Anonymous Pamphlets Series 1, No.

THE SERENITY OF A
WELL-CONSTITUTED
STATE
by
Ralph Maud Ph.D.

Published 2008 by Frank Nugent

5-1954 W. 11th Avenue, Vancouver, BC V6J 2C6.

Further copies of this pamphlet, and the previous pamphlet,

GOING IT ALONE, are available postfree from the above ad-
dress while quantities last.
To the Honourable XXXXXXXXX
Minister of XXXXXXXX
Legislative Buildings,
Victoria, B.C.

Dear XXXXXXXX

You have asked me to step down as the Chairman of the Special Commission on the
Survival of British Columbia in the Event of Global Economic Collapse. I believe “cease
and desist” were your words. But, my friend, my batteries are more charged than ever.
I’m like the Duracell toy. I can’t stop.
I’m going to write you a new Constitution for the proposed sovereign British Colum-
bia after the global collapse. This is only the logical consequence of our report, Going It
Alone which proved pretty well that it is the present form of society itself that will do us
in.
They tell me that Going It Alone has been printed as an anonymous pamphlet, and that
it has been a complete flop. They said that they wanted the ideas in the pamphlet to stand
on their own merits and that the thesis was strong enough without support from biography
of the writer. They really wanted to spare me, thinking, “Nobody will read a political pam-
phlet by a retired English professor, OBE or no OBE.” They only realised later that the one
thing people shy away from more than retired English professors is anonymity. We won’t
make that mistake again.
So, with the full forceful display of a retired English professor I point my extended fin-
ger at the perpetrators of our downfall, the heroes of the business pages of our newspapers,
that is, until the crash comes and the corporations are seen as the boastful authors of it. No,
we have to be very careful here: it is not certain individuals who can be so easily blamed.
It is the system itself, by its very nature, that is going hell bent for disaster. It must not be
allowed to revive and put us through all that again.
In Going It Alone I relied mainly on common sense to make the assertion that the end is
nigh. Since then I have found an interesting authority in Brooks Adams and his last book,
The Theory of Social Revolutions (1913), where he writes as a law of history (pp. 132-33):
A ruling class is seldom conscious of its own decay, and most of the worst catastrophes of
history have been caused by an obstinate resistance to change when resistance was no longer
possible.
Brooks Adams thinks that the “industrial capitalist class” was at its zenith “toward
the close of the third quarter of the nineteenth century” (p. 2), and that it has shown little
promise of being an exception to the above rule, and that “American society must continue
to degenerate until confusion supervenes” (p. 75).
 This is a man whose grandfather and great-grandfather were both presidents of the
United States. Though he sounds a little like Karl Marx he is really a patriot who is wrack-
ing his brains to see how his country could come around and escape its fate. He had great
hope for Theodore Roosevelt, and he was gratified to be listened to by him; but Teddy was
only a boy with his finger in the dike. At the Chicago Convention of 1912 Brooks Adams
saw the party rebuff Roosevelt, concluding once again that “a declining favored class is
incapable of appreciating an approaching change” (p. 31).
Adams would not of course know that it would take another Roosevelt to impose a
“New Deal” in order to restore some “social equilibrium” after a crash. But his predic-
tions were only postponed thereby, since no basic changes were made by FDR. In our
own time Brooks Adams is as pertinent as ever when he analyzes the origin of the social
revolution we face (p. 17):
power has been usurped by private persons who have used it purely selfishly, as no legiti-
mate sovereign could have used it, and by persons who have indignantly denounced all
attempts to hold them accountable, as an infringement of their constitutional rights. Obvi-
ously, capital cannot assume the position of an irresponsible sovereign, living in a sphere
beyond the domain of law, without inviting the fate which has awaited all sovereigns who
have denied or abused their trust.
At that time, only an insider like Brooks Adams (or his brother Henry Adams of the
Education, who was substantially in agreement with him) could get away with writing
these thruths. We wait patiently for a young Trudeau to say something interesting.
Meanwhile, as I write, the subprime housing mortgage debacle has allowed a good
many commentators to express the extremity that “a mounting financial crisis threatens,”
to use the words of Will Hutton in a Guardian Weekly editorial of 21, March 2008. Hutton
goes on: “The United States is about to be trashed by perhaps the greediest, most arrogant,
self-deluding financial class in the country’s history.” I have a feeling that Brooks Adams,
if he were alive, would have to agree with that; his vision has taken ninety years to be
proven true. The crash feels so immediate now that I’ve started to rush to get this pamphlet
out next week before it’s too late.
Therefore, on the basis of the testimonies of my fellow realist iconoclasts and the argu-
ments of Going It Alone, we will have to be very radical and state the first clause of the new
Constitution of our sovereign nation as:
1. No joint-stock company shall be incorporated in British Columbia nor char-
tered for operation.
As we said in our report, corporations are not at all necessary to the normal production
of wealth. They are the creations of anti-social greed. We have allowed them to chew up
natural resources and regurgitate obsolescent, addictive consumer trash. We have allowed
them to supply needs at the exorbitant prices that only merging monopolies can extort. We
have elected governments who work hand in glove with corporations on projects to funnel
money from the public purse into private pockets. Let us use the coming crash, in which
they will be deeply implicated, to get rid of ‘em.
Then, naturally, the Vancouver stock exchange will be laid decently to rest. Gamblers
will have to repair to the nearest casino, where they may be surprised to find how much
more honest it is compared with the pervasive insider trading of the stock market. Goodbye
boiler room stock promotions; goodbye selling short.
And just to totally clear the air, let’s have as the second clause of the new Constitution
the nitty gritty, bedrock prohibition:
2. There shall be no interest on money.
That will get rid of banks as we have known them, the willing panderers to the suicide
pact we call late stage monopoly capitalism. (Forgive my language, but there is no time to
invent a new name for the unprocessed sewage that we have had to live our slippery lives
in the ginnel of.)
Sorry: no banks. You’ll have to find something to do with your money other than let-
ting it breed in some hot-house. Oh, there will be safe deposit boxes to keep it secure for
you. We’ll charge only a small amount for the service. And non-interest-bearing checking
accounts, ditto. Debit cards, yes; credit cards, no. If you want a loan, you apply for it, and
there will be a service charge for that too. That’s it. That’s how the new capitalism will
work.
3. The state shall charter cooperatives, worker-owned factories, family businesses,
and partnerships.
4. The state shall charter credit unions to provide capital via lines of credit backed
by the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Please don’t think that people can’t get rich under this system; please don’t think that
there can’t be risk and reward for individual adventurers. It’s when testosterone capitalism
gets pumped into giant corporate structures that the Moloch strides across the earth. Well,
we’ve got rid of corporations, big-mawed joint-stock companies. Cooperatives, worker-
owned factories, family businesses and partnerships where there is personal responsibility
infused throughout the system: these will give us reasonable wealth by means of appropri-
ate technology.
Am I rushing things a little? We hold these truths to be self-evident. Let’s have genuine
free trade, none of these so-called “free trade” agreements which are negotiated in great de-
tail precisely to ensure profits for known corporations. Free trade means, or should mean,
importing and exporting as best we can on our own terms.
5. No agreements may be entered into that curtail free trade on our own terms
(a) importing of certain items may be curtailed, such as hand guns, toys which are a
threat to health, and so on;
(b) duties may be imposed on imports in order to protect small businesses which we
wish to see thrive here;
(c) there shall be no exporting of raw logs, unprocessed fish, unrefined ore, and un-
bottled water.
As for bulk water: I’m no fool; we’ll probably have to let some go, to ease tensions
below the line, eh?
We can survive without trade; obviously we can. But if we want oranges and comput-
ers we have to pay for them and import them, that’s all. We should be able to make a bit
of money selling canned salmon to the world. Am I oversimplifying? I don’t think so.
It’s the “free trade” pacts that confuse and obfuscate so we cannot see that “free trade” is
all attached to vested interests. I have perused the NAFTA Act. I won’t say I’ve read it.
There’s not a readable sentence in the whole thing. It merely amends previous agreements,
viz. Agricultural Act 51,07 (1938) section 257 amended by substituting 100 grams for 200
grams in paragraph 5: “ingredients of popcorn.” Only insiders know who is benefitted by
that one. But they do know. It’s manipulative, nothing “free” about it. Real free trade is
easy. It’s been going on since the stone age: you bring to market what you have, and you
buy what you need, and a few ribbons. And if the government puts on a few restrictions,
it’s not socialism. The state is not doing the trading, just regulating in general categories
for the common good and with support of the people–like the Chancellor of the Exchequer
controls the total amount of money in circulation in certain areas of endeavour, but not the
precise use of it.
Here’s a saving: close down the foreign office. If we are not in the bullying business,
we don’t need a foreign policy.
6. Our duty as a member of the United Nations shall be our only foreign policy.
Moving right along.
7. Only special forces of last resort will have weapons in our society. All hand guns
and every weapon but registered hunting rifles shall be entirely banned.
I have to declare a bias here. I was brought up in a town in Yorkshire, England, where
nobody owned a gun and, you know, nobody got shot.
Rights and duties: a big subject, more later, but first the golden rule:
8.The rights and duties affirmed in this Constitution pertain to all inhabitants of
a sovereign British Columbia, according to age group.
The rights and duties of juveniles are somewhat different from those of adults. Sixteen
would seem to be an appropriate voting age? Retirement age, seventy?
The rights and duties of convicted offenders are no different from the rest of the popu-
lation. We all have a right to a fair trial and appropriate punishment, which is an intensified
reminder that one’s duty to society still exists.
9. (a) Courts should be imaginative in their penalties for lesser offenses that do not
cross the line into threatening behaviour.
(b) Prisons are only for criminals who have proved themselves a real danger to
society by having committed assaults or persistent theft.
10. Prisons shall be places of health, not safe houses for continued anti-social ac-
tivity:
(1) no threats or assaults shall be allowed;
(2) there shall be no smoking, alcohol or drugs;
(3) there shall be good food and strenuous exercise;
(4) there shall be no TV, but libraries and classes; quietness shall be rewarded;
(5) prison work shall provide a nest-egg available on release.
Thus we have the first ten clauses of our Constitution. Can one just put into a constitu-
tion desiderata of this sort as they occur to one? Why, of course. Shall a constitution only
be full of pious generalities?

