I don't really disagree with any of your analysis of this issue. It does, however, bother me that someone who "taught Canadian history for 40 years" has such a poor understanding of our constitutional structure. The government doesn't need Parliament's approval (the approval of "our elected representatives") to go to war. Whether it should or not is a different question, but it doesn't NEED Parliament's approval (except indirectly, in that Parliament eventually has to vote the funds to pay for a war.) The conduct of foreign affairs - including decisions on declaring or going to war - are, in our system, a crown prerogative (in other words, the executive decides.) Even in World War II, although Mackenzie King did seek a vote in the House of Commons, he did that largely for symbolic reasons - Canada had just gained authority over its own foreign affairs with the Statute of Westminster of 1931, and the delay in declaring war (Canada declared war on Germany on September 10, Britain on September 3) was a way of making the point that Canada was an independent country making an independent decision. The referral to the House of Commons was similarly symbolic - a way of saying this was Canada's decision. But Parliamentary approval was not legally necessary - the Senate, for example, was not consulted; if parliamentary approval was required, that would have included Senate approval. The House may give its opinion; the decision in such matters is for the Cabinet. For example, Canada essentially went to war in Afghanistan without parliamentary approval, and the motion ending the combat mission in 2011 is only the House of Commons' opinion - I would argue it's not binding on the government if the government chooses to act otherwise. although the government would likely face a vote of confidence if it rejected the House's opinion.

Briefly, in support of all I've just written - Canada declared war on Japan on December 8, 1941, with the following proclamation by King George VI, acting on the advice of the Canadian Cabinet (not the Canadian Parliament, which was not consulted about declaring war on Japan):

"Whereas by and with the advice of our Privy Council for Canada [ie, the Cabinet] we have signified our approval of the issue of a proclamation in the Canada Gazette declaring that a state of war with Japan exists and has existed in Canada as and from the 7th day of December, 1941. Now, therefore, we do hereby declare and proclaim that a state of war with Japan exists and has existed as and from the seventh day of December, 1941. Of all which our loving subjects and all others whom these presents may concern are hereby required to take notice and to govern themselves accordingly."

I'm afraid your understanding of our constition is shaky. Much of it, unlike the American model, is based on practice and precedent rather than the constitution itself.

Yes, the excutive (the queen or her rep) can theoreticaly do anything at all.  In pracitce, neither of them can do anything at all except on t he advice of parliament, as represented by the leader able to command the largest number of votes (the term prime minister and parties does not exist in the constituion.)

The MP can, as you say, issue a declaration of war. But without the support of the house to vote money, he cannot spend anything on it. Similarly, the house has to be allowed to bebate an issue and to vote on it. It's not a written rule. But, like most of our practice, it works because it you don't do it that way, the whole system breaks down.

In the case of 1941, the executive and the cabinet were on safe ground since there was not the slightest possibility that anybody in the house would object, and even less that the money would not be voted.

Our system works because it works, not because of rules like the American system which, curiously, doesn't work very well at all.

in the case of Mackenzie King and WW1, you're quite right that King's delay in advising war was largely for symbolic purposes. But there are two points to remember. One is that symbolism is a major part of the backbone of our system.  It is such a symbolism that establishes a precedent - and therefore makes it advisable to be careful in changing symbols.

The second is that King knew what the vote would be, and had written to, (I think) Massey on the day Britain declared war, to "the state of war which now exists between Canada and Germany."

King had his faults. But he knew how our system works.

graeme

graeme, I don't think my knowledge of our Constitution is shaky at all, but that depends on whether you agree with me or not!  I think that essentially we're saying the same thing - as you've noted, Canada has gone to war without consultation with Parliament, and as I noted earlier, eventually Parliament has to vote supply to prosecute a war. Technically, though, in our system, Parliament does not declare or approve war. (Japan and Afghanistan are two examples.)

