"All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing." ~ Edmund Burke
Introduction
There is a growing subgroup of libertarians in the True North, Strong and Free that practice rigid apathy. They rarely so much as place a phone call, write a letter, or donate a dollar in the name of liberty. Their inertia is premised on their belief that the fight for liberty is hopeless. u2018No matter what any freedom fighter does,' they argue, u2018the state continues to expand, so why bother doing anything.' That is, activism has no effect, so why waste your life agitating for something that will never come about. Instead, they devote their energies wholly to non-political pursuits: career, hobbies, families, etc. I'll grant them that the fight for liberty is steep, but it is not hopeless. In what follows, I examine two aspects of Canada's apathetic libertarians: their development and their version of "activism." I argue that their thought is flawed and they should terminate their self-righteous indolence and fight for their freedom.
Development of apathy
The development of this anti-movement is rooted in the history of Canadian politics, especially the growth of free-market policies in three conservative political parties in the 1990s: 1) the Reform Party of Canada, a Western Canadian populist party that brought together populists, religious conservatives (what Canadians euphemistically term "social conservatives"), and libertarians, 2) the first two terms of Ralph Klein's Progressive Conservatives in Alberta (APC), and 3) the two terms of Mike Harris' Progressive Conservatives in Ontario (OPC).
Libertarians joined these three parties in the early 1990s. To understand why they did so, some Canadian political history must be considered. Canadian politics have taken a different course than either American or British politics. In American politics, the welfare state was born in the 1930s and it essentially went unchallenged until Ronald Reagan became President in the 1980s. Britain was similar: the welfare started somewhat earlier and went unquestioned until Margaret Thatcher's election in 1979.
Canada, by contrast, was slower to develop its welfare state. During the Great Depression, Conservative Prime Minister R.B. Bennett attempted a Canadian version of Roosevelt's New Deal, including a minimum wage, a maximum number of working hours per week, unemployment insurance, health insurance, an expanded pension programme, and grants to farmers. The provinces fought him legally on his changes arguing that welfare is a matter of property and civil rights and hence as per section 92 of the British North America Act – Canada's constitution – provincial jurisdiction. The case made it to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in England, at the time Canada's highest court. The court agreed with the province's argument and struck down most of Bennett's welfare programs. This is not to say that Canada did not have a welfare state, it did. There were a few welfare benefits, a monopoly wheat board, and several crown corporations (government-owned businesses). This welfare state was expanded upon in the 1940s and 1950s.
But radical change came in the 1960s when the then struggling Liberal Party of Canada decided to trade its (by then watered-down) classical liberal platform for a welfare statist agenda in hopes of gaining more votes. The change proved profitable. Further, in cases where their new, larger vote total was not enough to obtain a majority (i.e. control of Parliament), the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) was all too happy to use their balance of power – i.e. deciding number of votes – to push the Liberals further down the socialist road. This led to two decades – the 1960s and 1970s – of radical state expansion. Government developed unemployment insurance, student loans, government health insurance (including government-operated hospitals), significant gun controls that were heretofore non-existent (e.g. licensing of owners, a ban on automatic weapons, removal of self-defence as a legitimate reason for purchasing a weapon (all in the late 1970s)), a government-owned oil company, a minimum wage, a 40-hour workweek, a pension plan, and other socialist programs, businesses, and controls. In effect, Canada very quickly went from being perhaps the freest country in the English-speaking world to arguably taking the lead in the race to the bottom.
When the 1980s rolled around and Britain and the United States were voting to throw off 50 or more years of welfare statism, Canada only partly followed. With socialism being newer and its negative effects likely not as strongly felt, Canadians elected Brian Mulroney, a Progressive Conservative whose ideological opposition to the welfare state was significantly less potent. Though he privatised some crown corporations (e.g. Air Canada and Canada Post outlets), signed a "free-trade" agreement with the U.S., and ended cumbersome foreign investment restrictions, his knife never made Thatcher-esqe incisions into Leviathan.
