FEDERATION OR DISINTEGRATION FOR CANADA?

Mr. Eric Butler reports from Canada
In three radio interviews in British Columbia, I noticed that I set the phones ringing when, in answer to the question of what I saw as the future for Canada, I suggested that the only hope of preventing Canada from disintegrating was the establishment of a genuine system of Federalism with a Senate effectively representing the Provinces. All the evidence at the moment indicates that the people of Quebec are going to vote "Oui" in the coming referendum proposing that Quebec leave the Canadian Confederation. This Yes vote, following the recent Federal Elections which left Western Canada without any real say at Ottawa, has fanned the flames of Western separatism to the point where it must now be taken seriously.

The present Canadian Senate is a useless institution, with the Senators being appointed by the Prime Minister of the day. Quebec and Eastern Canada have the biggest number of Senators. The Liberal Party uses the Senate as a way to have their organisers on the public payroll!

Asked to submit a document outlining the type of Federal Constitution, which could hold Canada together, I have suggested:
1. The establishment of a Senate elected by the people, and, as in Australia, each Province, irrespective of size or population, having the same number of Senators. Senators either to be elected on a different franchise than that for the House of Commons, or elected by proportional representation.
2. The Senate to have at least, but preferably more, powers than the Australian Senate, particularly over financial policy.
3. Present powers of the Provinces to be entrenched and increased to the point where the Federal Government is a genuine servant of the Provinces.
4. Education and associated matters to be determined by the Provinces, this enabling Quebec, for example, to preserve its own culture.
5. The Supreme Court of Canada to be selected by the Provinces, again there being equal representation.

Inside such a Federation, any Province would have the power to change present financial policies in an attempt to demonstrate that modifications can solve growing problems. In the United States, the constitutional issue is also coming to the fore as the people endeavour to get more effective control over their own affairs through the States. The tax revolt is growing and as President Carter' s new anti-inflation policy gets under way, it can be predicted with certainty that the revolt against further financial restrictions is going to grow. The Soviet leaders must be delighted as they witness President Carter telling Americans they must accept a lower standard of living and even a reduction being imposed at a time when American productive capacity is greater than ever before.

Not only the future of Canada, but the future of what is left of Western Civilisation, depends upon a recognition of the truth that a reversal of present threatening developments requires effective decentralisation of all power; that central Governments should not be looking after matters which State or Provincial Governments can look after better; that State or Provincial Governments should not look after matters which Municipal Governments can look after better; and that no Government should be looking after matters which the individual can best look after himself.

Warm applause at one meeting greeted my charge that the Christian Church had abdicated from its responsibility to speak with Authority against the menace of centralised power, irrespective of what label is used to describe the centralisation. It was encouraging to have a Priest of the Anglican Church arise to endorse my remarks, but to suggest that it was also the responsibility of the Christian laity to press for a stand against the subordination of the Individual to centralised power. I could not agree more.

If Canada and other Western nations are to reverse present disastrous policies, the initiative will have to come from the "grass roots". The American Federation is not going to be saved by the Presidency, but by the people pressing for change through their different political representatives.

RHODESIAN ELECTIONS

A comment by Jeremy Lee
"It is extremely hard for Australians to grasp the farcical absurdity of a ballot type vote in the African context. I remember vividly the first general election in Kenya, which projected Jomo Kenyatta and his K.A.N.U. party into power. In fact, I manned a voting booth in a farming area on the edge of the Rift Valley.

The problems were incomprehensible to many westerners. There were over 28 major tribal groups, all speaking different languages, with numerous offshoots. Many in tribal areas had never seen a white man. Some of the older Africans could still remember Kenya before white influence had appeared. Written ballot papers were out of the question. Pictures were used instead. Jomo's symbol was a cockerel. Others were represented by giraffes, hippopotami, and bicycles.
The heated election debates were intriguing! One heated individual in a local argument said he wouldn't vote for a hippo an any account, as it caused so much damage in potato shambas - the native word for vegetable garden!

Two groups were evident at the elections - firstly, a bevy of British politicians and observers, who knew nothing of local language, tribal divisions or environment. All they could really ascertain was that bits of paper were marked and dropped into voting boxes; but this did not deter them from hailing the election as "a triumph for democracy".
The other group was the well-organised K.A.N.U. Youth Wing, which accosted every voter. Africans were told that the secret vote was a myth - another false European idiosyncracy. The result was an almost unanimous vote for the cockerel! One poor old fellow actually came to the booth with a white cockerel under his arm, which he wanted to put into the voting box! It was a farce, which beggars description.