Yes, agreed. That's why I dislike the Afghanistan case in particular. The decision to commit support troops to a combat role was made by Martin, so the transition to war was more than a little fuzzy. It was also disguised with the story that we were obliged to contribute troops because of our NATO commitment, (In fact, neither Nato nor the UN has any power to declare or approve of a war unless a member of the UN is attacked directly - as in the Koreas. And there is no evidence that Afghanistan had any role in the 9/11 attack).

I cannot remember at what point parliament debated and voted on the issue. I do remember the debate was both brief and late in the game. In any case, we allowed a very dangerous precedent to be created - and it may well be a precedent that will prove to be binding in the future.

I am very much afraid I see us stumbling blindly into decades of war, in a world in which no side makes even a pretence of following any of the rules that limited brutality, and with weaponry which mades that of world war two seem puny.

Oh - a quibble, and in defence of Mackenzie King (and whoever thought I would be defending him?) King always said Canada will decide on war. Thus his delay, because Canada could only speak through its representatives in the House. That position arose directly from the grant of independence which followed World War 1, a grant that came only at the insistence of Canadian leaders who supported their demand with the evidence of 60,000 dead.

No matter how one slices it, I think the way we went to war in Afghanistan was a betrayal of that enormous sacrifice.And I very much fear we are heading into an even broader array of precedents.

 Nothing like a good constitutional dust-up!

This is likely a bit off topic, but it does address Parliament's constitutional role in spending.  I read an article a couple of days ago in the Ottawa Citizen that pointed out a couple of years ago, the Financial Administration Act was amended to allow the Finance Minister to borrow money without needing the consent of Parliament.  Twenty words tucked away in a great big bill that no one seemed to notice.  It is that kind of really sneaky stuff the Conservatives have been doing that makes my blood boil.  It's a huge change in the notion of keeping the Government accountable.  And now of course, we have the biggest deficit in Canadian history!

AND - given that the Finance Minister is supposed to hold the shares of the Bank of Canada as a trust for all Canadian?  From whom is he borrowing the money when the Government of Canada could just go ahead and print its own money - instead of having to issue bonds to a central bank - and then have the bank put those up as notes for the commercial banks to create the money?

It just makes me so angry that we go and borrow money from private companies, and then have to pay it back with interest when all they have done is create it out of thin air, when we could just print our own!

Anyone want a thread on the evils of central banking?

Article:

http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Parliament+seeks+reclaim+powers/297925...

Graeme,

They actually claim you wanted to be put on the watch list:

http://www.campus-watch.org/apologists.php

They're liars. But that's okay. There are some lists I'm proud to be on. And that is certainly one of them. They only sense of shame I have is that so few of the names on that list are Canadian.  I'm particularly asamed of all those exalted types at Concordia who should have had the integrity to defend a colleague who was smeared in that way.

Stevie,

I agree with a comment you made at one point in this thread, that all sides need to quit lying.

For sure,

We all know war is an economic means of money and gun laundering.  Lets just go from there and shut up all the irrelevant crap artists. 

 President Barack Obama said today (May 11,2010) that he is committed to seeing a Palestinian state created. Yet on Monday May 10, the USA led the 31 countries who constitute the OECD to vote unanimously in favour of allowing Israel membership. This is a classic. The Yanks had a chance to put pressure on Israel to stop the settlements but blew it. Switzerland, Ireland and Norway expressed concern about the settlements but not enough to veto the decision; we wouldn't after all want to upset the US and Israeli coalition. Past US administrations going back to Jimmy Carter have talked a lot about a two state solution which would allow the Palestinians to have a state identity just like the Israelis but have never shown the resolve to see it through. No one is prepared to stand up to the Israelis and I am afraid Mr. Obama is no different.

I;m afraid you're right. It may even be that the US doesn't want a settlement. If's foreign policies works on setting groups against each other - rather like the old British Empire.

Certainly, the Israeli government has no intention of letting Palestine survive at all.

Yes, how vile of Israel to exercise their sovereignty when such actions are so unpopular on University campuses across Western Europe and North America; AND hurt poor Barack Hussein Obama’s feelings in the process!