The Draft Year

I want now to speak to every seventeen-year-old in British Columbia. I’m going to

grant you a new right. You don’t have it at the moment and consequently many of you
blunder to maturity with unnecessary emotional problems associated with leaving home,
which can be quite traumatic.
I’m proposing a simple way. You can say, “Folks, I have to go. I’m drafted. It’s my draft
year.” And they say, “I guess it is.” You say goodbye to your home and family because you
are required to. Doesn’t that simplify it?
11. The state shall require a year’s compulsory service away from home from all
young people on reaching the age of seventeen, without exception.
You may not have heard of Katimavik. I hadn’t until I began researching the “draft
year” (as I shall call it). “Katimavik” is the Inuit word for “meeting place,” and since 1977
Katimavik has enabled nearly 25,000 Canadians to be involved in more than 2000 commu-
nities. About 1000 youth participate in this volunteer program each year, in over a hundred
different places. For nine months young people ages 17 to 21 live in groups of eleven,
doing 35 hours of community work per week. The overall aim is to foster multicultural
understanding.
This sounds good, and no doubt accomplishes a positive effect. But it is not good
enough; neither is the Peace Corps, nor any of these volunteer organizations that won’t al-
low you in without a bachelor’s degree. They are elitist. We can volunteer, and you can’t.
You need to be served; we do the serving. We are virtuous; you enable us to be.
Then there’s the other take on the “gap year.” I have a newspaper clipping by Duncan
Mavin on what the “gap year” has typically become:
Taking twelve months off--from what, playing video games?--is said to build character. In
reality, all it builds is a high tolerance for booze and a big balance on daddy’s credit card.
There are companies, he writes, that specialize in gap year vacations, laying out year-
long frat parties and “globalized debauchery.” Sounds like a fate worse than death.
What is being proposed with the “draft year” gets away from any spurious class divi-
sions. For once in a person’s life he or she will have to do what everybody else is doing,
at least for the first three weeks of “boot camp,” with its emphasis on health, physical
fitness, self-evaluation, and aptitude testing. The props which have supported your “per-
sonality” through your adolescent years will start shaking; it will be a coming-of-age by
losing one’s false self-esteem, three weeks, my darlings, of not being pampered.
After that, the postings by the placement supervisors. After a month you can appeal for
a different posting and, if that’s what you want, you might get in five or six different expe-
riences of B.C., or possibly an overseas posting. The idea is to find a good way (hopefully
the best way) for you to be useful to others for a year. Nature conservancy. Companionship
for the disabled. Internship in politics, or a craft. National defense training could be a good
option for some. In any case, there’ll be pocket money, and a nest-egg upon the success-
ful completion of the draft year. This is a “nobody stays home” program, and parents of
disabled youth should have complete confidence in the experienced people staffing any
special needs.
The most interesting source book on this question is The Moral Equivalent of War? A
Study of Non-Military Service in Nine Nations (NY: Greenwood Press 1990) by Donald
Eberly and Michael Sheradin, especially the chapter on Costa Rica’s TLU University Com-
munity Work, which is mandatory for university students “to repay society for the higher
education received” (p. 46). In 1985, the three hundred hours of service on projects with
other students were 20% in health, 23% in engineering and agriculture, 7% in arts and
letters, etc. Israel has mandatory national service, with the possibility of a non-military
abstention. It turns out that West Germany (as it was when the book was being compiled) is
closest to what is being proposed in our constitution. Zivildienst is the completion of com-
pulsory military service “by other means and without arms.” But it is still a form of consci-
entious objection, fostering adverse reaction from “patriotic” segments of the population.
A review of existing systems comes up with no equivalent to our “draft year” compulsory
social service (with a small voluntary military component).
It is puzzling that nobody seems to consider peacetime problems sufficiently dire that
young people should be drafted to face up to them. It is equally puzzling that no country
seems ready to find the solution to adolescent lack of purpose in a mandatory period of ini-
tial health camps followed by aptitude-determined projects. Hasn’t any country thought of
this obvious scheme, with the will to put a draft year into operation? Apparently not. Then,
new British Columbia, all power to you!

In Vellum

It has taken me a good while to realise what the victory of the British Labour Party in
the election of 1945 accomplished. A bunch of us, still in school, were caught up in election
fever and dashed around to investigate political candidates of all shades before settling on
Labour, as our class in society would anyway have determined. We read the newspapers
every day to see how things were going, and tried our best to revere the staunch, avuncu-
lar Clement Atlee. As we cheered Labour on to victory, we lightheartedly laid down deep
pledges; in our laughter and milkbar talk were rudimentary determinants. We could not
formulate it, but we were in the grip of the general energy release concomitant with the
creation of a new constitution.
The slippage of the war years had let in some real democracy. In 1945 the people of
Great Britain voted for what they wanted. It was just about the first, and certainly the last,
time that they would be allowed to do that. Why do the mass of people vote against their
own interests all the time? It’s a long story.
Lee-Smith’s a gentleman.
Harvey Watt’s a fool
He shouldn’t go to parliament,
He ought to go to school.
All the children sang that silly ditty in the pre-war elections in our town in Yorkshire.
It was an old Tory trick, and of course one’s parents voted for the “gentleman.” The war
cleared something from our eyes and in 1945 we voted for our man, no fool, Harvey Watt.
We voted for our own welfare, not the other guy’s privileges.
The new constitution that was born at that moment was the welfare state: everyone has
a right to a reasonable share of the nation’s wealth, at least as translated into social security
(health, education, unemployment insurance, and old age pensions). Essentially it had all
been contained in the Beveridge Report during the war, which coined the term “Welfare
State,” and could have been the basis for a written constitution. The previous constitu-
tion was not written down; it didn’t have to be. All the organs of the state by custom were
geared to safeguarding the welfare of the upper classes, especially the landowners. The
new welfare-for-everybody constitution didn’t get written down either, and it should have
been. The Labour government, too harassed by these old vested interests, did not feel it had
a firm enough footing to call a Constitutional Convention. What the 1945 election had won
rested on the most precarious of things, a majority vote in parliament, which was eventu-
ally washed away by Thatcherism. They should have got it into vellum.
Let us not forget the reason for writing these general yearnings down: the main safe-
guard against evil is a holy text. If we can just get written down the best we can think and
believe about the way we live together in society, so that it becomes something of dignity
and authority, then we can put evil behind us perhaps. All a constitution is is saying for our
time what we know in our hearts to be fair. We shouldn’t need it written down, because
everybody knows what’s fair; but some who know it go against what they know. These are
the evil ones. If I say “schoolyard bullying,” you will recognize what I mean, and how deep
it is, now that we have schoolyard murders. Against this we need the written book, if not
the whole bell, book and candle.
A philosopher you may know and admire, Immanuel Kant, in a chapter headed “Radi-
cal Evil in Human Nature” in his Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (p. 28 of the
Torchbook edition) says:
That a corrupt propensity must indeed be rooted in man need not be formally proved in view
of the multitude of crying examples which experience of the actions of men puts before our
eyes.
It is amusing that Kant, who usually insists on formally proving everything, takes evil
in humanity as not needing it. Let’s go with Kant here, and we can also follow him when
later in the same volume he writes a chapter called, “Historical Account of the Gradual
Establishment of the Sovereignty of the Good Principle on Earth.”
But let’s not. We can figure this out for ourselves. We have at our command the means
to put a spoke in the wheel of corruption, mendacity, meanness and inhumanity in all its
forms. This is what a constitution is. Our Constitution will be written and ratified at a mo-
ment in our history when disaster forces us to rise to the task of expressing together what
we basically believe is worthwhile. At that moment we will be on our best behaviour. We
the people will push to the highest pitch our best moral nature and find the most beautiful
language in which to express it; so that there is enduring recognition through the years that
the Constitution is not something to ignore or tamper with. When propensities to lesser
aims start blurring things, bring out the Constitution. When downright evil rears its head,
bring out the Constitution.
We are the inheritors of the Welfare State. How shall we mold the Welfare State to
our needs and concepts? Where in our lives should the Welfare State come in, and where
should it stay away? Let’s test all the possibilities against our sense of felt justice. Let’s go
to work on this.
Life Issues