Compare this with Ivor Benson's report of the Rhodesian election, which swept Mugabe to power, from his March issue of "Behind the News": "A monstrous confidence trick must, before all else, have what is today called "credibility". Not so? Some of' this credibility was supplied at each polling station in the form of a British police constable, helmet and all, in popular imagination of the living embodiment of law and order, honesty and integrity.

Meanwhile, of course, the Lancaster House delays had been designed to give the Soviet backed Nkomo and Mugabe time to move their trained terrorists into position all over the country, these not to be confused with the thousands of returning refugees who were given guns and made to look like terrorists before proceeding to the ceasefire assembly points.

At every voting booth the drill was much the same; the unarmed terrorists were up long before dawn on the first day of voting and took their places at the head of the queues, their only uniform (now that real uniforms were forbidden) being two matches stuck into their woolly hair just above the left ear. Having voted, these "terrs" rejoined the queue, evenly spaced down the line, where they could continue to freeze the blood of those waiting to vote, with warnings of death and destruction for any who might be thinking of voting the "wrong way". In many cases intimidation accompanied the voter until the moment he put his mark on the voting paper and popped it into the box - all this under the watchful eyes of the bewildered policemen who, naturally enough, could make nothing of the Shona and Ndebele babble....

In this whole process of fraudulent misrepresentation spiced with terror, we can always expect to find a close and highly effective partnership of wickedness and stupidity, the stupid being, of course, at the service of the wicked. The stupid help to give credibility to the villainy, as was seen at the Bindura polling station where functionaries of the British Election Commission, politically stupid but not dishonest, discovered to their horror that the entire Black voting staff were actually commanding the baffled and frightened voters to vote Political Front....

Reading the above, one wonders what were the opinions of the British Bobbies who were stationed at the voting booths?
Australia also had a team of observers in Rhodesia. It was led by Mr. Neil Brown, (N.P. for Diamond Valley) and included Mr. Katter, Senator Robertson (Northern Territory), Dr. Neil Blewett, (A.L.P. Bonython) and some government officials. The committee's two and a half page interim report is quite extraordinary. Only a few quotes are possible:
....The Group recognized that freedom and fairness in elections are not absolutes, but gradations on a scale....the Group concluded that there was a considerable degree of intimidatory behaviour during the campaign... it did not believe that these negated the overwhelmingly more positive aspects of the election, the ultimate guarantee of which was the widely acknowledged secrecy of the vote...."

What can one say? The Group's report will probably end up as joke of the week in PRAVDA!

Conservative Dinner Speaker

The following Postscript to Rhodesia is provided by Mr. Jeremy Lee National Secretary of the Institute of Economic Democracy, a division of the Australian League of Rights. Mr. Lee addressed the Melbourne Conservative Speakers' Club on Wednesday, April 2nd last.

"How did madness triumph over sanity in Britain's behaviour over Rhodesia? After all, Margaret Thatcher showed she understood something of the reality about Mugabe and Nkomo in her pre-election speeches. C. Gordon Tether, who wrote the famous "Lombard" daily column in the London Financial Times for 21 years, gave a clue in a recent edition of the Washington based "Spotlight" from which the following is quoted:
"The outside world has been encouraged to see the battle over the future of Rhodesia as basically a racial struggle - an attempt by the Black majority to wrest the reins of government from an entrenched White minority. But the real battle has been concerned with the question: "Who was to be in control of the country's valuable mineral resources - the home side or the international Big Business community? Some powerful clues as to who won this tussle can be uncovered by looking at the background of the people behind the settlement that has ended Rhodesian independence...."

C. Gordon Tether names the three principal " stars" in the Rhodesian drama. First is Lord Peter Carrington, who comes from a "banking and land owning family and can be said to have devoted all his life to safeguarding and promoting the interests of the super capitalist class, both in and out of politics."
For his recent work in the international field, Lord Carrington was recently rewarded with membership of the Trilateral Commission, which Tether describes as the "super capitalist lobby that put Jimmy Carter into the White House in 1976."

Then there was Lord Soames, who is a director of N.M. Rothschild and Sons, and also a director of the National Westminster Bank, one of Britain's "big four" banking institutions.

Third of the "stars" named by Tether is "Tiny" Rowland, chief executive of the Lonhro empire, one of Africa's biggest multinationals the owner of enormous assets in Rhodesia and chief sponsor of Joshua Nkomo. . . ."

Thus do the ruthless, amoral men of power and finance trample on the small and helpless! To such, recent events in Rhodesia are no more than another business deal!

(For details of Rockefeller's infamous Trilateral Commission, read Gary Allen's documented revelation "Jimmy Carter, Jimmy Carter."