Howard Anglin: In defence of a loose Confederation in an age of separatism

As separatism burbles in two provinces, it's worth remembering how federalism in this country should, and should not, work

This piece is adapted from the second half of a keynote lecture given by the author at Cardus Exchange in Ottawa on May 7, 2026. Parts of that lecture were adapted from an earlier piece published at The Hub in 2021.

By: Howard Anglin

The common good is a universal goal that cannot be realized universally.

At best, that good can only ever express itself locally, among a specific people, in a specific time, and a specific place, and through social bonds among groups of people. Aristotle called this kind of social connection, which he believed was a precondition for a healthy social order, a “civil friendship.”

“Civil friendship” exists on a spectrum of social ties somewhere between the personal bonds of a family and the transactional bonds of a commercial enterprise — but closer to the family than to the corporation. A man might willingly die for his family or his country, but only a fool would die for corporation.

Let’s start there, with a discussion of Canadian federalism — what it is and ought to be, and where its proper limits lie. It’s a conversation made all the more urgent and real by talk in Alberta and Quebec of separation, of splitting our national polity for reasons that reduce to longstanding feelings of economic and cultural alienation.

Let’s start from first principles.

An intimate and vital relationship between and among the people of a polity is necessary to realize the common good in practice. But a society must also have natural limits that allow it to remain ordered. These limits are set by the practical limits of the civil friendship. We can and should love beyond our kin and beyond the kin of our kin, but at some point, the universe of potential love exceeds the practical reach of politics. The size of a self-governing polity properly conceived should be the largest social group to which we can effectively extend the condition of civil friendship.

This is in the first instance a practical limit. But this practical limit also has moral implications. Except under unusual circumstances, it is morally insulting to impose our political will on those with whom we do not share a social bond. To attempt to govern beyond the civil friendship of the polis is an insult to the stranger.

This is why the European Union’s commitment to “ever closer union” is so dangerous. Its goal is to break the bonds of civil friendship within nations by stretching them so far that they snap. It also presumes a power to govern strangers who do not have a say in, and do not see themselves reflected back in the vision of, a transnational government or a transnational court.

So, is the Canadian federation like the EU’s “ever closer union”? Is it also a dangerous and presumptive exercise of anti-civil authority? I would say no — so long as we respect the differences of the natural and evolved polities within its boundaries.

Where federalism works, it does not simply divide a state into smaller polities for ease of governance. It recognizes that in a large and diffuse state even people who share a common citizenship and a common legal constitution may be more or less strangers to each other.

I subscribe to the idea that a community is what you can walk across in a day, which in our constitutional order roughly corresponds to a municipality. But given all that we expect of government today, that is far too small a unit for effective self-government. Provinces make possible in a large and sprawling country like ours what Roger Scruton has called “[t]he politics of the first person plural.” The “we” in “we the people.” They allow for the creation of stable units within the larger and inevitably less stable unit of the country.

Orders within order, producing greater order.

Canadian federalism is a policy much older than either official bilingualism, official multiculturalism, or the Charter — three other ways we’ve tried to accommodate social difference within our country. It was born out of the need to accommodate regional differences that were acknowledged as real — and probably intractable — long before Confederation.

From the beginning, federalism has been a way to reassure diverse parts of the country that they will not be dominated by a single cultural or economic vision driven by the most populous and electorally powerful provinces.

Remember that Prince Edward Island, despite being the site of the 1864 Charlottetown Convention, refused to join Confederation just three years later in 1867. The reason, as its premier Edward Palmer said at the time, was: “We would submit our rights and our prosperity, in a measure, into the hands of the general government and our voice in the united Parliament would be very insignificant.”

Whether it was the “little islanders” of PEI or the linguistically and religiously distinct French Canadians, Canadian federalism has, from the beginning, been a response to the fear of domination.

Federalism is thus not a solution to our regional differences and divisions — it was never meant to be — but a recognition of them.

This means that the constitutional function of the province today is not solely legal and political; it is also social. It helps cohere distinct regional identities that are partly real and partly mythopoetic, identities that self-imposed until they become social facts.

You can say that there is more that we have in common as Canadians than there is that divides us, and you would be right. But that does not deny that the divisions and differences that do exist are real. A functioning federalism would not just acknowledge these differences, it would respect them.

Unfortunately, the opposite has happened. Pace Mark Carney, for too long we have been too European in this respect.

Over time, Ottawa has arrogated to itself more and more power over provincial matters. From health-care policy to the federal carbon tax to recent childcare, dental, and pharmaceutical mandates, Ottawa has taken on, and taken over, the proper role of provincial governments. This is not healthy, and it is not how federalism is supposed to work.

One of the most eloquent recent statements against this centralizing tendency came from the Alberta Court of Appeals in its decision striking down the federal carbon tax. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice Cathy Fraser admonished that:

“Time has not eroded the provinces’ rights to have the powers assigned to them under our Constitution sedulously respected. While some may view the division of powers as anachronistic or a barrier to uniform action … the division of powers remains key to our federal state. It is part of the fabric of Canada itself. … The federal government is not the parent; and the provincial governments are not its children.”

An earlier defence of federalism came from, of all people, Pierre Trudeau. In a 1957 essay Trudeau surprised his readers by siding with Maurice Duplessis against Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent’s decision to provide funds to provincial universities.

In words that would make a libertarian economist’s heart flutter, Trudeau wrote that: “if a government has at its disposal such a surplus of funds that it can undertake to support a part of the common good that does not lie within its jurisdiction, one may suspect that this government controls more than its share of taxation.”