OK. You are fifteen and having your first abortion...Well, I hope not! I certainly hope
not. But it happens, and I have to say that there should be no impediment to your getting
an abortion in a state-supported clinic where everything is done properly. Let’s put it in the
Constitution:
12. No law shall be made that criminalizes a woman for seeking and obtaining an
abortion, nor a professional who supplies it.
Even if a misguided need for secrecy leads a young girl to try to do it herself, that’s
not a matter for criminal courts. Neither should tragic infanticide be considered a criminal
act, for the state of mind of some women during lactation is well understood. (Even in the
present criminal code infanticide is put into a separate category where the maximum pun-
ishment is five years imprisonment. Why doesn’t the code take that thinking to its logic
conclusion?)
While these two kinds of abortion, before birth and after birth, should be considered
extreme forms of self-defense, and therefore not criminal, they are properly abhorrent to
everybody. Basic human nature cherishes the foetus the moment its conception is known,
and we cheer on its efforts in trying to be born. Birth is beautiful and abortion is ugly. So
don’t do it.
But those of us who counsel against abortion must jolly well make sure that the new
mothers, perhaps otherwise unsupported, have whatever it takes to raise the child. If we put
into the Constitution that every child must be given safety and developmental opportuni-
ties, it would be just more of that poor pious vagueness that guarantees nothing, certainly
not the laughing infant that a loving home produces. We create a Ministry of Families to
offer at least a minimum of attention to all alike no matter what.
Minimum? Let us look at an extreme case. It’s one that I have something to do with,
but what my role should be troubles me. At present I watch from the sidelines. P has been
diagnosed as having a mental illness. Coming upon her in her twenties it has been easy
to put it down as schizophenia; but it does not involve the usual sort of hallucinations but
rather some strange catatonic hesitations in getting her legs across doorways or in getting
food into her mouth. Attempts at personal cleanliness are defeated by incontinence. Yet this
picture would not be at all complete if one didn’t say that P is a truly beautiful woman who
can be sweet and interesting in conversation. She has attracted J and has had two children
by him. J has a on-and-off drug problem, and seems not to be around except for activity that
has twice resulted in paternity without responsibility. P’s one hallucination is her belief that
she can look after the babies though she has not the agility to keep them out of trouble. I’m
not sure she’s even changed a diaper without help. The children are currently in Ministry
care; P visits them by appointment, but she doesn’t always make it because of problems of
getting there. And what of the future?
The Family Court is what the Constiution creates to pass judgment on these cases, but
what can it say? One really wants P to have the experience of motherhood to the fullest that
is possible. But what is possible? Perhaps a quick separation and adoption would be best?
The children would not, would they, want to have her for a mother? Who knows? In any
case, the state cannot really afford to give P twenty-four hour help to have them at home.
Or can it? Maybe a country that doesn’t feel it has to buy a fleet of attack submarines can
afford a lot of things. But would the bonding work if P was not in a condition to give real
succour?
Somebody has to answer these practical questions in our present society, and I’m not
sure the answers could be much different in any imaginary “improved” system. Perhaps
we can write down:
13. The Ministry of Families, and the Family Court, if appealed to, must make
every effort to keep mother and child together for nurture. As well as social workers,
the state shall support a nation-wide system of volunteer care-givers.
Or maybe that second provision is not so wise, unless the government support is very
much at arm’s length. There is one organization which is on record as doing most for dis-
abled children and their families by creating circles of friends and preparing rigorously
for the grown child to live securely beyond the parents’ lifetime, a society based in British
Columbia called PLAN (Planned Lifetime Advocacy Network). This organization knew
“from previous experience” that it must be independent of government and have families
rely on themselves, and the pledges of neighbours and volunteers, to ensure safety and se-
curity in a network that allows love to operate. Safe and Secure is the title of the handbook
published by the leader of PLAN, Al Etmanski, in 1996, with the subtitle “Six Steps to
Creating a Personal Future Plan for People with Disabilities.” This practical and inspir-
ing manual acknowledges John McKnight as one of PLAN’s “great guardian angels,” on
whose analysis and insights they have modeled their work. McKnight is a long-time pro-
fessor at Northwestern University (Illinois) and director of their Community Studies Pro-
gram. His thinking is to be found in The Careless Society: Community and its Counterfeits
(Basic Books 1995), which is a scholarly and passionate indictment of the way services
have come to be delivered in our society, i.e. by a professional caring industry that is self-
perpetuating and is now expanding into such things as bereavement counselling and re-
cluse management. Re this last, which McKnight says he came upon in “a Canadian city”:
 This service was developed when a recluse dies and no one found him until fourteen days
later. A newspaper photographer took a picture of the room where he lived. People were
shocked, and the result was the conversion of his death into a need. The local government
created a committee of officials that decided to respond to the need his death created. They
recommended that the city create a new service--recluse management. The committee also
wrote a manual that now guides recluse managers. It tells how to find recluses, how to
observe them without their knowing they are being observed, and when to intervene in
their lives.
(Quoted from the exerpts published in Common Ground, #143, June 2003.)
McKnight goes on to question whether the recluse needs the service more than the
servicers need the recluse. He sees a certain crassness behind it: “If an old man dies and is
undiscovered for fourteen days, he is worthless. If a recluse manager controls his death, the
service economy will count his death as a product of value.” If the state deals with grief, it
adds to the Gross National Product; if family and friends do it, it isn’t counted. McKnight
and PLAN, and all of us, I should think, would want to get away from this perversion of
caring in the present institutionalized servicing.
In P’s case, it appears abundantly clear that any way forward is made more difficult ex-
actly by the amount of care thrust upon her in terms of accommodation and welfare money.
She seems to be well looked after, but it is an illusion. The quality of life is not there, and
she turns for solace to J, who is, as far as one can tell, irresponsible and hurtful, both in
the short run (taking her money for drugs) and in the long run, when you can bet he won’t
be around as her condition deteriates. For she does seem to be doomed without the kind
of network PLAN proposes. Meanwhile, the babies have to cling to someone; decisions
have to be made. I suspect that all a Constitution can do is to set up a Family Court that is
accessible to all parties and have it make these difficult decisions somehow. The volunteer
solution can grow organically in a caring society and become increasingly there to make
the Family Court’s work easier.
Talking of the difficulty of gauging what is genuine welfare and what is piously delete-
rious, how can one really help drug addicts and drunks? I have saved the issue of The Van-
couver Courier for 1 June 2007 which contains the story of Mike Petek, a father so driven
to distraction that he took a butcher’s knife and waited in the shadows for his daughters’
drug dealer to drive up. “I was going to stab this prick and keep stabbing him until the cops
came and pulled me off.”
The question of the rights of parents is very pertinent here. For more than a decade
Mike Petek has tried to get his kids clean, without any back-up from the law. Both his
daughters, now aged 21 and 27, are drug addicts in Vancouver’s downtown east side and
his son is in jail for drug-related theft. He would take them to hospitals and detox centres
only to see them run immediately out of the building. He is infuriated, says the reporter for
the Courier, that there is no law that will keep his adult children in treatment. “Never mind
their rights,” he says. “They are slowly dying.” These days he cruises at night in his red
truck so that his daughters can see him and stop him if they are in need.
He rumbles down Main Street to East Hastings, where the notorious corner is plugged
with zombie-like characters, some of them staggering and shouting at the rising sun...”This
is where I picked up Gelena last time–couple of days ago. She was out of her mind. Took
her to breakfast at MacDonald’s and then she was gone again.”
On this occasion, with the reporter present, he got Gelena as far as the treatment centre
(she had made an appointment herself in order to renew her welfare). He tells the reporter
that they won’t keep her there, in spite of needles and a bag of whitish-brown powder in her
pocket. Later in the day they call to confirm that she has left. “She’s an adult,” says Mike.
“She can do what she wants. What a waste of time, a bloody waste of time. Don’t these
people get it? You’ve got to lock her up.”
Mike’s son Justin has come out of jail after five months, reports the Courier of 11 July
2007. He is clean and ready to try to stay clean. They did lock him up, but he had to commit
a crime to get them to do it. I have read several testimonials of ex-drug addicts who “kicked
it” in prison and say they could not have done it any other way. They say it takes ninety
days for the body to get somewhat used to not having the drug. Can we not consider drug
and alcohol addiction a special category of illness where the disease is such that victims do
not seek cure and therefore society has to mandate a cure? We can declare a new human
right for this specific situation.
14. The state insists on an individual’s right to be freed from the deadly grip of
drug and alcohol addition by medical incarceration for ninety days.
We cannot stop people in general from ruining their lives if they are determined to do it.
There are many ways to degradation. We are here picking out one particular way, one that
is conspicuous in its symptoms, which include public nuisance, petty theft, pimping, and
comatose states. Why should society force addicts into crime before it will take them in and
give them a new chance at life? The essence of a new law would be the right of the indi-
vidual to be taken against his or her disintegrated will, and incarcerated for 90 days, not for
any crime but for detox and getting the human body back to some kind of normality with
the chance for future abstinence. This would be to extend the definition of “freedom” to
include limited detention in a hospital in order to escape the permanent prison of addiction.
It is important to make a clear distinction here because I want to include a clause on
suicide in the Constitution:
15. Suicide is not to be criminalized; end-of-life suicide should be facilitated.
If addiction were suicide one might respect it more. The fact is that addiction is a mis-
guided attempt to lead life more intensely, and is so stupid that one wants just to shake
people out of it. It is quite different, for instance, from the recent news item in the British
press about convicts with life sentences passing round a petition to have their sentences
“commuted” to the death penalty. And many old people would rather be dead than the
victim of end-of-life medical procedures. Edward Gibbon is supposed to have said: “Life
is fine except for the last twenty minutes.” These days it’s more drawn out; one endures a
long confiscation, with bed rules designed to make things easier for attendants. One has to
get out of life somehow and, like the process of getting into it, the state should not prescribe
methods but rather offer facilities as requested.

