Canada Is Not a "Sovereign" Nation

The Canadian Constitution Proves it.

There is a question that every Canadian should be able to answer, and almost none can. It is not a trick question. It is the most basic question about the country you live in. Here it is: have you read the Canadian Constitution?

Not the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is a small portion of it. The whole Constitution. If you asked that question in a room of a thousand Canadians, including lawyers, you would get no hands. Not one. And yet there is no document that affects your life more. It governs which governments have authority over you, what they can do to you, who commands your military, and who actually runs the executive branch of your country. The reason you have not read it is not because it is inaccessible. It is on the Department of Justice website. The reason you have not read it is because you are not supposed to. Because if you did, the political myths that keep this system functioning would collapse.

The most foundational of those myths is that Canada is a sovereign nation.

Let us examine what sovereignty actually requires. A sovereign nation governs itself. Its laws are made by its own legislative bodies. Its land belongs to its people or its state. Its military answers to its own government. Its executive power is vested in its own institutions. By every one of these measures, Canada is not sovereign. And this is not my opinion. It is written plainly in the documents that constitute our governing law.

Our Constitution is not a document drafted by Canadians expressing their founding principles. It is a collection of statutes passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom. The British North America Act of 1867 is a British statute. The Constitution Act of 1982, which Canadians were shown in a ceremony with Pierre Trudeau and the Queen and told represented our patriation, is also a British statute. The Queen came to Canada and signed into law an act that had already been passed by the UK Parliament, because that is how British law works. We watched political theater and were told it was independence.

Because our Constitution consists of British statutes, the United Kingdom Parliament retains the constitutional authority to repeal or amend them. According to their own constitutional law, Parliament cannot bind itself. They are free to change our governing documents. That is not sovereignty.

Now read Section 9 of the British North America Act. It states that the executive power of Canada is vested in the monarch. Not the federal cabinet. Not the Prime Minister. The monarch. The king of the United Kingdom is the executive power of Canada. Read Section 15. The command in chief of the land and naval militia and of all naval and military forces of and in Canada is hereby declared to continue and be vested in the Queen. Substitute King. The King of the United Kingdom commands our armed forces.

When the United Kingdom was involved in providing air support during the bombing of Iran, Canada’s Prime Minister publicly supported it. Liberal supporters were shocked. They should not have been. The head of our armed forces, the executive power of our government, was engaged in that action. A Prime Minister who publicly opposed his commander in chief and his executive would be in an untenable constitutional position. The Governor General, who is the King’s representative, has the authority to dismiss the Prime Minister at any time. You do not publicly oppose your manager. That is not politics. That is the constitutional structure of Canada operating exactly as written.

Every member of Parliament swears allegiance to the King. Not to the people of Canada. Not to the Constitution. To the King. Mark Carney’s oath is publicly available. Every MP who has ever served has taken that oath. The House of Commons is the King’s House of Commons. The public revenue is the King’s revenue. And Section 54 of the British North America Act makes clear that it is not even lawful for the House of Commons to pass a spending bill unless the Governor General has first sent a message to the House requesting that bill be passed. Read that carefully. Our elected Parliament cannot legally spend public money without the King’s representative first directing them to do so. The money flows top down, not bottom up.

Then there is the question of land. If you have paid off your mortgage, you believe you own your home. You do not. What you hold is a fee simple, which is a grant from the king permitting you to use the land without restriction. The king owns your land. If you doubt this, stop paying your property taxes and observe what happens. The government will sell your property without your consent. If you owned it, they could not do that. They can do it because you do not own it. The king owns it, and the government administers it on his behalf.

So let us apply a simple test. Imagine that Canada somehow found itself free of the United Kingdom entirely, and decided to enter into the same arrangement with Luxembourg instead. Luxembourg’s Parliament would pass our governing documents. Luxembourg’s monarch would own all Canadian land. Luxembourg’s monarch would be the head of our armed forces and our executive power. Every Canadian MP would swear allegiance to the Luxembourg king. Canada could not pass a spending bill without the Luxembourg king’s representative first requesting it. Would any Canadian call that sovereignty? Would any Canadian consent to it? Of course not. And yet that is precisely the arrangement we have with the United Kingdom, and we call it independence because we have been told to.

The Privy Council Office is the mechanism through which this operates day to day. Most Canadians have never heard of it. If you asked who the most powerful person in Canada is, most would say the Prime Minister. The correct answer may be the Clerk of the Privy Council Office. The Privy Council Office is appointed by the Governor General, who is the King’s representative, to advise the executive. It contains people who are not elected. It has existed since Confederation. It is the administrative machinery through which the King’s executive power is exercised over Canada. The federal cabinet operates within this structure and is permitted to direct day to day affairs in ways that do not threaten the underlying power arrangement. But permitted is the operative word. The cabinet governs because the King suffers them to govern. That is not sovereignty.

None of this happened by accident, and none of it is hidden. It is written in documents that are publicly available and have been publicly available for over 150 years. The reason Canadians do not know this is that twelve or more years of public education, followed by publicly funded post-secondary education, has never once required them to read the most important document governing their lives. That omission is not an oversight. A population that understands its actual constitutional situation is a population that asks inconvenient questions. A population that believes it lives in an independent democracy with representative government and rule of law is a population that does not rebel.

We have been given political myths in place of political reality. The myth of sovereignty. The myth of democracy. The myth of representative government. The myth that our cabinet runs the country. The myth that we own our land. These myths are functional. They create social cohesion. They prevent the kind of unrest that genuine understanding of the power structure might produce. But they are myths, and the gap between the myth and the reality is where our rights, our property, our military, and our governance actually live.

The Constitution is on the Department of Justice website. You can read it today. There is a reason you never have. There is a reason your lawyer has not either. Start there.

An educated and engaged citizen is a powerful one.

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Shawn Buckley