Unearned Liberty

What Canadians Owe the American Founding

The Covid-19 pandemic has revealed that governments throughout the so-called free world have differing attitudes toward human rights, for better, or for worse. This has been very evident in Canada where healthy, innocent people have been detained against their will by all levels of government.

The state has prevented people from travelling freely, associating with others, worshipping freely, and, finally, from enjoying bodily integrity due to the coerced administration of Covid-19 vaccines. Although the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights were written for American citizens, the natural rights they articulate apply to each Man, Woman and child on Earth.

It is attracting renewed attention in other parts of the world, including Canada, where many citizens have found in those documents, the words to articulate their grievances. In this essay, I will explore how the philosophy of natural right, so central to the American founding, can help us understand the nature of the injustices inflicted in Canada under the guise of public health, as well as the methods that would prevent such injustices from being repeated.

Modern society can be characterised by its core belief that the truth can only be determined by what can be objectively measured. This form of thinking, embodied in the scientific method, was developed when the Western world was overtaken by natural science, a discipline claiming that all relevant questions and truthful answers had to be based on the workings of the external, material world.

This view, also known as empiricism, has encroached on almost every field of thought such that each field must now proclaim itself to be a science in order to gain legitimacy. Its epistemic foundation must be “evidence-based,” where evidence is reduced to a peer-reviewed scientific experiment.

It is not scientific thinking that is inappropriate per se, but rather the misapplication of scientific thinking to every realm of knowledge. Nowhere is the insufficiency of science more evident than in the field of ethics. The discipline of science, like a cancerous cell that was once healthy but is now unrecognisable, has reduced proper philosophical inquiry to a competition of footnotes.

If one person’s idea about bodily integrity has more footnotes than another’s, then the ideas are no longer contested based on their logical merit. If the aspects of an argument that cannot be materially measured are discounted, then we cannot take account of important phenomena such as the qualia of the experience of violation itself.

Can there be a scientific experiment to prove that the violation of a person’s bodily integrity can damage the psyche? The replication crisis in the field of psychology¹ reminds us that experiments on a subject where the most crucial variables are immaterial, are futile, if not fraudulent endeavours.

In an intellectual tradition that values scientific experimentation as the only form of reasoning, the statement in the Declaration of Independence justifying its contents would be insufficient:

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among which are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.

The Declaration proclaims that it is “self-evident” that human rights exist and that they are endowed by the very nature of our creation. This powerful assertion reverberates through history without a single footnote referring to material evidence to justify it. The lack of “scientific” justification reflects the seriousness with with the American Founders conceived of human rights.

As such, the American founding reminds us today, when our basic human rights are being violated based on “scientific justifications,” that our rights are not contingent on such things. It does not matter whether or not a quarantine is truly, scientifically helpful in limiting infectious disease in a population. Where human rights are concerned, a forced detainment of an innocent person is still unacceptable.

The American founding reminds us that a Declaration of Rights is useful to people only when it can be enforced. Human rights exist whether or not they are articulated; thus, the purpose of their articulation, is not to create them, but rather to codify a plan for their enforcement. This leads to the idea of a social contract, which is codified in the Declaration of Independence:

To secure these rights, Governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed—That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the Right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government.

The American Declaration of Independence, July 4, 1776

Seen from this perspective, Canada has hitherto enjoyed an unearned liberty. Its constitution and Charter of Rights is modelled loosely on the Declaration and theBill of Rights, but it misses the crucial statement that these rights are "self-evident" and “inalienable.” In fact, the Canadian Charter qualifies these rights with exceptions where violations may be permitted. These cracks in the logic of the Charter lead to dangerous violations of basic rights, which, in turn, lead to manifest harms such as the forced separation of families, the bankruptcy of family-owned businesses, and isolation induced mental health crises among vulnerable groups.

Richard Henry Lee originally advocated for a Bill of Rights because it would protect “those essential rights of mankind without which liberty cannot exist.” A country without provisions to protect against human rights violations and the institution of tyranny is lying in wait for the maw of the Charybdis to feel hungry. Today, Canada is in the belly of the beast.

When the King breaks the law, who checks his actions? On February 14, 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau tweeted:

To those that say the vaccine mandates are illegal: a mandate enacted by the government of Canada—by definition—cannot be illegal. This government acts legally, and we will continue to do so to save lives. This includes dismantling of the illegal blockade.

A Prime Minister is no King, in the same way that a mandate is not a law. However, “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”² A Prime Minister who behaves like a King is no different than one. In this one statement, Prime Minister Trudeau has summarised the crux of the human rights crisis in Canada: the government feels empowered to break its own laws, and the people believe they are powerless against its transgressions. Of these, the latter is more troubling.

Though it is in the nature of politicians to lust for power, and therefore to be expected, it is the responsibility of the people to defend each other against tyranny. The Declaration and the Bill of Rights teach us how a government can be regulated by recognising the fundamental right of the people to choose their form of government, as well as the right to bear arms.

The disturbing human rights violations in Canada remind us why the principles of the American Republic are not only relevant today, but crucial if we are to build free and healthy societies once again. As Rousseau states in The Social Contract: “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.” The principles of the American founding must be used to remind men, once again, that they tie their own chains, and that a man who does not fulfil his duty to fight his subjugation is as culpable as his subjugators in his enslavement.

1. Maxwell SE, Lau MY, Howard GS, “Is Psychology suffering from a replication crisis?” American Psychologist Association, 2015 (70) 6:487-498 https://www.deborahapthorp.com/courses/replicability/topic_8/readings/ Maxwell2015.pdf

2. Romeo and Juliette, Act II.ii lines 47-48, William Shakespeare 6 Jean Jaques Rousseau, “The Social Contract”