Serving God and Neighbour

By Jason Kenney

May 18, 2018

Speaking to a Cardus-sponsored event in Calgary on Thursday evening, United Conservative Party leader Jason Kenney highlighted the 1774 Quebec Act, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, the AIDS crisis of the 1980s, refugee resettlement, the Canada Summer Jobs program, and the mileage on his Dodge Ram pickup as sources for his renewed vision for Canadian conservatism within liberal democracy.

Now following what our French Canadian friends called Le Conquête, the conquest of New France, the British Crown imposed through the Royal Proclamation an assimilationist policy, an effort to rub out the differences in the former French colony, to marginalize the exercise of the Catholic faith, to prevent Catholics from obtaining public office, to suppress the French Civil Code and all of those institutions of civil society which the Church had created: the first school in North America, a result of the good works of Catholic nuns in Quebec City, Le Ursulines; the first hospital in North America, again, in the Quebec colon; he first social welfare programs starting the great tradition that Pat Nixon personifies started by people of faith in that church For Kuyper, the government could satisfy the common good alone only if all that we had in common was that we were subject to the same government, but we have as people many higher and prior bonds to the community, to communities beginning with the first community, as Aristotle called it, the family, and including our communities of faith, of commerce, of culture, of common purpose But as one of our great constitutional scholars, Donald Creighton demonstrated in his 1939 submission to the Royal Commission on Dominion-Provincial Relations, he found that the phrase peace, order and good government encompassed not merely the limited modern idea of government as the State, but of good governance, which includes the healthy division of responsibilities between the State and civil society, the latter of which has an important, even essential role to play in a well- functioning, well-ordered society The same people who could not serve the common good prior to 1774 in Quebec because they would not take an oath renouncing the faith, would they qualify today for the Canada Summer Jobs Program? Would Rachael Harder, MP for Lethbridge, who was barred from chairing a parliamentary committee because of her convictions rooted in her faith, is her experience returning to the sentiments that governed the northern half of North America prior to the Quebec Act in 1774?  Let me begin by the title I've been given, which is Peace, Order and Good Government, of course, the defining theme of the British North America Act, Canada's original Constitution Act Creighton concluded that "Good government referred to good public administration, on the one hand, but also had echoes  what we now talk of as good governance, which incorporates the notion of appropriate self-governance by civil society actors, since one element of good government was thought to be its limitation to its appropriate sphere of responsibility I was proud as immigration minister to expand the Private-Sponsored Refugee Program and here's a perfect example of what I'm talking about: the power of civil society in producing good social outcomes versus often those of the bureaucratic state because we have what's called a government-assisted refugee program

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