Part II

Let us see what all this is beginning to amount to. We have been looking at certain
aspects of life from conception to death and assessing what we think is purely private and
what is of public concern. This process implies that we as individuals and as a society do
hold, some things sacred. A Constitution is a written approximation of self-evident com-
mon law, which is itself an ever developing embodiment of the judicial memory of what
the people at large believe is fair play and where the government needs to step in. Common
law shouldn’t require a constitution; custom should take care of everything. The noble
households of Homer’s epics offered hospitality (in the name of the supreme god Zeus) to
any traveller who turned up, either by boat with retainers or walking with staff and sandals.
The latter would sit by the door and eat left-overs, which is proper; the former would be
seated at the high table and not required to explain himself before being given a feast. Some
things are Zeus-sacred. Everyone living in the early Middle Ages knew that the commons
was there to be freely used in certain traditional ways: grazing, firewood, lovers’ walks. A
society at ease with itself for generations does not need such customs enforced.
But things go wrong. Somebody discovers they have the power to enclose the com-
mons for their exclusive use. When customs are radically disobeyed, a new constitution is
in the making. Shall it be one that protects the powerful few? It usually is. Let’s be aware
of that, and make the new Constitution ours instead.
About 80% of Canadians have seen no improvement in their incomes since 1982. On
the other hand, the top 1% of Canadians had their 8.5% of the national income wealth
increased to 12.2% by 2004. The Canadian Constitution is such that it has allowed a 43%
increase in the piece of the pie going to 1% of the people in its jurisdiction. This small
minority have simply asserted their power not unlike those who enclosed the Commons
in former times. We need a Constitution that makes sure such inequalities do not happen.
Some inequality, yes; inequalities that violate all sense of fair play, no.
 I have been persuaded by such writers as F.A. Hayek that one can only get equality in
society by horribly totalitarian means, and even then it doesn’t work. So how can a consti-
tution curb the excessive greed of the 1% and help the 80%? We have actually dealt with
that. Joint-stock companies were created precisely to accomplish such gross rearrangement
of wealth. So get rid of them. Our Constitution says: “No corporate charter shall be grant-
ed.” That takes care of much of the problem. But how is this different from totalitarianism?
Hayek gives us the answer: our constitution is expressing a law of universal application. It
is not a government edict for or against known individuals. It arises out of the wish of the
people to get society on to the right track. It does not violate Hayek’s principle of “spon-
taneous order,” since abolishing corporations leaves the outcome sufficiently unknown.
Other forms of endeavour are available--family businesses, partnerships, cooperatives-
-and people will work out how to prosper within the new limitations.
It gives me a particular pleasure to make use of a thinker I would not be expected to find
congenial. I certainly had an aversion to Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom when it came out
in the 1950s. It was pitted distastefully against all the hopeful things my beloved Labour
Party was trying to do to give working people a better life. Hayek said it would lead to serf-
dom, as if I hadn’t come from a long line of serfs. We were just getting out of serfdom, and
there was not the slightest chance of any totalitarian tyranny coming out of the avuncular
Clem Atlee government. The Road to Serfdom was a ridiculous over-reation. I didn’t invite
Hayek to my board for many years. And then I picked up the three paperback volumes,
from the University of Chicago Press, of Hayek’s Law Legislation and Liberty (1973). It
was his last work, and came with a much different tone.
What do I get out of Hayek’s concept of “liberty”? Essentially it is, of course, freedom
from authoritarian restraint. We wish to live in a fairly unordered society and make our
way as we please, not being moved like chess pieces. Obedience is not liberty. Hayek’s
definition of liberty is not, then, different from anybody else’s; he is just clearer about it.
He knows that, conversely, freedom requires a certain amount of order in society, and that
only one of the two kinds of order will serve us properly:
(1) We want to avoid what Hayek calls “made order”–the directed, artificial order,
imposed as one might a taxis, an order in battle (vol. 1, p. 37). This is what he thought the
Labour government would bring in if it were brutally efficient, which obviously it never
was or could have been, being true to its sense of the brotherhood of man, not the dictator-
ship of the poletariat, which was never an English concept.
(2) It is “spontaneous order” that is Hayek’s ideal. In footnote 9 he goes immediately to
my old and venerate Professor Werner Jaeger, quoting from his masterwork, Paideia The
Ideals of Greek Culture (New York: Oxford 1945, 2nd edition):
The law on which it [the polis] was founded was not a mere decree but the nomos, which
 originally meant the sum total of that which was respected by all living customs with regard
to what is right and wrong.
This is the source of Hayek’s concept of “spontaneous order,” which is produced by
the actions of the many people of a culture not by design but by the aggregate of “all living
customs.” Perhaps “spontaneous” is not the best word to use for this phenomenon, since
the laws of human nature (nomoi), the slowly evolving common laws, are what produce
it. It only appears to be spontaneous, or it is only spontaneous in contrast to order imposed
from above. Be that as it may, it was Hayek (I have to admit) who made me think that to
write a constitution afresh is what we should be doing above all else. It came to me reading
the following paragraph (vol. 1 p. 55), where he summarizes his thesis:
That a condition of liberty in which all are allowed to use their knowledge for their purposes,
restrained only by rules of just conduct of universal application, is likely to produce for them
the best conditions for achieving their aims; and that such a system is likely to be achieved
and maintained only if all authority, including that of the majority of the people, is limited
in the exercise of coercive power by general principles to which the community has com-
mitted itself.
To which he adds: “such principles...have never been fully articulated in constitutional
documents.” Well, then, I said to myself, let’s do it. Let’s articulate the principles to which
we are committed. Our Constitution had better catch up to what is best in general public
opinion or else we have lost our liberty, the liberty to go about our own ends, to work within
the law, without being blocked by utter stupidity. If, for instance, the law (i.e. constitution)
has allowed elections to be bought by monied interests, then, once that fact has been di-
gested, we cannot work at ease within the so-called democracy we live in. We have to write
a new Constitution to have any chance for the free flowing of our energies. I came to the
conclusion that a new Constitution was the main ingredient of “the pursuit of happiness.”
It has to be new. At one time spontaneous order had children working in the mines with
workhouses for the old; and nowadays in the USA spontaneous order has health care and
prisons for profit, the one trying to avoid patients and the other trying to keep the cells full.
What if your spontaneous order produces offshore tax havens and ethanol subsidies and
1% of the population with most of the wealth? Hayek does not face up to these nagging
questions in his volumes, so he hasn’t done his job.
Yet he has, up to a point. The theory of “spontaneous order” means that one cannot
blame everything on “the military-industrial complex” or “multinational corporations,”
because these things are what the opinion of the people has managed to come up with in
this stage of our development that is now at this moment about to give way to something
new from a public will putting out feelers in a new and better direction. We can wait and
see what happens. Or we can call a Constiutional Congress and thrash something out in
writing. Possibly we don’t have time to wait. There is a feeling that the next tragedy of the
human race will be its last. I’m proposing that if we behave sensibly in a small independent
British Columbia it will make a great difference to the whole planet. If one place can think
its way out of the downward spiral, then that becomes possible for all.
So let us, for god’s sake, think things out with some care. (It will be clear by now that
I am appealing to more than the wayward Minister in that laundromat we call the B.C.
Legislature.) One thing that Hayek helps us to get clear is that we live by laws, but there
are two kinds of laws and one kind should not really be called laws when they are only
government regulations.
The first kind, the real laws, are hardly felt as commands. We mostly live by them
without thinking. Common law is common, second nature to us. Mischief, fraud, theft and
assault; we know when we are guilty. Why do you think that judges don’t get assassinated
all the time? Because criminals know the judges are right. We cherish common law’s cohe-
siveness; it bonds society together.
There is no cohesiveness in the other kind of “law”--let’s not use the same word. Let’s
call them regulations, a list of offenses. We often violate regulations that irk us, because
we feel that we are being micromanaged. When they decided to make it an offense to ride
a bicycle without a helmet, I refused to alter a practice of sixty years’ standing and rode
down the street with my hair flying, while one smiling lady my own age stood clapping, ap-
plauding my civil disobedience. She knew that I wasn’t violating common law, only some
meddling lobbied for by the insurance companies. Instead of arresting cyclists who do
dangerous turns in traffic or sail through stop lights, the state finds it easier to ticket people
who are riding perfectly safely (but without so-called “proper” headgear).
Most of these “regulations” probably had at the back of them some perceived need.
People say “there oughtta be a law.” Bad types are using the park for nefarious purposes,
but, instead of arresting people for mischief or whatever, they close the park at dusk and
ticket people for disobeying a sign. It’s easier for them; and I become a criminal every
time I take the air in the evening. Nevertheless, there is mischief in parks, and one needs
by-laws; there is dangerous driving, and one needs traffic regulations. There are a myriad
of things that government on all levels needs to get done. We put these “second class” laws
into the hands of the legislators (as we are accustomed to). The custodians of primary or
common law will be the senators. This involves taking a new view of the function of the
Senate.
The weakness in the brilliant “checks and balances” U.S. system is the Senate, which
really does not do anything different from the House of Representatives. In origin it was
a response to the possible inbalance of the federal system: the House has members pro-
portionate to the population of the states, the Senate has an equal number of senators from
each state. That difference does not seem to produce any beneficial effects worth noticing;
and if you don’t have a federal system, it has no reason for existence on that ground. I am
proposing here that a Senate of an independent British Columbia can have an essential role
in the way democracy works, the primary role: it can be the safeguard of the true wishes
of the people.
Hayek (vol. 3 p. 32), in trying to see how more democracy could be sought, imagined
a marathon constitutional congress:
I believe in fact that we should get a more representative sample of the true opinion of the
people at large if we picked out by drawing lots some five hundred mature adults and let
them for twenty years devote themselves to the task of improving the law guided only by
their conscience and the desire to be respected.
Why not a permanent body of a more modest composition of one hundred senators with
the same general purpose?
A story in the Globe & Mail by Jim Brown tells of a lawsuit begun in 1999 by rela-
tives of someone who came home from the Second World War in a shell-shocked state and
spent most of the next fifty years in a psychiatric hospital until he died in 2002 aged 88.
The class action was about the pension benefits which had been held by the government in
trust but without being invested. For decades it didn’t pay interest. The Mulroney govern-
ment started paying interest in 1990, but passed a law prohibiting retroactive claims. The
Supreme Court of Canada in 2003 decided that the law was valid, even though it breached
its own legal duties. So here at this point the Senate, if it was constituted to do as is being
proposed, could have stepped in to override the Supreme Court on behalf of veterans and
their families. The class action continued on the basis of other damages and in the Ontario
Superior Court they were awarded about $5 billion only to have this decision overturned in
the Court of Appeal. The Supreme Court decided they wouldn’t look at the matter further,
so the veterans are empty-handed. Should these mentally crippled vets and their families
get $5 billion? It’s not certain what the Senate would do with it, but it is exactly the kind of
thing they should deal with as embodying the best opinion of the people at large.
For this job one would look to people from all walks of life, trusting the hundred as one
trusts the twelve of a courtroom jury. A roster of potential senators could be compiled from
respected men and women nominated by peer groups such as unions, churches, universi-
ties, business associations, and regional councils. An Election Board would have to take
care of the details, but one essential condition would be that the final hundred would be
chosen from at least twice that number by lot. Hayek suggested this, and he was only echo-
ing the practice of the Athenian democracy at its height. It reduces one’s sense of being be-
holden to anyone for one’s seat. A candidate will be chosen in some way by the peer group
and might report back to them, but they cannot claim more than that. The seat is given by
chance, and that takes the pressure off. As Hayek says (vol. 3, p. 30):
For the task of laying down the limits of what governments may do clearly a type of person
 is wanted wholly different from those whose main interest is to secure their re-election by
getting special benefits for their supporters.
Other elections–for the legislature, for municipal councils–would not have to be by
lot, but they would proceed with strictly regulated campaign spending. Newspapers and
TV stations must by law give a certain amount of time or space to candidates, but noth-
ing bought. Democracy depends on our going back to stump speeches and canvassing, no
million-dollar TV blitzes so that the people’s voice is lost under the roar of money. Let’s
put it in the Constitution: no paid lobbyists, no campaign spending.
No paid lobbyists. How can we have grassroots politics, if money comes to politicians
in brown paper envelopes or well-known more subtle ways? Hayek is surely right when he
says (vol. 2, p. 4) that acts of government should not normally specifiy “particular foreseen
benefits for particular people.” In our society, it seems, it is getting to be the essence of
government that you pay back tenfold what you got in election donations. Just think of the
law that was passed so that pharmaceutical companies could not be sued for adverse effects
from vaccination. What a gift that was! That wasn’t a law; it was a blatant pay-back. So we
must keep our legislation clean by constitutionally ruling out donations; and, just to make
sure,we have the Senate to say, “That won’t do.”
I haven’t finished appropriating Hayek’s ideas yet. One could undoubtedly get these
same ideas from other sources, but it pleases me to go to a man who is supposed to be
untainted by radicalism. In fact, Hayek in the end is seen to stand against much of what
this late capitalism has come to. Wouldn’t it send a cold shiver down the spine of the mu-
tual back-scratching powers-that-be to hear him say the following about special favours?
“There can be in justice no such claims as, e.g., those of the American farmer for ‘parity’
or of any other group to the preservation of their relative or absolute position” (vol. 2, p.
95). He would be grinding his teeth at the way the ethanol subsidies have morphed into
the craziness of the biofuel bubble. And contrary to the prevailing notion among capitalists
that they have a right to be bailed out if they get into difficulties, Hayek naively thinks that
the free market involves someone accepting “an unfavorable turn of events when they [the
events] go against him” (vol. 2, p. 128). I think I’ll sit by Hayek in the grandstand when the
shock of the godawful shuddering global collapse hits the smug players in the field.
And in the recovery period, when we will be trying in various ways discussed previ-
ously to make the playing field level for entrepreneurial activity, we will be able to bear in
mind Hayek’s dictum (vol. 3, p. 16): “We can limit the powers of organized interests only
by limiting the powers of government.” That is, the government can only work through a
strict constitution which does not allow it to be, as it has tended to be from the times of
Elizabeth I, a purveyor of monopolies. I think the constitution we are building will keep the
government out of fostering private monopolies.
Nevertheless, there will always be some public monopolies, and rightly so. Hayek finds
it “unquestionable that in an advanced society government ought to provide a number of
services which for various reasons cannot be provided, or cannot be provided adequately,
by the market” (vol. 3, p. 41). Hayek is no Milton Friedman of rigid minimalism. Govern-
ment can provide some services more cheaply and effectively (vol. 3, p. 44):
To this category belong not only such obvious instances as the protection against vio-
lence, epidemics, or such natural forces as floods or avalanches, but also many of the ame-
nities which make life in modern cities tolerable, most roads (except some long-distance
highways where tolls can be charged), the provision of standards of measure, and of many
kinds of information ranging from land registers, maps, and statistics to the certification of
the quality of some goods or services offered in the market.
In short (vol. 3, p. 59): “it is merely common sense that government. ...will step in
when private investment flags, and thereby employ resources for public investment at the
least cost and with the greatest benefit to society.” I think we can give Hayek posthumous
membership in the Labout Party for this theoretical establishment of the government’s role.
For who decides when government has to take over from the market to supply essential
benefits? Not the market. That’s pretty obvious. It must be the public will as expressed
through democratic structures of government. It is not, therefore, the free market that holds
total sway and allows government in for particular needs. On the contrary, the free mar-
ket operates within the state and by its enlightened regulation. The state violates the free
market’s freedom at its peril–”public-private-partnerships” being only the latest form of
peddling monopolies–but, on the other hand, it can’t allow the market to wreck the ship
of state by pretending it can do everything better. Hayek says it perfectly (vol. 2, p. 136):
“Capitalism as it exists today has many remediable defects that an intelligent policy of
freedom ought to correct” i.e. government intervention working within the rule of law.
Hayek continues with a gracious admission that takes him into the core of the welfare
state (vol. 2, p. 136):
A system which relies on the spontaneous ordering forces of the market, once it has reached
a certain level of wealth, is also by no means incompatible with government providing,
outside the market, some security against severe deprivation.
This statement of the safety net is rather marred by the word “severe,” which has more
than a hint of the old cliche that the poor are malingerers and that we should take them as
such until their deprivation is so bad that it demonstrates that they are not pretending.
Be that as it may, to see how “far out” Hayek gets, think of the most radical proposal
we have had in the last fifty years. The proposal that goes against all that status quo capital-
ism and its symbiotic trade unions stand for is the guaranteed annual income. I first heard
Robert Theobald talk brilliantly about this when he visited the campus of the University
of Utah in 1950. It hits capitalism in its vitals when it proposes that people don’t have to
work and suffer in order to maintain existence. Hayek takes up this dangerous radicalism
(vol. 2, p. 87):
There is no reason why in a free society government should not assure to all protection
against severe [sic] deprivation in the form of an assured minimum income. . .So long as
such a uniform minimum income is provided outside the market to all those who, for any
reason, are unable to earn in the market an adequate maintenance, this need not lead to a
restriction of freedom, or a conflict with the Rule of Law.
Hayek really means it, and repeats the idea (vol. 3, p. 55):
The assurance of a certain minimum income for all, or a sort of floor below which nobody
need fall even when they are unable to provide for themselves, appears not only to be a
wholly legitimate protection against common risk but a necessary part of the Great Society.
Hayek does not go any further than this emphatic but sketchy statement. So we must
turn to others to make the step beyond Hayek’s notion that the guaranteed annual income
is only for the “poor” in “severe” circumstances. Margaret Mead, for example, takes this
first stage for granted. In her essay in Robert Theobald’s Middle Class Support (Swallow
1972) she says: “The idea that anyone should not receive basic subsistence, food, water,
and shelter–so long as there was anything left to divide–is a modern savagery” (p. 9?). She
goes further in seeing that a guaranteed annual income for everybody would improve the
quality of the workplace (p. 114):
It is undoubtedly true that if a man does not live under dire threat, he will ask more of his
job. He will not tolerate unsafe working conditions, a degrading work situation, a job that
defines him as less than human. Every task will have to be made worth doing.
If having all jobs provide a “sense of purpose, dignity, and participation” is a threat to
society, then we had better get a new society. The guaranteed annual income is a step into
that future.
I see a couple of problems–only one big one, really: how can society afford such lar-
gess? Well, we do actually provide a guaranteed annual income at the present time, in
a very higgledy-piggledy way, with various measures of welfare such as unemployment
insurance, food stamps, charities, and various cash hand-outs that have to be asked for. In
our society we do not think it is all right for people to die on the streets (or until recently
we didn’t), so we provide a safety net in a desultory and expensively bureaucratic fashion.
A universal system of providing a sustaining income would subsume all piecemeal welfare,
including unemployment insurance and old age pensions, all at great savings in administra-
tive costs.
I think I have found out how the guaranteed annual income could work. It really should
be a guaranteed weekly income. At designated disbursement centres accessible to the
whole population of British Columbia (post offices, credit unions, government buildings
etc), computers will show a week’s sum of the guaranteed annual income for all residents
who sign up for it and obtain a photo ID card. When the apportioned sum is withdrawn by
the identified individual the account will be empty for a week, then the sum will appear in
the computer again and can be collected again in the same way. For this to work, the cash
must be picked up in person (or authorized social worker in case of disability). If there has
been no withdrawal in a week, there will be nothing added to the account; the same sum
will appear in subsequent weeks, and nothing will be accumulated. In short, there is money
for you each week if you pick it up. If you don’t pick it up in the week, you lose it. But
the same sum is still there for you the next week if you need it. The corollary to this is that
affluent people may not always bother to pick up the weekly money, and if they are away
from B.C. they can’t. So it might turn out that this money goes mainly to the poor (presum-
ably more than the “severely” poor); but it is also there for anyone who wants to take a
break from other forms of earning income.