In the late 80s and early 90s, the economic scat started to hit the fan, so to speak. Provincial governments and their federal counterpart struggled to pay for the costs of Canada's opulent welfare state. In the provinces of Alberta and Ontario, Canada's two foremost economic engines, voters elected two premiers, Ralph Klein (APC) and Mike Harris (OPC), that started privatising/closing, or reducing the funding of, a sizeable number of government programs. They also balanced budgets and began paying off provincial debts. Concurrently, Western alienation (i.e. discontent based on perceived indifference to Western Canada) and general unpopularity lead to the literal collapse of the Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives. In response, the Reform Party was set up. It promised to sell off a great deal of government enterprises and reduce government involvement in the lives of Canadians. Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives were replaced by a Liberal government, which, though still welfare liberal in ideology, began balancing their budgets, paying off the federal debt, and reducing government funding to various state departments.
Enter the libertarians. This petit free-market revolution was a pleasant surprise for them. Here the country seemed to be awaking from its welfare statist comma. Libertarians moved in large numbers to join all three parties (depending on their province of residence). In fact, the move to Reform, in particular, was so great that the federal Libertarian party collapsed after the 1993 federal election. Follow this link and scroll down.
But the lustre soon wore off. Alberta and Ontario's Progressive Conservatives cutting created economic prosperity, which those provincial governments began spending (instead of further cutting taxes and returning the money to taxpayers). Concomitantly, the Reform Party wanted to break out of its Western electoral base so it began to moderate its platform. (The party eventually merged with what was left of Mulroney's Progressive Conservatives to become the Conservative Party of Canada, which though more free-market and pro-gun than Mulroney's party is still a far cry from the more radical Reform Party.) Finally, the political effects of September 11th seemed like a final nail in the coffin for many libertarians' association with Canada's political right. The Reform/Conservative party began to turn their attention to growing security/military state, leaving many of their free-market ideas behind. As a result, libertarians were left disheartened and feeling dejected. Sizeable numbers swore off politics entirely. The federal Libertarian party, now alive again, is a far cry from its pre-1993 levels.
Apathy's effects on activism
But of course party politics are not the only measure of political involvement, nor does a libertarian have to join a political party to effect political change. A person can write letters to the local paper, compose academic papers, hold conferences or speaking events, or participate in political rallies.
However, the eclipse of Canada's petit free-market revolution has seemed to affect participation in these activities as well. In Alberta, libertarian groups made up of mostly former federal Reformers and/or provincial Conservatives, used to hold first-rate libertarian speaking events. These well-attended speaking events would bring together famous libertarian activists, academics, and journalists to discuss a freedom-related topic for an evening. (Full disclosure: I attended many of them. And they were, in quality, on par with events one would attend at the Mises Institute or the Cato Institute. (Further full disclosure: I've interned at Cato and I have twice been a fellow at the Mises Institute.)) The most famous of these events was an annual 4th of July speaking event that celebrated not America, but the idea that inspired its founding: individual liberty. It usually brought together one high-profile American libertarian together with a well-known Canadian Austrian school journalist. People I knew used to mark if off on the event off on their calendars, then it disappeared.
Libertarians in the Maritimes seem to have been affected by a similar activist apathy. But because the movement there is smaller, it is difficult for me to address the lack of activities without outing people. I'll just say that some great political analysis and activist action has been lost.
There are strong exceptions to this lack of non-partisan activism, especially in British Columbia, Ontario, and Quebec, that I will touch on later in not the next section, but the one following.
Anti-Activism Arguments
So what activism do apathetic libertarians (especially in Alberta and the Maritimes) engage in if they are not holding events, writing letters, or attending rallies? In short, they do nothing. But like any group with strong ethical convictions, they have a defence of their chosen course. It is made up of two arguments: one reason concerns partisan political involvement, the other activism.
Voting for the Libertarian Party: by participating in elections, one sanctions the state's rights violations by participating in the process that legitimises its power. (Reply: the state receives its legitimacy from the vote totals of the major parties that support it, not the process per se. If the Libertarians received 30% of the vote, the legitimacy of the welfare-warfare state would be in question. But I'll concede, with one caveat, that one does not have to vote or run for office to make a difference: if Ron Paul or another strong libertarian candidate is running for office, one should vote for them.)
Writing letters and organising speaking events: they affect no real change so why bother? (Reply: these activities may not produce large numbers of libertarians, but they do incline their audiences toward freedom and, further, they strengthen the stand of those who are pro-freedom on particular issues. In short, they do produce change, just not radical change. Don't expect revolutionary change from non-revolutionary activity.)
