Column: Power and Justice
By Charles Jeanes
Arc of the Cognizant
As a historian, I study those moments in the past… but I never expected to live through one. I should have… If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition. — Margaret MacMillan, Canadian
The topic of today’s Arc is the colonial nature of Canada’s history and what that means for us.
The inspiration for writing is, June 21 is Aboriginal People’s Day https://www.rcaanc-cirnac.gc.ca/eng/1100100013718/1708446948967
and
July 1 is the 158th anniversary of the passing of a British Act to create the Dominion of Canada. https://www.canada.ca/en/canadian-heritage/news/2025/05/the-countdown-is-on-canada-day-2025-will-be-one-to-remember.html
Are we serious about creating social justice, correcting historic wrongs, and living up to the highest expectation of human rights in our culture? This is front of mind for me today.
A World Order
To begin the column today, I ask your indulgence. Please read this bit of a longer essay.
“This Is the Way a World Order Ends
By Margaret MacMillan
Americans once associated spheres of influence with a cynical, volatile European past. Now Washington is resurrecting them.
In his memoir, The World of Yesterday, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig looked back on Europe before the First World War. That was, he wrote, the Golden Age of Security, when institutions such as the Habsburg monarchy appeared destined to last forever. Zweig lived to see much of his world swept away by first one war and then another, even more devastating, which was raging when he died by suicide in 1942.
The Europeans of Zweig’s youth did not grasp the fragility of their world, with its growing domestic tensions and fraying international order. Many of us in today’s West have suffered the same failure of imagination. We are stunned and dismayed that what we took for granted appears to be vanishing: democracy in the United States, which was a model for much of the world, and international institutions and norms that allowed many nations to work together to avoid war and confront shared problems, such as climate change and pandemic disease.
As a historian, I study those moments in the past when an old order decays beyond the point of return and a new one emerges, but I never expected to live through one. I should have. Today’s world is lurching toward great-power rivalry, suspicion, and fear—an international order where the strong do what they will, as Thucydides wrote, and “the weak suffer what they must.” Imperialism, which never really disappeared, is back. Governments and think tanks now speak of spheres of influence, something the U.S. long opposed. If history is a guide, this will not be an easy or pleasant transition.
The past holds many examples of great change: regimes ending, monarchies becoming republics, whole civilizations vanishing, ways of managing relations between peoples and states swept aside, to be replaced by a new one.” [excerpted from Atlantic April 30, 2025]
Regular readers of the Arc will know that I am very much interested in geopolitics, global law and order, and empires throughout history.
Study of History, as MacMillan notes, can warn us not to think that the present we enjoy will last forever. I’ve written a few columns this year and last, on the subject of a transformed international order, consequent upon the erosion and twilight of the post-world-war-two liberal United-Nations vision of world peace. That peace was contingent and the contingencies are in decay – primarily, the planetary dominion of a Euro-American economic bloc once able to claim 80% of the world’s productive capacity, and the hegemonic status of one superpower, the USA, as the police force of the order. The 1990s were the decade of a collapsed USSR and the absence of a powerful China, when the liberal order was at its strongest. Just a couple decades or so ago. Already, it’s gone.
A Canadian Order
Canada is a liberal, democratic, parliamentary, electoral, federal, rule-of-law constitutional monarchy. I include so many adjectives because each has meaningful impact on the kind of lives Canadians lead today. And here is the adjective that most concerns my subject today: “colonial” – European colonialism in the recent past is the foundation of the State we know, and maybe we “love”, called Canada.
Taking our focus off the global stage, and putting our attention only on the national arena of Canada, I ask here about Canadians’ intentions inside our nation, for the better establishment of justice, making restitution for colonial history, and effecting the best motivations of our culture.
What is the effect of political and philosophical liberal values and norms enshrined in documents such as the UN Charter and the 1948 Declaration of Universal Rights? [https://www.un.org/en/about-us/un-charter/full-text
and https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights ]
and UNDRIP? [ https://www.un.org/development/desa/indigenouspeoples/wp-content/uploads/sites/19/2018/11/UNDRIP_E_web.pdf ]
The effect is this: Canadians are obligated by treaties and declarations we signed at the UN, to pursue policies of restorative justice for the aboriginal peoples who have lived here far longer than anyone whose roots are in Eurasia or Africa. And of course our very own Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms obligate us as well. Our Constitution guarantees aboriginal rights.
Twilight for global order, Dawn for Canadian justice
In 1945, Canada stood very tall, in indisputable prominence, in a temporary geopolitical drama. We were a major military Power, who had been partners with the Americans and British in the invasion of German-occupied France at D-Day, and were major players in promoting the UN and in the research that led to the US possessing the first nuclear weapon (which, as we all know, they alone in history have used.) But I emphasize how temporary this was; Canadians never expressed any intention to remain among the great powers of the world, to do what power would demand from us if we had a drive to stay in the role of a major power. Our history, and our culture, shaped us to reject that role. The Canadian tradition has never been to be imperial nor to take on a global policing order. We had, once, a proven record for UN peace-keeping; that reputation was lost.