Yes, defending themselves from a nuclear attack CERTAINLY is beyond the pale!!!  How vile of those “dirty Jews” to think they have the right to defend themselves from being slaughtered by homicidal maniacs and despotic regimes; that definitely puts them “beyond cooperation”!

oh, he's worse than that. He's reads like one of the CJC hangers-on. They hand notes to these clowns on how to respond to posts like mine.

Like you, Beshpin, he really knows close to nothing about the subject, so he makes up for it with inaccurate assumptions and gutter language. Keep posting, Reggie. We want to keep up on the latest  CJC line.

OH. Then there must also be no wrong party? Or two wrong parties? If nobody's wrong and nobody's right, why are we helping one side against the other?

In one sense, I quite agree with you. To speak of right or wrong is to cast blame. That very seldom works as any sort of solution. It's more reasonable to forgive - that is not to say both sides are okay so we can all forget it. To forgive means to see both sides as people (actually, there are at least three sides in this), and, since they are people and since people have reasons to act as they are - then we must understand the reasons if we're going to find a solution. Why are Israelis so quick to use violence? Not to blame them - to understand why. Why do Palestinians dislike them and the west so much?

For that matter, why is the US so deeply committed to support of Israel?  Why did a Canadian cabinet minister (junior grade) pledge Canada to go to war with any nation that might attack Israel?

Nail those down, and you can start realistically discussing a solution.

ReggieJ wrote:

"Yes, defending themselves from a nuclear attack CERTAINLY is beyond the pale!!!  How vile of those “dirty Jews” to think they have the right to defend themselves from being slaughtered by homicidal maniacs and despotic regimes; that definitely puts them “beyond cooperation”!"

If the Israelis have the right to defend themselves, so do the Palestinians. If the Israelis have the right to a sovereign state and homeland, so do the Palestinians. The problem is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank including East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights; this occupation has lasted over 40 years and is made worse by the non stop influx of Israeli settlers who take land that does not belong to them.  Isn't "Thou shalt not steal" one of the commandments in the Bible?

It's ironic you said that since it is the "palestinians" trying to steal Israeli land. In fact they're really trying to steal all of Israel. The nicest way to describe the "palestinians" is that they're squatters.

The Palestinians are squatters? In their own homeland?

No even Israel claims that.

 Hey jon71

The British Mandate in Palestine was set up by the League of Nations and made official around 1922. At that time, there were 750,000 Arabs and about 84,000 Jews living in Palestine, about 11% of the total population. These figures suggest there were generations of Arabs living in Palestine who owned their own land, ran their own business, ran their own government and spoke their own language. Most of the Arab descendants of this period of course  were forced to flee their land, becoming refugees, in 1948.

Going back to ancient history, there were non Jewish people (Hittites, Philistines etc) living in Palestine before the Exodus and the arrival of Moses, Joshua etc. So to say that the Palestinians today are trying to steal Israel and are in effect "squatters" just does not in my view jive with the facts.

After the formation of Israel there was a concerted effort to steal it. People on the low end of the economic spectrum (in rural America you'd hear the term "po' white trash") starting going to Israel trying to crowd out Jewish people and take it over. After they failed their home countries, primarily Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, but to lesser degrees all middle eastern countries, basically didn't want them back. It was a failed attempt at squatting. The presence of those "palestinians" are the source of current problems in the region. I don't mind them having a "homeland" but it needs to come out of Syria or Lebanon or one of the countries that produced them to start with. That would be fair.

the formation of Israel was a theft. The British had UN responsibility for Palestine. They tried to stop European Jews from migrating to the country. But they broke through. They had already formed terrorist gangs to chase out Palesinians. (If you would take the trouble to check, you will find that nobody denies the existence of the terror gangs.)

As well, the UN did NOT recognize the state of Israel. The general assembly voted in favour. But a vote of the Security Council was also needed, and there was no possibility that would pass. So Israel declared ITSELF an independent country. The people who had lived there for centuries were forced off their land into the concentration camp that is Gaze. That was pure theft and illegal imprisonment.