Taxes

I’m sorry this Constitution business is so serious. Maybe we can get a few laughs out
of taxes. The GST is a big laugh. We can abolish that tax, and all the bureaucracy that man-
ages it and fails to stop millions from being siphoned off by not even very bright crooks.
Income tax is an even bigger laugh, with off-shore tax havens and a thousand loopholes.
It is always imperfectly “progressive” because nobody has worked out what the tax has to
be to hurt a rich household as much as a poor one. And if it were truly “progressive”, the
incentives for entrepreneurial ambition would be diminished; human nature is such that
you can tax enterprise to a standstill. So let’s abolish income tax too.
A general sales tax is an abomination, but the government can pick up a bit of loose
change by taxing luxury items, such as furs, jewelry, cars over a certain amount, houses and
condominiums over a certain amount. And nobody minds the government trying to curb
use of tobacco, gasoline and air travel these days by taxing them. A pollution tax might fit
in here except we don’t tax criminal activities.
Customs duties are a good form of taxation; they add to the cost of imported commodi-
ties in order to give home industry a chance. In this way the government interferes with the
market in order to ensure that there is a market at all for many products B.C. wouldn’t pro-
duce otherwise. No country should have to depend on another country for shoes, clothing,
basic foodstuffs, and other essential items. Anyone who says the opposite is just softening
you up for colonial status.
Apropos duties, a newspaper item (The Guardian Weekly 14 March 2008 p. 31) reports
that the traditional black and white keffiyeh scarf that Yasser Arafat made synonymous
with the Palestine cause is now being imported from China, selling much more cheaply
than the locally made product. “The whole textile trade collapsed in just a couple of years,”
the head of the Palestine garment industry is reported as saying. “Our government, which
has no control over the borders, was quite unable to cope with the massive influx of Chi-
nese products.” And I remember the news photograph of the last Jantzen sweater made in
Vancouver a few years ago.
A major part of Government income will be what the British call “rates,” which is
basically a user fee for what the state, nationally or locally, supplies to the population in
general. It is usually attached to home ownership and passed on to renters by landlords.
We are speaking here of obvious things like schools, hospitals, roads, street lighting and
upkeep, and domestic and business utilities, all the services we have learnt to expect and to
pay the authorities for. And nobody would mind a one or two percentage addition, a sort of
cost-plus, to build up the treasury a bit.
The main revenue to support the guaranteed weekly income scheme will come from
taxes on land ownership. On our annual tax assessments the value of our property is di-
vided into “Buildings” and “Land.” Why is that division made when both parts are taxed at
the same rate? It’s there because there may come a time–and I’m proposing that the time is
now–when the two will be treated differently. The tax on the “Building” part is essentially
the user fees described above.
The tax on the “Land” part will be raised until it meets requirements to balance the
budget. Why is it just that the land tax should bear the brunt of raising money for the public
good? Well, now we have to get very serious again, because it takes a tremendous shift in
ingrained attitudes to land ownership. We are proud when we have saved enough to buy
our home, and later a little vacation cabin on an acre of land. This pride does not have to
be disturbed. It is not under attack. But what about another senario where a different kind
of land ownership is involved. I always tell my young acquaintances who have a glint in
their eyes that they should buy a downtown block in Prince Rupert, which is at the end of a
transcontinental rail line and cannot help but grow from its rather depressed position at the
present time. “Just sit and watch the price of downtown real estate in Prince Rupert go up
and up,” I say to them with a developer’s leer on my face. Why the leer? Because my young
friend’s fortune would not be through his own effort. The population pressure pushes up
the price; the amenities accrue from the well-managed city council; and increased world
trade decides the rest. Rents go sky high, and it’s a classic case of unearned income. Then
he can pass the property on to his children, and they can have income that is even less de-
served. This kind of speculation, betting on happenstance, has been going on in B.C. since
the Canadian Pacific Railway was just a puff of smoke on the horizon.
It is this value brought to land by the community that the community has every right to
get taxes from. The market will determine what rent the landowner gets from his holdings,
but in future the community will take a much higher percentage of that rental income. It
was Henry George in his popular book, Progress and Poverty (1879), who put these ideas
out most effectively. The idea of a land tax is simple and compelling, except to speculative
developers, who are gambling with other people’s chips.
Will it work? Look up Mason Gaffney’s “Adequacy of Land as a Tax Base” in a de-
finitive compendium, The Assessment of Land Value ed. Daniel M. Holland (University of
Wisconsin 1970). Gaffney, who has a clear command of conventional economics, answers
the question: “I feel confident that land is an adequate tax base” (p. 207). Especially when
you lift the taxes on buildings, the increased desire to build makes the land itself more valu-
able, and the tax revenue from it all the higher, even before you start raising the percentage
rate of the tax on that land value.
Eugene, Oregon, has pushed up assessment on vacant land more than on the improved
land. Roger G. Sturtevant and Richard W. Lindhom in “American Land Tax Roots: Plus
Experimentation in Oregon” included in Land Value Taxation (Wisconsin 1982) give a
statistical account of what’s been going on in Eugene, and conclude: “This study lends
empirical support to the use of land value taxation as an effective land use planning instru-
ment, as well as a fiscal tool providing tax relief to homeowners” (p. 82)
Summarily, it appears that land value taxation has an effective relationship of a great
enough magnitude to warrant its use. Care must be taken in manipulating the tax rates so
that growth control variables are affected sufficiently while needed revenue capacities are
being met.
I find the tone of these remarks very reassuring. They give the feeling that the Henry
George land tax proposals have reached a stage beyond experiment.

