an unamendable Constitution what can that law look like? But what you need to say to people, very concretely is, "They can take your house. They can take your business. They can take your farm. They don't have to give you anything. And they can decide, they don't have to appoint some independent backfire"—I mean they usually do because it's expected of them. But sometimes they don't. What we need above all is to have a constant parade before the public eye of people who have had their rights infringed. People like my father-in-law with his father's gun. People like farmers whose farms have been taken away from them, or effectively taken away from them, because of environmental regulations.
We need to have these people in front of the public eyes so that the public can see and hear their stories. People rightly mistrust abstractions, they want to see what does this mean? What does this mean to somebody like me? We need concrete cases, we need concrete stories, we need people who have been through this.
1 Marshall Copithorne is on the Board of Directors of CanPRRI.