As to poor little Israel and the threat of an Iranian bomb - the UN has many times announced it has no evidence of a bomb beiing built in Iran. Not even one. Meanwhile, Israel has 300. Poor little Israel. People are always picking on it. Palestinians picked on it when the Israelis came to visiit; they purposely got in the way of Israeli bulets. And UN building purposely got in the way of Israeli shells - as did clearly marked UN convoys of food and medical equipment.

As to syria and lebanon having produced the palestinians,  - do you seriously believe that you have a right to be in the US because you were produced there? Are you Navajo?

Don't you know that most of the Israelis were not produced in Israel - at all - ever? They have no historical connection whatever with it.

Read some history - ancient and modern. Try to catch up.

I'm actually way ahead of you, maybe because I don't make up "history" as I go along. Israel belonged to the Israelites for thousands of years. They were driven out in multiple diasporias. Their descendants came back home. Some people didn't like that, but it's still their home.

Also, for what it's worth, I'm part Cherokee. I have more Irish, Welsh, British and German, but there's native American in the mix too.

oh, so I guess the native peoples were not robbed of th eir lands at all. I mean, if you're part cherokee, you have a clear claim.

There is no people on earh who live in the land of their origins. The English are not originally from England. Yes, the Israelites lived in Israel a long time ago. And there were people there before them who were pushed out.

In any case, just look at Sephardic minority, and look at the Ashkenzai majority. There are not he same people.  The shephardics are obviously mediterranean. he Ashkenazis are not.

But that's all beside the point. You are encouraging the Israelis on a course that can only mean disaster for them and for us. If you will check on laest studies of the Jewish community in the US, you will find that support for Israel is dropping. It's dropping because it is so plain to see the disaster that Israel is deliberately creating for itself.

 In fairness, one cannot deny the historic and religious connection the Jewish people feel for Israel, and especially for Jerusalem - just read the Tanakh (or the Old Testament.) One also cannot condone the current policies of the State of Israel, which seem deliberately provocative and intended to prevent any real resolution of the problem.

I submit that, while it's an interesting academic debate, whether the Security Council voted in favour of Israeli independence (which it didn't) or whether Israel's declaration of independence was unilateral (which it was) is immaterial. The State of Israel exists - and it's not going to go away. Pro-Israeli Christians should admit that the modern State of Israel is not "biblical" Israel - it's a secular state and its boundaries are not the same.  Also, of course, from a historical perspective, it would have been helpful if the original UN resolution on the partition of Palestine in 1947 had actually been put into practice. The declaration of independence by Israel, while perhaps premature in that the Security Council hadn't approved, didn't really prevent that, as the new state wasn't claiming jurisdiction over lands promised to the Palestinians, but an invasion of Israel by Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Syria (who themselves weren't affected by the resolution) made that impossible and led to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. The point is that there's blame all over the place in the Middle East. To single out Israel, the Palestininans or the Arab states is crazy. They're all in some ways to blame - except, in all honesty, maybe the Palestinians, who are stuck in the middle between Israel and the Arab states that would prefer to see Israel wiped off the map, and who have responded to their plight by - yes - becoming actively involved in terrorism, which, of course, the Jewish community also did pre-1948.

As far as the comparison of the situation in the Middle East with the displacement of native North Americans is concerned, it is a good comparison in this sense: Israel isn't going to go away. Neither are Canada and the United States going to go away. The Jewish people aren't going to leave Israel for ancestral homelands so that the Palestinians can have it - neither am I going to move to England, where my ancestors came from, so that native North Americans can have my house. Historical arguments may be interesting, but one has to deal with the current reality. I would like to see Israel stop building settlements and eventually withdraw from lands promised to the Palestinians by the 1947 UN Resolution. I would like to see all the Arab states (and Iran) offer a guarantee of Israel's existence and security. I would like to see an end to terrorism committed by anyone. I would like to see peace in that part of the world. Playing the historical blame game won't accomplish that. In all honesty, I'm not sure how that's going to be accomplished. In the meantime I feel for the desperate plight of the folks in that part of the world (especially the Palestinians who, as I said, strike me as largely victims of the actions of others) but also the Israelis, many of whom live in constant fear of violence and terrorist attacks.

 jon71/ Rev Steven

I have to disagree with you on a couple of points.