As an alternative to activism, the positive programme of apathetic Canucks is to "live free." This entails living according to libertarian ethics until some imagined fateful day when the state comes to take them away. Murray Rothbard has addressed this type of pompous defeatism, which he labels "retreatism," in his essay "On Resisting Evil." He writes,
The rationale for retreatism always comes couched in High Moral as well as pseudo-psychological terms. These “purists,” for example, claim that they, in contrast to us benighted fighters… are “living liberty” and living a “pure libertarian life,” whereas we grubby souls are still living in the corrupt and contaminated real world. For years, I have been replying to these sets of retreatists that the real world, after all, is good; that we libertarians may be anti-State, but that we are emphatically not anti-society or opposed to the real world, however contaminated it might be. We propose to continue to fight to save the values and the principles and the people we hold dear, even though the battlefield may get muddy.
Theories of libertarianism assume that humans are by nature social animals and that their life as members of society is beneficial to them by their own estimation. Libertarianism is after all a theory of rules for society. If you care about liberty, your actions have to be directed towards improving social relations. If you wish to exist by ignoring society, you are defending something other than libertarianism.
Other apathetic types propose moving to a U.S. state that is more pro-freedom than any of the Canadian provinces. They propose a state that is without seat-belt laws (and other petty restrictions), that has low taxes, and few gun controls. But this, of course, is playing into the state's divide-and-conquer strategy. Freedom causes are divided along left and right lines for a reason. When in power, the left destroys the freedoms praised by the right, while mildly increasing left freedoms. Vice versa when the right is in power. This enables government to grow while pitting those who most care about freedom into competing camps that care little for their particular cause.
In America, the right gains power more, while in Canada, the left. Sure freedom-friendly states are better on the issues of import to those who propose moving to them, but all of America, including those states, is worse in ways that Canada is not. The U.S. justice system, should one ever cross it, is far more right-usurping, cruel, and contemptuous of the rule of law than is Canada's. The U.S. surveillance state is far more active. And then there is America's drug war, likely the most anti-freedom domestic public policy in the Western world. Sure, given their lifestyle, these particular apathetic libertarians would have little to fear in America, but remember we must band together to protect all freedoms. If we pick and choose, we lose.
Many active libertarians in Canada
Based on what I've written, don't get a dark picture of Canada as a land of indolent libertarians. There are many noble exceptions in Canada. In Quebec, there is Le Quebecois Libre, a weekly webzine in French and English that is the main libertarian publication of the French-speaking world. Le Quebecois Libre group also holds an annual liberty-oriented university similar to Mises University, but admittedly smaller. They also host regular speaking events.
Their activism, and that of other Quebec libertarians, has paid off. Recently, a Quebec doctor successfully argued in front of the Supreme Court of Canada that his province's ban on private healthcare should be overturned – a decision that applies to the entire country. The doctor is sympathetic to libertarians and is no doubt influenced by Quebec's amis de liberté.
In Ontario, my friend Peter Jaworski hosts one of the best libertarian events I have had the pleasure of attending: the Liberty Summer Seminar. It takes place on his estate outside of Toronto. Every year, he invites Canada's top libertarian and pro-freedom academics, journalists, and activists to give talks during the day, while a pro-freedom band (and his mom!) rocks out in the evening. The event is annual and will be held next at the end of this month.
In British Columbia, the West Coast Libertarian Foundation regularly holds libertarian supper speaking events in Greater Vancouver. There is also libertarian cannabis activist Marc Emery who publishes Cannabis Culture magazine. He is still agitating for liberty even now as he fights his extradition to the United States.
Conclusion
Canada has one of the world's most active libertarian communities. The political events of the 1990s and early 2000s seem to have deadened the movement's enthusiasm, especially in Alberta and the Maritimes. However, the movement can regain its strength by renewing activism in these apathetic regions. By once again organising libertarian speaking-events, by writing letters, by producing academic papers, by attending the Liberty Summer Seminar in Ontario and Quebecois Libre University, and by realising that "living-free" is anti-social and ultimately useless, liberty can be defended with our best efforts once again. It is when history is not going our way that liberty is in greatest need of our defence. Let's get on it.
July 17, 2006