In 1945, we were appreciated by the US and UK, and the Netherlands honour us to this day for our part in their Liberation. But from 1946 on, America, the British Empire, and the Soviet Russian Union, decided the great issues, while we went back to our accustomed relative obscurity. Soon, France, Germany, Italy, China, Japan, resurrected. Canada dwindled into an appropriate middle-power status. And then, by the turn of this century, even that status was unsupported by real armed strength and contributions to maintaining the world order that benefited us so clearly.
That war we so proudly helped to win, was, in statements made by our leaders then, fought for “freedom” and “rights.” Western, Judeo-Christian cultural history underlay the concepts of the new order in 1946, but as the UN itself tried to say, the rights upheld within this system were “universal and human.” Much of the world now challenges our pretensions to have universal values or that others should conform to the views that were dominant in 1950.
No one would say Canada did not benefit mightily from the world order MacMillan describes, and no one can miss the significance of the decay of that order for our security, peace, and affluence. That international system is fading into twilight; Canada will not be the same, in the new order emerging, and MacMillan is quite right, “this will not be an easy or pleasant transition”.
As that wonderful era of peace and security, wealth and development, for Canada and its allies and partners in Europe, America, and the Anglo-sphere, fades: Canada cannot neglect justice inside our borders.
Conclusions
For me, the federal election just completed in April this year has one outstanding political significance. Canadians did not support small parties in the way usual for us, but instead we indicated alignment with two major parties. Is this “polarization”? That word is loaded. But we do seem to have declared loyalties to quite different kinds of leaders, and the man who won is nothing like the man who leads the Conservatives. The Liberal brand, despite Trudeau’s taint, survived his fall, and Liberal philosophy is for the next term entrenched in our federal government. Yet Conservatives won the popular vote.
[ https://www.policymagazine.ca/election-2025-a-conservative-postmortem/ ]
Here is the caveat, for me. Liberalism in Canada is not primarily a social-justice philosophy. Obviously Conservatism is not either. Our Prime Minister understands capitalism far better than Trudeau ever did, and he will step up to align Canada with the great Powers of the capitalist West in the G7 and EU and of course with the USA. We will spend a lot on defence, we will contribute to the ‘Golden Dome’ – and all of this expense at a time when Western capitalism is notably weaker than it was from 1945 to 2020.
Voices will be heard, using various subterfuges to hide a basic intent, that make the case for the growth of the Economy first, and defence expenditure as a prime policy demand; the implication is that justice issues – for natives, for the environment, for the poor, for the ill, for women – must all be relegated to a lower level of priority. Aboriginal justice, truth, and reconciliation, is going to be resisted… and not by just a few.
Provinces with reservoirs of raw resources will resist any policy that regulates their capitalist development with social-justice legislation. The great Canadian middle class is likely to erode. Concentration of wealth in a smaller class of people seems probable. Unless we forge a new path.
No nation can ignore its global context. Canada has just come through 75 years when the UN’s liberal international order gave us affluence without much effort, and very inexpensive security by dependence on a benign superpower ally. It is sad, ironic, we did not build toward justice in those times when conditions were so good; we must still go forward on that project, constructing our nation-state based on justice. No one should (morally) argue that we cannot afford justice because the world is so dangerous now. Some will argue that.
Just when that scenario alters for the worse, and the climate and other environmental threats mount in danger, we find ourselves committed to make life better for more Canadians, not fewer.
Can we go back to 1960 and start over? this time with all the knowledge we have now, then… Ah, History, you are a cruel master.
Life is lived moving forward, but understood looking backward.
***
Appendix
Canadian spending on arms
https://www.policymagazine.ca/guns-vs-butter-in-canadas-new-security-context/
quote:
In that context, in addition to improving economic productivity and facilitating internal trade to boost prosperity and federal revenues, fiscal imagination might be needed to pay for our new, higher defence bills. Certainly, promising massive tax cuts is highly problematic at this point, because most Canadians are unlikely to like the prospect of choosing between “guns” (higher defence spending) and “butter” (preserving our social programs). More generally, in assessing our capacity to pay for both a stronger military and a sustainable welfare state, new sources of tax revenues could be discussed.
Canada as a power in the world
https://www.ipolitics.ca/2024/11/29/is-canada-still-a-middle-power/
Aboriginal rights in Canada and the UNDRIP
https://thevarsity.ca/2024/11/17/canadas-false-truths-and-the-illusion-of-reconciliation/