I am no expert but I have done some reading of the Arab-Israeli conflict and I've never heard of squatters from Egypt, Lebanon or Syria trying to "crowd out Jewish people and take it (Israel) over. If you have some numbers to back this claim I would appreciate it.

What I can tell you is that after the Israeli war of independence in 1948 approximately 500,000 Palestinian Arabs were forced to flee their homes, about 38% of whom fled to the West Bank, with the remainder fleeing to Syria, Lebanon and Jordan. Some tried to return to their homes in the early 1950s but were prevented from doing so by a series of laws passed by Israel, one of which was the "Absentee Property Law" (1950). Such laws allowed Israeli settlers to take over Arab homes/land which were judged to  have been abandoned. Here is a quote by Golda Meir: "We used the houses of those Arabs who ran away from the country whenever we could for new immigrant housing." The right of return remains a bone of contention for Arabs to this day.

Which brings me to my second point.

You state:  "Israel belonged to the Israelites for thousands of years."

Not so, at least from my study of the history.

You could argue the Biblical perspective that God made a deal with Abraham for the "promised land," some 3,000 years ago. Many people today however do not take the Bible literally and some scholars have even suggested that Abraham did not exist. I prefer to examine the demographics of the areas and from what I see, at no time (modern era excepted) did the Jewish people ever outnumber the Arabs in Palestine. As I said in my last post, in 1922, the Jewish population in Palestine constituted only 11% of the total population. The bottom line is there have been Arabs in Palestine for generations. What bugs me is not the existence of the state of Israel; as   Rev Steven says Israel exists and is not going away. What bugs me is the Israelis will not share the land (West Bank, East Jerusalem, Golan Heights) with the Palestinian Arabs and so I guess I would also have to disagree with Rev Steven in that the Israelis are more the problem than the Palestinians.

Actually, I believe I said that. "They're all in some ways to blame - except, in all honesty, maybe the Palestinians, who are stuck in the middle between Israel and the Arab states that would prefer to see Israel wiped off the map, and who have responded to their plight by - yes - becoming actively involved in terrorism, which, of course, the Jewish community also did pre-1948."

I quite agree we should not blame  Israelis or arabs for this mess. In general, assigning blame is a poor way to solve any problem. That's why we are supposed to believe in forgiveness.

Both Jews and arabs have been horribly abused by the west in the last century. Hitler was the author of the holocaust - but Canada and the US and other western countries were just as anti-semitic, and actively and cruelly denied help to European Jews throughout the war and even after. If todyay's Israelis seem bloody-minded and indifferent to world opinion -that's how they got that way.

As to Islam, every Islamic country has been invaded by western countries for centuries, particularly those with oil in the past century.  To them, Israel is just another western intrusion.

The US could have used it influence with Israel to reach a settlement. It has made only timid efforts because it needs Israel as a reliable base in the region.

 Rev Steven

You are right. I did not read that part of your post carefully. My apologies.

In my own defence I was drawn more to your comment about terrorism especially the comment about the Jewish community becoming actively involved in terrorism pre 1948. 

Why limit it to 1948??

Would you not condemn as an act of terror Israel's attack on Gaza last year which killed 1,300 people? The Goldstone Report thought Israel overreacted and accused Israel, along with Hamas of war crimes. ( as a side bar to this Netanyahu would not even cooperate with the judge when asked to do so). I would also remind you of the Israeli air strikes that killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians in 2006. And today, if you are a fisherman in Gaza and want to fish outside the 3 mile limit imposed by the Israelis (normally it's a 12 mile limit...there are no fish left within the 3 mile limit), the Israelis shoot you. As for the comment about Arab nations wanting to wipe Israel off the map, how about the Israelis who want to wipe the Palestinians off the map with their settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem? So who are the real terrorists???

quite so. I didn't mean to limit it to 1948, by any means.

Our news media use the word terrorist only to describe moslems. The three or four or more millions of civilians  killed by the US army in the last fifty years don't count as victims of terrorism.