Part III

Turning to the Canadian Constitution we should really be able to have some fun. It is
hilarious to watch otherwise quite intelligent jurists trying to grapple with it and pretending
to have succeeded. I have read Canadian Supreme Court judgments where it is asked, with
apparent seriousness, what the framers of the Constitution meant by a particular wording,
as though whoever wrote those words had some higher wisdom. Internal evidence goes
to confirm one’s suspicion that the Hon. Jean Chretien wrote most of the Schedule A (in
French), but I think he had a hand in Schedule B’s English also. Take the preamble:
Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
SCHEDULE B Part I CANADIAN CHARTER OF RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS
Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and
the rule of law:
That’s the preamble, all of it. Though perhaps to be commended for its brevity, some-
thing more majestic might have been called for. There is nothing in it to suggest why a
Charter of Rights is needed. Quite the contrary, if, as it says, Canada has “the rule of law,”
then we are doing well enough, and a charter might just muddy the waters. And if there is
“the supremacy of God” operating in the land, we are doing very well indeed. And what if
God doesn’t like a section of the Charter of Rights, will He exercise His supremacy and ex-
punge it? I have not noticed God exercising His supremacy very much in British Columbia,
unless we take Him to be the God of Rain, in which case we have felt His power indeed.
Let’s just say that the preamble is a Jean Chretien preamble, the work of a malapropist
using the stub of a pencil. It took him a day to write, and his desk was clear by five o’clock.
But already the Constitution has lost any halo it might have had. So I don’t know how
seriously one can take s.52:
52. (1) The Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada, and any law that is
inconsistent with the provisions of the Constitution is, to the extent of the inconsistency, of
no force or effect.
Does this mean we are supposed to puzzle out the imperfect wording of the written doc-
ument and scrap any good working law that seems as though it might offend and thus be
called “unconstitutional”? There has been some mighty good case law from Magna Carta
on down. I would rather work it the other way: seriously check the newly stub-pencilled
Charter to make sure it hasn’t gone astray.
For instance, s. 1:
RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS IN CANADA.
1. The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms
set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably
justified in a free and democratic society.
This is a deliberately vague umbrella clause. I think we would get the essence of it if it
was stated more bluntly:
The Charter allows free action only so far as it is allowed by the authorities.
Then it becomes clearly a tautology. Is this an advance on common law since Magna
Carta?
Section 2 is worded rather strangely for a charter guaranteeing fundamental freedoms.
It says we already have them:
FUNDAMENTAL FREEDOMS.
2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: (a) freedom of conscience and
religion; (b) freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the
press and other media of communication; (c) freedom of peaceful assembly; and (d) free-
dom of association.
The charter is not giving us anything in allowing us to have internal thoughts about
right and wrong. Conscience is one thing, but conscientious objection to something the
powerful hold dear is another. What we should be concerned with here is the fundamental
freedom of the “whistle-blower.” Put that in the Charter.
Finally, at the end of 2(b) we get to the freedom to express oneself. The writer of the
section wants to be a bit practical and up-to-date, so we are supposed to have “freedom
of expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.” If this
means anything it is that newspapers and TV are available to us for self-expression. Does
this mean that the Vancouver Sun has to print all the letters I write to the Editor? Apparently
not, since the Sun doesn’t print any of ‘em. This section can’t mean that we have indepen-
dent newspapers; they are practically all owned by conglomerates. If all it means is that the
government of the day shall not close down newspapers and TV stations, why doesn’t it
say so; “There shall not be censorship of the media...” And then we wait for the “...unless.”
It is the “unless” we are interested in, not some ungrammatical talk of “freedom.” Where
does the War Measures Act come in?
It is all the “unlesses” lurking in the shadows of the Charter clauses that we should be
concerned with. Take section 2(c): we know there is no “freedom of peaceful assembly”
when visiting dignitaries come to town; at least nobody gets within view or earshot of any
dictator or factory slave-owner who happens to be feted by our government. I believe there
is “peaceful assembly” for playing bowls. But what about substituting “peaceful protest”?
The Charter of Rights and Freedoms did not want to use those words.
Section 2(d) is interesting: “freedom of association.” In 1987 the Supreme Court of
Canada said that this freedom did not apply to unions fomenting strikes. As of a Supreme
Court decision of 2007 unions apparently have a constitutional right to foment strikes.
It is almost meaningless to talk about freedoms unless you also specify limits on free-
dom. Section 6 (i) says: “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave
Canada.” Simple enough, unless the FBI fakes evidence to get someone extradicted, or
your name is on a terrorist no-fly list.
Curiouser and curiouser, we come to a section headed “Equality Rights” where some
people are given more rights than others:
15. (1) Every individual is equal before and under the law and has the right to the equal
protection and equal benefit of the law without discrimination and, in particular, without
discrimination based on race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or mental
or physical disability.
(2) Subsection (1) does not preclude any law, program or activity that has as its object
the amelioration of conditions of disadvantaged individuals or groups including those that
are disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or
mental or physical disability.
Section 15(1) is a straightforward kind of wishful-thinking non-discrimination clause;
then section 15(2) immediately contradicts it by discriminating. It is an attempt to bring
affirmative action into the Constitution of Canada, but it really puts its foot in its mouth. It
is trying to “ameliorate” the lives of “disadvantaged individuals or groups.” There are what
we used to call in England “gentlefolk of reduced circumstances.” I presume this section
envisages helping out widows who don’t have enough money left to keep multiple servants
and full-time gardeners. It may be a relief to some such “disadvantaged” to know that they
are not excluded.
The section does actually list the kind of people the writer had in mind: “those that are
disadvantaged because of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, age or men-
tal or physical disability.” I thought we had largely got away from the notion that mental
and physical disabilities are disadvantages; they are to be thought of as “challenges.” I
hope that age itself is not a “disadvantage” at any age; religion is surely an advantage to the
believer’s spiritual wellbeing. How can it be a disadvantage to have originated in certain
nations or ethnic groups? I don’t think this section really meant to say that it was a disad-
vantage to have been born a certain sex or colour; yet here we have in the Constitution of
Canada the notion that people are “disadvantaged” because of these things. I see the hand
of Jean Chretien in this wording.
Affirmative action, which this section is rather incoherently trying to express, need not
be a bad thing if you can find the most downtrodden at any particular time and be sure that
they can be helped, genuinely, by the methods proposed. However, no one can deny that it
contradicts “Equal Rights,” so it had best be slipped into another section.
The enormous exception to the Charter of Rights is a separate part II of the Constitution
Act of 1982, headed “Rights of the Aboriginal Peoples of Canada,” which reads:
The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby
recognized and affirmed.
Is this or is this not an egregious racist proclamation? Is there the slightest hint that any
of the cherished Charter rights of part I apply or might apply soon to aboriginal people?
The Indian Act reigns! There is nothing that says there will ever be an end to the wardship
of the state. I find that intolerable, and want to have the following declaration included:
The Constitution of a sovereign British Columbia does not recognize or affirm any
rights except those held by all inhabitants equally.
Those previously called “aboriginal people” are declared citizens of British Columbia
with rights equal to those of any other citizens. The reserves as they stand will have the
status of municipalities, present residences will become private real estate and other land
will be held in common as parks.
Canada’s mistakes must not be perpetuated by a sovereign British Columbia. A new
nation after the crash will not have the luxury, neither the time nor the bottomless cup of
tax money, for the farcical kind of treaty exercise that we have been witness to and that will
never be finalized while the status of “wards of the state” still exists.
The interesting thing is that the Trudeau White Paper of 1969 also said, in effect, “Come
on in.”
For Canadian society the issue is whether a growing element of its population will be-
come full participants contributing in a positive way to the general well-being or whether,
conversely, the present social and economic gap will lead to their increasing frustration
and isolation, a threat to the general well-being of society. For many Indian people, one
road does exist, the only road that has existed since Confederation and before, the road of
different status, a road which has led to a blind alley of deprivation and frustration. . .The
Government has outlined a number of measures and a policy which it is convinced will
offer another road for Indians, a road that would lead gradually away from different status
to full, social, economic and political participation.
This sounds right. Why didn’t it happen the way Trudeau wanted it to? A good question,
posed fully in Melvin H. Smith’s Our Home or Native Land (1995). Smith lists Trudeau’s
main proposals of 1969:
1. “The legislative and constitutional bases which set Indians apart must be removed.”
(Yes, we propose the same.) 2. “There must be a positive recognition by everyone of the
unique contribution of Indian culture.” (All ethnic groups must be given every reasonable
opportunity to exercise their uniqueness.) 3. “Government services must come through the
same channels and from the same government agencies for all.” (No more special wards of
the state.) 4. “The title to Indian reserves would be transferred to the Indian people of each
reserve.” (Yes, with the responsibilities of real estate and municiple status.) 5. “Lawful
obligations must be recognized.” (Same as anyone else.)
As an alternative to this inclusivity, it is only fair that if it is the fervent wish of a band
or a group of bands to officially secede from the new nation of British Columbia this course
of action would be unopposed. This would be an exceedingly noble way to extinguish the
“ward of the state” status.
Unfortunately, there was a final point to list:
6. “Those who are furthest behind must be helped the most.”
This bleeding heart clause turned out to be the only one that was heeded in the passing
of years, with Indian bands vying to be the “furthest behind” and politicians falling over
themselves to give “most” help. What a mess it has been! Trudeau spoke so clearly: “We
must be all equal under the law and we must not sign treaties amongst ourselves.” He was
not listened to at the time, and eventually he forgot he had said it. It’s time has come round
again.