Trudeau returned to the theme in a later essay titled, “The Practice and Theory of Federalism.” “Since regionalisms do exist in Canada,” he posited, “such feelings should be exploited to further the cause of democracy: each community might enter into a state of healthy competition with the others in order to have better ‘self-government.’”

More recently, Carl Vallé described Stephen Harper’s successful accommodation of Quebec’s desire for provincial autonomy as “dictated by conservative logic: we believed it was the best way to make such a large and diverse country with competing regional interests’ function.”

Note, this constitutional defence of federalism is different from the related idea that federal systems create “laboratories of democracy” in which provinces can test different economic and social policies, with the others eventually adopting those that prove most successful. The goal of provincial difference should not be national convergence.

True federalism assumes that different provinces may — and, in fact, must — choose different ways of achieving the common good that are suited to their culture and their circumstances and not to others. The virtue of federalism is not that it allows for policy experimentation, although it does, but that it does not impose a single prescription for good government on a diverse country.

Federalism is our best hope for reconciling our national differences because it is the best way of respecting those differences. Of respecting the mutuality of civil affection within each provincial polity and of allowing those polities to respect each other in turn.

True federalism is not incompatible with a strong federal government, but it reminds us that a strong federal government need not be a large or intrusive federal government. Ottawa can be strong in the areas where it needs to defend our country’s national interests, like defence and foreign policy. And although I would transfer the criminal law power to the provinces, Ottawa would still be free to use its legitimate constitutional powers to address truly national matters and emergencies. Otherwise, it should leave the provinces to govern themselves.

If this all sounds like a rather stiff and formal arrangement, and possibly a sterile one, I would like to make the case that it is in fact the makings of a love story.

The title of Hugh MacLennan’s classic Canadian novel, Two Solitudes, is taken from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. In one of his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke wrote that: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” That is one translation of Rilke’s notoriously elusive style, but there are others.

Mary Herter Norton’s 1934 translation rendered the line as: “The love that consists in this: that two solitudes protect and border and salute each other.” And in 1945, the year MacLennan published his novel, Reginald Snell translated it as: “The love which consists in the mutual guarding, bordering and saluting of two solitudes.”

There are subtle differences here: “protecting” is not quite the same as “mutual guarding”; “touching” sounds rather different than “bordering”; and “greeting” sounds more friendly and mutual than “saluting.” But all the variations have this in common: love both depends upon, and must accommodate, natural differences.

Love is the recognition of another person as someone who deserves to be loved as themself, just as you would want to be loved as yourself.

This idea is obviously related to Kant’s insistence that we treat others as ends in themselves and not as means to our own ends. Love is not instrumental, it is selfless — it does not demand that your beloved change to fit your idea of them, even if you think that you have their best interests at heart and are sure you know what would be best for them.

The same idea is expressed in the idea of love, or true friendship, that Aquinas describes in his discussion of caritas in Book II of the Summa Theologica. The philosopher John Finnis, summarizes it this way:

“In friendship one is not thinking and choosing ‘from one’s own point of view’, nor from one’s friend’s point of view. Rather, one is acting from a third point of view, the unique perspective from which one’s own good and one’s friend’s good are equally ‘in view’ and ‘in play’.”

Moving back from friendship to federalism, love — caritas — means not imposing one vision of Canada on all regions. It means not asking why other parts of the country can’t be more like yours, like Henry Higgins wondering, stupidly, “Why can’t a woman be more like a man?” Nor does it mean wishing that other parts of the country would become more like your idea of what would be best for them.

Self-government is a never-ending process of decision, debate, reflection, revision, rejection, and new decisions. It is the process that constitutes the act of making and being a society. To pre-empt this process, to take away a province’s process of self-government, is a denial of its dignity and the right of its people to self-determination within their subsidiary sphere. Such presumption is the opposite of love.

With a much more complex Canada today than the “Two Solitudes” we struggled to reconcile for the first century after Confederation, I submit that a federalism that embraces the original idea of subsidiarity (not primarily a practical matter but as a principle of natural justice) is our best hope for realizing something close to the idea of love, caritas, within a sprawling country of regions, and the best way for the people of each province to achieve the civil friendship that is a precondition for the realization of the common good.

This view has sometimes been disparaged as a vision of a “loose confederation”. Pierre Trudeau often used that phrase pejoratively. To which I would respond, what is wrong with a loose confederation?

Where critics see looseness as national instability or fragility, I see suppleness and flexibility — a play in the constitutional joints that allows for ease of movement, adaptation, and adjustment.

It is a fixed and brittle constitutional rigidity that we should fear. And goodness knows we have more than enough of that in Canada already. The last thing we need is to compound the problem by imposing uniform social strictures in the free spaces still left between the textual walls of our sclerotic legal Constitution.

It has always been the case in our country that, to be well-ordered federally, Canada must be well-ordered provincially. That is as true now as it has ever been.

We should be especially enthusiastic to promote the conditions of social solidarity and civil friendship where the scale of government is most amenable, and the natural commonality of interests is strongest: in our provinces.

And at all costs, we must resist the cultural and social straitjacket that tightens every time provincial policy is dictated by those whose view of Canada extends no further than what can be seen from the windows of the Rideau Club.

Howard Anglin was deputy chief of staff to prime minister Stephen Harper, Principal Secretary to premier Jason Kenney, and is currently a doctoral candidate in constitutional law at the University of Oxford.

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