A House Divided

by Adam Yoshida

  "How many Amendments have they proposed, Chief Whip?"

  "Five hundred and counting."

  "Fuckers!" he shouted, pounding the ornate $25,000 desk that his fashionable wife had insisted that the taxpayers purchase to furnish his Langevin Block office.

  "We'll just have to keep them voting. This is a matter of fundamental fairness and justice for all Canadians. The sort that my father fought for. It's why I ran for this office. The bill will pass."

  The bill – the so-called "Resource Revenue Fairness Act" – had already been in the minds of many in the government long before the Iranian crisis had pushed it to the front-burner. How was it fair, they argued, that the people of British Columbia, Alberta, and Saskatchewan should disproportionately benefit simply because they happened to live in places where a valuable liquids and gases (albeit sometimes in a solid form) were deposited underneath the ground? Especially when the consequences of extracting that liquid and its use, the Prime Minister and his allies argued, had such long-term consequences that would, by definition, be equally shared. Should not, then, the benefits be equally shared? And, in any case, while the rest of the country had overwhelmingly voted for the right and correct things, those backward regions certainly had not. So, to hell with them.

  The Prime Minister sighed; he had concert tickets for the evening.

  "Keep the House in session around the clock if necessary."

  It took nearly seventy-two hours for the House to vote down all of the Conservative amendments to the Resource Revenue Fairness Act, a long an endless drone of roll call votes as one technical amendment after another was disposed of. The interminable series of divisions made for boring television, even so far as the most dedicated views of the Canadian Parliamentary Affairs Channel were concerned.

  The matter now moved over to the Red Chamber, as the Senate of Canada was known owing to the garish red cloth with which the chamber was decorated. Senator Marcus Draper of Nova Scotia, the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, took a quiet moment before the commencement of the day's proceedings to steady himself. Through the quirks of the Canadian system Draper, though titled the Leader of the Opposition, actually commanded a majority in the upper house – the matter of the division of the government versus the opposition having been decided entirely within the popularly elected House of Commons.

  A creature of a number of half-finished reforms, the Senate in which Draper served, was now facing its first test. Under the Harper government reforms had been introduced designed to achieve the long-cherished Western dream of making it equal, elected, and effective – as was the Senate in the United States or, if one wished to look for another example in the Westminster tradition, Australia. However, full reforms had been blocked by recalcitrant anti-Tory provincial governments. The result was a Senate where roughly half of its members had been elected through various ad-hoc processes arranged at the Provincial level and where others had been appointed to office at the whim of various Prime Ministers.

  Now, for the first time in its history, the decision had been taken to test the legitimacy of the Senate by having its opposition majority combine to block a money bill.

  No one knew quite how such a move would play out. The matter of confidence, in the Westminster system, rested entirely with the lower House. Yet, at the same time, if the government was not able to pass a budget or other matters of confidence – a definition that automatically includes all money bills – and have them gain Royal Assent, then what alternative would exist but for the government to resign?

  Even the invocation of Section 26 of the Constitution Act, which allowed for the appointment of eight extra Senators, had not been enough to overturn the Conservative majority that had been constructed in the Senate during the long years of Tory rule. Yet, as the vote approached, the government remained confident that enough wavering Tories would have sufficient fear of the consequences of a momentous collusion between the two House of Parliament to allow the narrow passage of the bill.

  Senator Draper took his place and smiled.

  Howard Eagleton just shook his head. No one had anticipated the Federal Government's reaction to the rejection of their cash grab bill by the Senate.

  When he and the other senior statesmen of the West and the Conservative Party had decided upon the Senate to make their stand, they had anticipated that they would invoke Section 26 and seek to pack the Senate with Liberals and New Democrats. When that had failed they had figured that they would cajole, intimidate, and even try to bribe their way through. What they had not considered was just how much the Prime Minister was his father's son.

  "Just watch me," he told the television cameras.

  God, such dramatics, Eagleton thought on first seeing it. Then he realized that the fucker meant it.

  Of course, the moment it became clear that the Senate was the best chance of stopping the government from coming for the West, the Liberals, the NDP, the Greens, and all of their friends in the media and the cultural establishment had begun a round-the-clock campaign of demonization and delegitimization against both the Senate and the Conservative Party. We ought to have seen it coming, Eagleton thought ruefully.

  When the media began to drone on about a long-forgotten decade-old alleged electoral "scandal", the think tank head and most of the rest of the Canadian right had taken it as just a part of the latest wave of collective hysteria. It was claimed, on scant evidence, that senior Conservatives had participated in a scheme to disrupt the get-out-the-vote effort of the Opposition parties. But, as the days went on, the drumbeat grew gradually steadier.

  Then, on the 26th of May, the national newspapers and the twenty-four-hour news stations had suddenly begun to run the sensational "confession" of a former Conservative Party operative who had claimed to have played a key role in the operation and who now implicated virtually the whole former senior leadership of the Conservatives in the scheme. The arrests, none of which appeared particularly sound to the rare unbiased observer, seemed to be based upon little more than conjecture and "evidence" in the form of a cascade of confessions of dubious provenance. The media, however, presumed every man and woman guilty. That many of the elders of the Conservative Party happened to now sit in the Senate was, of course, simply a beneficial coincidence of the course of justice.