What A Mess

In The Province for 9th January 2007 Brian Lewis reported on concerns over what was
then the pending Tsawwassen First Nation treaty settlement with the provincial and federal
governments. The treaty calls for the transfer of 724 hectares of Delta municipal land to
the Tsawwassen band, including taking 200 hectares out of the agricultural land freeze,
presumably so that the band can get a nice income leasing it to developers.
But further, what Brian Lewis was bringing to our attention was the fact that some of
the land was taken from the neighbouring Semiahmoo, who apparently had not been pay-
ing proper attention but now express themselves “astounded.” A letter sent to Prime Minis-
ter Stephen Harper, Premier Gordon Campbell, and the Delta council reads:
Our First Nations are completely opposed to the government’s signing the final agreement
for Tsawwassen since it appears it may infringe directly on our rights... We are astounded
that any government would consider that our primary and immediate aboriginal title and
rights and our Douglas Treaty rights in our core areas could be infringed by government ac-
tion of this kind. We thought there was some protection within the treaty process regarding
consultations that are supposed to happen with neighbouring First Nations. Our chiefs and
councils have never had any contact with the Tsawwassen at any phase of the B.C. Treaty
Commission process, nor have we had any notification from any level of government that
the Tsawwassen had any interests in our core territory during negotiation of this final agree-
ment.
What a mess! The treaty process has proceeded to a completion of sorts, but there will
no doubt be a court case over it. “It looks,” says Brian Lewis, “as if the legal beagles, who
have already made a fortune from B.C.’s treaty process, aren’t done yet.” One could laugh
if it weren’t all tax-payers’ money. “Even some Tsawwassen band members,” Lewis adds,
“have spoken against the treaty in public, saying its implications are far-reaching and not
properly understood by the average band member.” What a mess! And we know that this
and the hundred other similar treaties will undoubtedly be reopened in the future when
poverty spurs on grievances again. It makes one positively yearn for a Constitution which
affirms that there are no rights except those held by all inhabitants equally.

Rights
Section 26 of the Canadian Charter should really have been put up front so that we get
things in perspective. It says:
 26. The guarantees in this Charter of certain rights and freedoms shall not be construed
as denying the existence of any other rights or freedoms that exist in Canada.
Pretty dumb constitution if you have to stick that reminder in as s. 26. In stressing
certain freedoms there are others we haven’t mentioned. Duh. Why not say up top: “You
are as free as you think you ought to be” and then say where universal freedom has to be
given limits?
For instance, under “Democratic Rights” (Sections 3-5), instead of just saying that
everybody has the right to go into politics and stand for election, add, “Yes, but you are
not allowed to spend a million dollars on your election campaign.” Democracy requires
representatives not to be bought. So let’s say, “No campaign spending. None at all, or none
at all beyond bus fare.”
Again, section 8: “Everybody has the right to be secure against unreasonable search or
seizure.” This is good, unless you happen to be sitting innocently looking at television in
your apartment and the narcotics squad charges in (having been given the wrong address)
and because you turn round with a TV channel changer in your hand they shoot you to
death. But they would claim that they were killing you constitutionally under section 7:
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be
deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”
This is so vague that it might be asserted that “fundamental justice” requires police to
knock down doors and kill if they think there’s some drug activity inside. I think our Con-
stitution needs to make it clear that “fundamental justice” requires no such thing. Cool it.
The “war on drugs” will end when drugs cease to be illegal and that will put a stop to much
of the antics we currently call “law enforcement.” It would also help for hand guns to be
banned. A swat team would be less trigger happy if they hadn’t come across anybody with
a hand gun in a decade or so.
The Criminal Code of Canada is a thick book; it could be a lot thicker if one tried
to desribe every possible crime precisely and all the significant cases that have tried the
crimes in court. It could be a lot thinner. It’s the case law that’s really important anyway;
so why not limit the Criminal Code to four words: Mischief, Fraud, Theft, and Assault, and
let the case law take care of guiding us into staying on the right side of the law. The public
doesn’t read the Criminal Code; it reads newspapers where the trials are reported on. It’s
the grapevine that lets us know how to stay out of trouble, to confirm and stimulate our
universal sense of working ethics.
Again, the Criminal Code can be cut down drastically by reducing what is counted as
criminal in our society. Helping runaway slaves was once a criminal act. Law is no longer
in the service of the slave-owning class. Certain categories of crimes are abolished every
time a civilization takes a step forward towards emancipating the people at large and stops
protecting old vested interests. Laws that allow corporations to get away with mass murder
will be abolished when it becomes clear that we have to abolish all corporations period.
Laws governing stocks will disappear when there are no stock exchanges. There are no
courts martial if there is no army. Many crimes disappear as society progressively moves
its ethics and its corresponding moral structures. We got rid of debtors’ prisons, but there is
still too much of an attitude of “gotcha” in current thinking. How can anyone cheat on the
Skytrain if it is free?
A new British Columbia needs a new Constitution, but I hope I have shown that the
present Canadian one is not much help. No constitution should be such as to allow the rich
to get richer and the poor to always get poorer. We need a Constititution that Jean Chretien
could not imagine in his wildest dreams. Instead of something as simple as a Guaranteed
Income, we get such banality as section 28: “Notwithstanding anything in this Charter, the
rights and freedoms referred to in it are guaranteed equally to male and female persons.”
What is this, an afterthought, Mr. Chretien? Brilliant. And section 27:
This Charter shall be interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhance-
ment of the multicultural heritage of Canadians.
Dat is dat. My spoutings are now the Supreme Law of the land, and my desk clears
itself by five o’clock.
What we want in a Constitution is not vagueness, not a pious charter of rights, but as-
sumed freedom and a list of limits that people can live with (and can’t live without). I more
and more feel that we must get back to judge-determined case law where the universality
and fairness of common values might have a chance of being expressed. I find that a feel-
ing for common law is working today to humanize regulations in traffic court, for instance.
Presiding Justices of the Peaces are encouraging people to plead “Guilty with explanation.”
It saves time because the court will almost invariably have to accept the facts as stated on
the ticket in any case; but they can listen to an explanation of why possibly the regulation
was unfair in this particular instance. The court really wants to know why the infringement
happened and what brings the individual there to dispute it. Life intrudes into the enforce-
ment of the code.
Similarly, I heard recently of the pilot of a system of “Community Courts” is being set
up in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside by Judge Thomas Gold. It’s a problem-solving ap-
proach, with a staff of nine health workers and a support group of twenty-five social work-
ers. The effort will be, by volutary explanations, to find out why the person has turned to
crime: it may be something to do with basic needs, which can perhaps be attended to rather
than just throwing the person into jail.
There are advances, and what we want is a Constitution that inspires us simply by
reflecting faithfully how we now feel about the world. In summary, then, since we are pos-
tulating a world recovering from an enormous economic crash for pretty obvious reasons:
(a) the Constitution must make sure that there are no corporations around to repeat their
role in economic suicide and criminal waste; and that the marketplace is operating well
with appropriate technology and local emphasis supported by import duties;
(b) the Constitution must be politically astute in setting checks and balances for demo-
cratic government, giving crucial place to a Senate that will be the ultimate measurer of
legislation and the final appeal of the judicial process;
(c) the Constitution must safeguard us from mischief, fraud, theft, and assault, while
preserving our freedoms within known limits;
(d) the Constitution must include provision for general welfare and a safety net for the
most vulnerable, and for everybody through a form of guaranteed income.
The proposal, in short, is to be a government, a well-constituted state.
In the story of Red Riding Hood, it’s the huntsman who comes in at the end who is the
government agent. Unfortunately he doesn’t appear until after the grandmother has been
eaten. Then it is rather a terrible job to get her out of the wolf’s digestive system. So, hunts-
man, let’s keep on our toes, eh?

This pamphlet has quite obviously broken out of the original framework device of a
letter to a Minister of the Crown. If there had been such an addressee I’m sure his attention
span would have been exhausted before this point, so any apology I might want to make
for my longwindedness would in any case not be read; so it is not necessary to make one
or, indeed, to sustain the epistolary mode at all.
Unnecessarily yours,

XXXXXXXXXXX

Epilogue

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid

Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on.
We have two duties to our children: when they are very young they must not know how
bad it is; and when they grow up enough to see for themselves how bad it is, we must have
something serious to say to them about it. About disaster, and about recovery. For there
may be a way through. Yeats wrote his “Prayer for my Daughter” in 1919, a desperate time
for Ireland, British troops let loose with bad-tempered violence in the Irish countryside,
and no end in sight. Yet within a few years Yeats himself was a senator in the republican
government of an Irish Free State, in charge of designing the new coinage and liberalizing
the divorce laws. And who could have predicted the bursting economic self-confidence of
the recent decades in Ireland? So don’t let’s scare our children. We know nothing for sure.
But it truly appears that Ireland’s wild success will fail, along with every other vain
thing, in the coming global economic collapse. Yeats’s ghost will pace his tower again.
I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come,
Dancing to a frenzied drum,
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.
Yeats addresses his daughter, and so will I, looking ahead to seven or eight years from
now when she may read these words. I do not want her not to have these distress signals
from me. Nor do I want her to think that she does not have a prayer.
Hobbes said that the chief parties to the social contract are not the generation making
it. With those words in mind I want to embark on writing a new Constitution for an inde-
pendent British Columbia of my daughter’s generation. A good Constitution means she
can better expect to live with serenity. She will have to renew it, of course, but we must
postulate as best we can what might produce a general wellbeing after consumer lust and
video emptiness has brought the present dispensation down.

