Popular Sovereignty, Locke's Famous Acknowledgment of the Right of Revolution, and the Fathers of Canadian Confederation

Popular sovereignty has a more radical dimension: "The people" can withdraw their "original consent"; they can reject Parliament as their representative; they can reject the very idea of government. Locke famously acknowledges the right of revolution. It is true that he would allow recourse to revolution only after--in the well-known phrase--"a long train of Abuses." But he does not deny the right. All legitimate government rests on the consent of the people. When the people no longer consent, the government is no longer legitimate.

It is said that the Fathers of Canadian Confederation were unfamiliar with the notion of popular sovereignty or deliberately ignored it. Just as they were not inclined to philosophy, so they did not ponder questions of "original consent," let alone the "right of revolution." Thus Peter Russell argues that the Fathers regarded popular sovereignty as "heresy": "The idea that a constitution to be legitimate must be derived from the people [was] a dreadful heresy." He continues: "at Canada's founding its people were not sovereign, and there was not even a sense that a constituent sovereign people would have to be invented."

But consider these statements from the debates on Confederation in the colonial legislatures, the "ratification" debates: "[T]he people [are] the only rightful source of all political power" (James O'Halloran in the Canadian Legislative Assembly); "The principle which lies at the foundation of our constitution is that which declares the people to be the source of political power" (William Lawrence in the Nova Scotia House of Assembly); "[The] only way in which the constitution of a free, intelligent, and independent people can be changed at all is by revolution or the consent of the people" (William Gilbert in the New Brunswick Assembly). Note Gilbert's reference to "revolution." All the legislators see themselves as revolutionaries of a sort. They are considering whether to break with the old regime and institute a new one. As ratifiers of the new, they are being asked to say "yea" or "nay" to the old. Joseph Cauchon put the matter this way: "That which is going on at the present moment before our eyes is neither more nor less than a revolution, a bloodless one if you will, but as complete a revolution in ideas and things as if we had reached it by the spilling of blood."

In Prince Edward Island, Alexander Laird argued that the population of the Red River colony had "every right" to rebel against being "literally sold" to the Dominion of Canada. Red River was annexed by Canada in 1870, entering Confederation as the province of Manitoba. The transfer of a people from one government to another without its consent is perhaps the archetypal offence against popular sovereignty.

--Janet Ajzenstat, The Canadian Founding: John Locke and Parliament, McGill-Queen's Studies in the History of Ideas 44 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007), 23-25.