  They had not, however, found anything to stick to Howard Eagleton. He, after all, had famously fallen out with many of the leaders of the Conservatives many years before and was long gone from Ottawa before any of this fantastic wrongdoing had supposedly taken place.

  The fury of the West, long-submerged and ostentatiously ignored by the media, came to a boil. As the government pushed a modified version of the Resource Revenue Fairness Act through the House of Commons and the Senate, countless men and women began to appeal to the man who had once marched under the slogan "the West wants in" to take up a new one screaming that "the West wants out."

  Howard Eagleton had been misunderstood for his entire life. The kid with the thick glasses and the famous Dad had longed to be an artist, to spend his days with his family and to enjoy the beauties of Canadian nature. In short, he had wished to do anything but what his father had done. And yet, whether it was because he has inherited a name or some quality of the blood, he had always been the first called upon the lead in a crisis. He had fought for Canada before and he was not about to quit even in this moment of supreme crisis. He would not lead a succession movement but, as he had once before, he would seek to channel all of that energy and anger into a movement to renew Confederation. Feeling each of his seventy-two years, he packed his bags in Calgary and prepared to take his place at the head of the "Western Congress" that was being assembled in Vancouver.

  William Thomas Jackson had waited most of his life for this moment. During all of the years he had spent serving alongside Augustus King – years that had taken him to foreign battlefields and taught him the trade of a soldier alongside that of a lawyer – he had always known that some great unfinished business re
mained for him back at home. Even so, as he walked along the stones of the Olympic Plaza at the Vancouver Trade and Convention Centre, he reflected upon the fact that he had never quite expected those scores to be settled in so sudden or dramatic a fashion as this.

  On returning to the air-conditioned interior from the warmth of the late-spring air, Jackson waited to be called upon to speak to the assembled group of eminent Western men and women.

  "A Western Republic," he began on taking his place at the lectern, "would be positioned as no other nation on this Earth. Possessed of a young and vibrant population balanced between every race and religion, it would be a pluralistic paradise where free enterprise and individualism would reign supreme. Freed of the legacy costs of the old welfare states – in the form of both old debts and the ill-conceived social programs of the past – it would allow a fresh start not only for all of our citizens but, indeed, to the cause of liberty around the world.

  "Our new nation would be incredibly rich in not only talent, but resources. In an era of increasing demand for commodities, we would possess, process, market, and sell almost every resource demanded anywhere in the world. We could – and would – trade freely with almost every other nation. We would become not only the most beautiful, but also the most prosperous country in the world from the first moment that we declared our independence."

  Two days earlier, the government of Alberta had passed legislation calling for a referendum on the secession of the oil-rich province. Now, as the Western Congress debated, the question was not whether the referendum would pass – every poll showed that, in the face of the heavy-handed actions of the Federal Government, that that much was a certainty – but whether Alberta would be permitted to secede and what other territory would follow them out of Canada.

  Many, including Howard Eagleton, viewed the Albertan secession movement as nothing more than a negotiating tool to force the Federal Government to back off. Jackson, in contrast, was determined not only to force the thing through but to maximize the size, wealth, and power of the new Western Republic.

  "It is not enough, Mr. Chairman," Jackson called to the Congress, "that we should permit the vast resources of the northern territories – lands that were, after all, first settled by our ancestors – to remain in the hands of a corrupt and rapacious Eastern Government. Given this, I move that the Yukon and Northern Territories both be invited to dispatch representatives to the Western Congress and that."

  Someone within the crowd of delegates seconded the motion.

  "Moved and seconded," the bored Chairman declared by rote.

  "Mr. Chairman!" several delegates jumped to their feet.

  "The Chair recognizes the Delegate from Southern Vancouver Island."

  The delegate, a balding man in his forties with a thin and tightly drawn face, turned to address the Congress.

  "Mr. Chairman, I put it to you – and to the members of this Congress – that the motion and the rhetoric of Mr. Jackson continues to be very destructive. This Congress has been assembled with the goal of repairing the breach that exists in our country. Mr. Jackson seems to aim, each day, to widen that breach by his provocative statements and proposals. He seems to seek to transform this from an organization dedicated to the preservation of the country to one that seeks to destroy it. That I will not accept."

  Jackson leapt to his feet, seeking the Chair's recognition, which he momentarily received.

  "Mr. Chairman, I put it to you that the present establishment in Ottawa – through a process that began even before the Prime Minister's father took office – has already destroyed this country through their contempt for the people and the rights of the West, of their habitual efforts to deride and destroy the successful, and through their clear and seething hatred for the rights of the individual citizen. I can only thank God almighty that they have, at every turn, underestimated the fortitude and the will of the citizens of the West, as they have done in this case and as they shall do."