My dear daughter, it is my fantasy that when you get to the university of your choice
some classmate you quite like will discover this pamphlet in the library stacks and with
some excitement bring it to you to read, and you will hold it in your hand and say, “Yes,
I know who wrote this.” And you will recall how I used to tease you when you were very
young–half tease you–in saying, “When you grow up I want you to be the Secretary-
General of the United Nations.” I think l got that idea in first when you were four years
old, and after I had repeated it a few times and you were old enough to be annoyed (say,
six years old), your first act as a rebel, the first formulated independent assertion of your
own life, was: “Dad, I don’t want to be the Secretary-General of the United Nations.” Of
course I laughed that you had to make it so very clear! But now with your university friend
you might remember my attempted “indocrination” with a new idealistic frame of mind. It
is my wish that you will take these ideas seriously–in due time, as it has taken me all this
time, since my awakening in 1945, to write the political pamphlet I knew I should.
 So I imagine you and your friends, perhaps at UBC (Okanagan) in Kelowna, perhaps
with Sharon Thesen and Paul Meir inviting you over every other week to their house in
Lake Country, and offering to be a sounding board for all your ideas. I propose that, with
this draft Constitution in hand, you prepare yourselves to push the wheel out of the mud
hole. Good luck to a new British Columbia.
I have a book for you that I pass on as if it were an heirloom from your grandfather. I’m
pretty sure he read it cover to cover more than once. I’m not absolutely sure, but a couple
of years ago I came across a copy of Analysis of Usury by Jeffrey Mark and, opening it up,
I heard my father’s voice saying along with the text, “The root of the world’s problems is
interest on money.” He used to enunciate this at dinner table (that is, midday “dinner” of
the British working class), with the corollary: “People should pay banks for looking after
their money, not expect interest on it.” This went over our heads, being counter to every-
thing we heard elsewhere. It was supposed to be childhood wisdom to have a savings ac-
count to take care of the pennies while, through accumulation, the pounds would take care
of themselves. Your grandfather spluttered at the idea of “unearned income”; it was the
“ruination of everything.” If I have come to the same conclusion--and pass it on to you--I
must record its source in either my father’s innocent looking about him or in a book called
Analysis of Usury, my father’s thumbed copy of which might be shelved somewhere in a
Bradford used bookshop.
Essentially, what we now know so well about the late stages of monopoly capital-
ism was already there in 1935, except that Jeffrey Mark could not possibly imagine how
fast money could circulate around the globe electronically, producing fake wealth beyond
the dreams of Midas. When reckoning up the damage, one has to discount the deriva-
tive gambling, where somebody loses for every winner. Nevertheless, the enormous credit
generated by banks to meet the frenzy of deluded consumer addicts will slash and burn
the world. You know all about this. We have taught you organic diets and the light carbon
footprint; what I worry about is that we have not been able to teach you austerity. Because
we didn’t have to, we didn’t. But austerity is going to come and the truly useful thing is
to plan so that it can be your kind of austerity, not theirs. And if you can be up enough to
plan for the whole of our nation of British Columbia, to teach ahead of time the practice of
austerity against the coming drought and pestilence, then you will be the necessary Bibli-
cal prophet. Use jazz, rap, or whatever Isaiah had up his sleeve. Tell them, “No interest on
money.” Tell them they can be wealthy, but only by working, not just investing. Tell them,
“No unearned income.” Less damage to the world that way, less damage to ourselves. And
your grandfather will rejoice.
I have a snapshot of my father when for once in his life he was happy. It is 1919, and
he has escaped the trenches of the western front, and is in the occupation force in Germany.
Far, far from home. He stands with two other army messengers on bicycles, and he is
beaming. When my mother was not in earshot he called it the best year of his life. I too had
my period of peacetime conscription and relished it. I say this to reinforce the arguments
for the proposed “draft year.” You and your friends will come out of it, as I surely did, with
a less cloying ego and a sense of renewal.
What else do I want to mention before I quit? Marriage? Well, that’s easy. Our Con-
stitution will simply say that the state shall make no laws governing marriage. Things
get very simple when the state is not trying to deceive and bully people. That’s why the
proposed guaranteed weekly income can work for everybody whereas the present patchy
scrutinized welfare measures please no one. That’s why the daily watchdog and body of
last resort should be a senate dedicated formally to ensuring universality and fairness in
legislation and enforcement, so that it might turn out that there will be no vested interests
but the electorate at large. Of course, this involves the number one keystone of the Consti-
tution: “There shall be no corporations.” That would take care of it, a lot of it.
I will not go on. I’m just getting deeper and deeper into a utopian penchant. And I know
that you long ago began to look at me with a quizzical eye. But do not put this pamphlet
down before I rectify this. Please listen to a confession I have to make. All along I have
been putting a good face on it, trying my best to see what a positive disposition might ac-
complish. The fact is, as you know quite well, in the other recess of my mind I have all the
doubts in the world. I cannot look you in the eye and say that I believe my proposals will
ever come to anything. I cannot look you in the eye and say that this Constitution I have
been laboring to persuade you about has the slightest chance of reaching by any route a
stage where it might be ratified by the people of a sovereign British Columbia. I do not
believe there will be a groundswell towards independence. It’s not going to happen, unless
there is utter disaster, and not even then. Oh, I believe in the global economic collapse all
right, but I can’t imagine that anything I have proposed will follow. The powers-that-be will
somehow manipulate the disaster into something they can control, if not by slogans along
the ceilings of buses, if not by threats, then by thuggery. Then we shall see where Canada’s
multiculturalism gets us, when one racial segment of society will be pitted against another,
to keep our minds off the real perpetrators. I see disaster as the only hope, but there’s no
guarantee of a fortunate fall. Who will be prepared enough to make something good come
out of it? Where is the Recovery Party and a strong, appealing platform? I see no recovery.
I see no guaranteed weekly income for everybody. I see no youth-saving “draft year.” I see
no fine, upstanding senators thinking in terms of universality and fairness. You will not be-
come the Secretary-General of the United Nations. There will be no pride in a self-reliant
British Columbia. There will be no pride in anything. We will enter a new age of servitude.
As a matter of fact, Yeats was ahead of me here. His poem “A Prayer for My Daughter”
curses politics as an “angry bellows.” He wants his daughter to have nothing to do with it.
He wants to marry her to someone who can look after her with decorum. Yeats could in his
time still reasonably expect that there could be some serenity within a badly-constituted
state. I do not see that option, or I might apostatize myself on your behalf. I rather think
that there is no escape this time, no country house that will be able to maintain a tradition
of courtesy. There will be no oasis of ease--at least for the likes of us. The 1% might be
secure, but I’m not so sure about that. Perhaps the only consolation in being brutalized by
the coming regime of brutal authority might be watching the guarded enclaves go up in
flames in brutal retaliation.
There can be only one way of acquiring serenity in this vision of the future. That is to
try. Any serenity will be in the effort. If you read just as much as you can, if you have pre-
pared your mind and thrashed out alternatives with like-minded friends, if you have built
up reserves of money and essentials, if you have worked as hard as you can to be prepared
to prevail in a battle of political will, then you can have no shame and no regrets. Thus
internally supplied, you can be the she of Yeats’s poem:
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.
Only happy, though, when you know you have done your best in preparation to turn
things around. Nothing less than that, I should think, Mr Yeats?
I think that dire events will overwhelm the best laid plans. But you have to go ahead
and make them anyway. “DYB DYB DYB!” used to be the chant. “We’ll DOB DOB
DOB,” was the reply. Sounds ludicrous. In reality “Being Prepared” is not only the one
good thing we have but is also ludicrous. But still, it is the one good thing we have. Any
serenity lies there.

Appendix
CONSTITUTION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA
WHEREAS in these troubled times when an economic and spiritual crisis has engulfed
the human race, British Columbia, standing perforce alone, asserts its sovereignty as a na-
tion among nations;
WHEREAS every nation seeks the serenity of a firm Constitution reflecting the deeply
held opinions of the people at large, the ultimate authority for good governance in society;
WHEREAS to this end the bodies of government, with appropriate checks and bal-
ances, will be restructured;
& WHEREAS with customary freedoms assumed, limits on rights and freedoms need
to be set afresh, and anachronistic crimes expunged from the criminal code;
The following items comprising a CONSTITUTION OF BRITISH COLUMBIA are
presented to the Constitutional Assembly for ratification:
1. No joint-stock company shall be incorporated in British Columbia, nor chartered for
operation.
2. There shall be no interest on money.
3. The state shall charter cooperatives, worker-owned factories, family businesses, and
partnerships.
4. The state shall charter credit unions to provide capital via lines of credit backed by
the Chancellor of the Exchequer.
5. No agreements shall be entered into that curtail free trade on our own terms
(a) importing of certain items may be curtailed, such as hand guns, toys which are a
threat to health, and so on;
(b) duties may be imposed on imports in order to protect small businesses which we
wish to see thrive here;
(c) there shall be no exporting of raw logs, unprocessed fish, unrefined ore, and un-
bottled water.
6. Our duty as a member of the United Nations shall be our only foreign policy.
7. Only special forces of last resort will have weapons in our society. All hand guns and
every weapon but registered hunting rifles shall be banned.
8. The rights and duties affirmed in this Constitution pertain to all inhabitants of a sov-
ereign British Columbia, according to age group.
9. (a) Courts should be imaginative in their penalties for lesser offenses that do not
cross the line into threatening behaviour.
(b) Prisons are only for criminals who have proved themselves a real danger to society
by having committed assaults or persistent theft.
10. Prisons shall be places of health, not safe houses for continued anti-social activity:
(1) no threats or assaults shall be allowed; (2) there shall be no smoking, alcohol or drugs;
(3) there shall be good food and strenuous exercise; (4) there shall be no TV, but libraries
and classes; quietness shall be rewarded; (5) prison work shall provide a nest-egg available
on release.
11. The state shall require a year’s compulsory service away from home from all young
people on reaching the age of seventeen, without exception.
12. No law shall be made that criminalizes a woman for seeking and obtaining an abor-
tion, nor a professional who supplies it.
13. The Ministry of Families, and the Family Court, if appealed to, must make every
effort to keep mother and child together for nurture.
 (a) As well as social workers, the state shall support a nation-wide system of volunteer
caregivers.
14. The state insists on an individual’s right to be freed from the deadly grip of drug and
alcohol addition by medical incarceration for 90 days.
15. A guaranteed weekly income shall be instituted.
16. Income tax and most sales taxes shall be abolished, and tax on land expanded.
17. The Constitution of a sovereign British Columbia does not recognize or affirm any
rights except those held by all inhabitants equally. (a) Those previously called “aboriginal
people” are declared citizens of British Columbia with rights equal to those of any other
citizen. (b) The reserves as they stand will have the status of municipalities, present resi-
dences will become private real estate, and other land will be held in common as parks.
18. Everyone has a right to seek elective office, but there shall be no campaign spend-
ing beyond bus fare.
19. The Legislature shall be composed of three members elected from each of the fol-
lowing regions of British Columbia: Vancouver Island Lower Mainland Okanagan Koote-
nays Cariboo Northwest Peace Central Interior.
20. A Chief Executive Officer shall be elected by the Legislature from outside its ranks.
21. A Senate of one hundred members shall be chosen by lot from a roster compiled
from groups recognized by the Elections Committee. It will have a veto on legislation and
be the ultimate court of appeal.
22. The government shall safeguard the people from mischief, fraud, theft and assault,
while ensuring human rights in law enforcement.
[Unfinished]