  "Events," the Solicitor-General explained to the Federal Cabinet on the 7th of June, "take on a logic of their own if Alberta votes for secession. The terms of the Clarity Act – though of course designed with Quebec in mind – are, if you do not mind the pun, very clear. From a legal standpoint, we would be obligated to negotiate for the separation of Alberta and British Columbia and Saskatchewan and any other region if they elected to do so."

  "And, gentlemen, I need not remind you," the Minister of Finance interjected, "that this country would be effectively bankrupt without the fiscal transfers that we receive from the West, and from Alberta in particular."

  "The reality is," the Leader of the New Democratic Party as well as the Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister added, "that, from a political standpoint, Alberta is the driver of this thing. If the polls are to be believed – and I think that they should be – then a majority of Albertans... a strong majority, in fact, favor separation as an alternate to resource revenue equalization. The same isn't true in the rest of the West. They might find narrow majorities if British Columbia and Saskatchewan were to vote on the issue today, but those would be transitory majorities. Yet, as the Solicitor-General pointed out, if Alberta goes it seems almost inevitable that the rest would be stampeded with them in the immediate aftermath."

  "We would do well to remember that there are something like four in ten Albertans who do not favor separation," added the Minister of National Revenue, the sole Albertan in the government Caucus.

  "It seems to me that what is required today is a cooling-off period," noted the Prime Minister.

  "Legally," the Solicitor-General said, "I think that we have the means to provide that."

  Jackson read the headline on the CBC's website and smiled.

  "Federal Government invokes Emergencies Act, Citing 'Irregularities' in Alberta Referendum Preparations."

  Specifically, as he continued to read, the Federal Government had – citing both the Emergencies Act and referencing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms – argued that Albertan voting laws that used a narrow definition of what constituted a legal resident of the province for the purposes of voting in the referendum continued a potential breach of human rights that had no available legal remedy save the resort to the terms of the Emergencies Act, including the dispatch of federal troops to the province to stop the Provincial Government from holding its vote.

  "Well King," he declared, as he looked across the table at his old friend, "I told you that this was going to be interesting."

  Howard Eagleton viewed the images from Edmonton with despair. The days when Federal soldiers had patrolled the streets of Montreal – then to counter terrorism – were nothing more than a dim memory from a distant youth. This was visceral and terrible. As sick as he felt, he had still agreed to meet with young William Jackson.

  The lawyer was smartly turned-out in a light-blue pinstriped double-breasted suit. He walked through the door of Eagleton's temporary office without a backwards glance.

  "Well, they've finally done it," Jackson boomed as he strode towards the desk.

  "Yes, and I fear that they have inflicted a fatal blow," Eagleton replied.

  "If any such blow has been inflicted by this act, it is upon their side, not ours," said Jackson.

  "How so?"

  "By resorting to force, they have given us the license to do the same - and they have vastly overestimated the strength of their own forces."

  "They have the whole of the Army and the police...," said Eagleton.

  "No," replied Jackson firmly, "they possess the command structure of those things, not the forces themselves. That is not the same thing."

  "It's enough. I've just been on the phone to Edmonton – unless they were to call for a civil uprising, they don't have anything to stop the Federal Government from marching right on in. I saw on the news that a few people refused to the orders to do it – and God bless them – but that's not enough."

  "No, that would not be enough. But we have other resourc
es."

  "Such as?" asked Eagleton.

  "You know who I am and what I've done," answered Jackson.

  "While everyone else here has been hoping for the best, I've been planning for the worst. I can put five hundred armed soldiers – most of them Special Forces veterans and many of them Canadians – onto the streets of Vancouver in the space of twenty-four hours. I can have two thousand soldiers here within a week and, from that point, we can begin to raise a larger force."

  "From where?"

  "Praetorian has forces around the world. In this case, we'll also be able to draw upon our men in the United States, until such a time as that flow is cut off. We have two ships in Vancouver harbor with enough weapons two equip two full infantry brigades. We could begin unloading that gear as soon as we have enough security on shore. We also have heavy weapons and aircraft that could be brought in. Also, of course, we ought to anticipate that a substantial portion of the Armed Forces will come over to our side."

  "And what do we do with all of this accumulated strength?"

  "Why, if we have to, we fight," Jackson evenly replied.

  The Board of Directors of Praetorian International was, of necessity, a secret group. Though the firm was nominally organized as a holding corporation registered in the Cayman Islands and though, in reality Praetorian was a creature controlled largely by Augustus King, as the private military company's work had increased it had become necessary to invite outsiders into the company for both their money and their connections.

  "This is a very dangerous business," one former Secretary of State fretted, "it has been one thing to use Praetorian as a private army in the Middle East and Africa. It is altogether another for it to be putting itself in a position where it may be fighting against a major Western power and a member of NATO at that."

  "Yes," agreed another director, this one a Hedge Fund Manager, "I don't see how this will not bring us into direct conflict with the government of the United States and thereby undermine the carefully crafted and wholly unspoken relationship that we have with them."