The Convention Bill: The Contemporary Record

ALCOTT: We’re going to the House of Commons, where in a few moments a backbencher from the Dakotas is going to ask leave to bring in a bill to replace the Charter. Not to amend it. To replace it. Delia, how seriously should anyone take this?

MORENO: Stephen, under the ten-minute rule, the honest answer is not very, and that’s the point of it. He gets ten minutes, one member gets to answer him, and then the House decides whether he can bring the bill in, which it usually does without bothering to vote, because a ten-minute rule bill goes to the back of a queue that never moves. What makes this one different is the date. Yesterday the Dakotas voted for a new constitution by fifty-three per cent. Joseph Many Horses is a Dakotas member. He has been on the phone, I’m told, since about six this morning.

ALCOTT: And the Crown?

MORENO: Stays. He’s been very clear about that, and I think you’ll hear him be clear about it in the first sentence. The Speaker is calling him now.

THE SPEAKER: Mr Joseph Many Horses.

MANY HORSES: Mr Speaker, I beg to move that leave be given to bring in a bill to provide for a convention to draft a new Charter of Union, and to put that Charter to the people under Article XVII; and for connected purposes.

I will start where my bill starts, which is with the King. His Majesty has reigned for nine days. He is fifteen. Six weeks ago this House sat while the Realm did not know whether his father was alive, and in October we found that the Charter could not tell us who might act for a King who could not act, and that we had to ask Westminster to pass a Regency Act and the Queen to come here as his delegate. We managed. We managed because people of good will made it up as they went along, and they made it up well. I do not want to have to rely on that again. I want the next young King to find his place, and ours, written down.

Yesterday the people of the Dakotas voted for a new constitution. Their Supreme Court had told them, four years ago, that the old one was no longer a constitution a citizen could read and know what it required. They believed it. They spent three years writing a new one, in plain words, and yesterday they adopted it, and I am proud that I helped, in a small way, the nations who sat at that table.

Mr Speaker, our Charter does not mention the Prime Minister. It does not mention the Cabinet. It does not say that a ministry must hold the confidence of this House, which is the first rule of our whole government. It does not say what the Governor-General may do on her own judgment and what she may not. We know these things because we have agreed them, generation after generation, and nobody has ever written them down. A schoolchild in Sioux Falls can read the Dakotas’ constitution and find out who governs her. She cannot do that with the Charter.

My bill would set up a convention. Two hundred citizens chosen by lot, as juries are, from every part of the Realm, and fifty members of this House and the other place, with a committee of lawyers to hold the pen and no vote. The convention would be free to propose anything at all, except the Crown, which my bill places outside its reach in the first section. It could write in the premiership and the confidence rule. It could look at the absolute veto of the other place over this Charter, which no elected House can answer. It could write in what the Dakotas wrote, that the treaty nations are governments of their own. It could take the rights this House enacted in the Rights Act and put them where no ordinary statute can reach them.

And then, Mr Speaker, Parliament would put the convention’s Charter to the people under Article XVII, as one amendment, with the double majority, on a day of its own, and that amendment would carry over the entrenched core of the old Charter word for word, because those words are the best words we have. I am told that a Charter whose supremacy cannot be amended cannot be replaced. I answer that it would not be: the new Charter would be supreme in exactly the words the old one is.

The last time this Realm amended its Charter was in 1989, when it agreed that the treaties with the nations should be read as the nations understood them. It was right. It has not had the nerve to touch the text since. I ask the House for leave to give it the chance.

THE SPEAKER: The question is that leave be given. Does any member wish to oppose? Mr Dale Ambrister.

MORENO: Stephen, that’s the leader of the Opposition. Party leaders do not do this. I’ve never seen it.

AMBRISTER: Mr Speaker, I have spent twelve years in this place saying that the political class has taken the Realm away from the people who own it, and the honourable member has given me the most perfect illustration of it I have ever had. A convention. Two hundred people chosen by a machine, and fifty of us, to sit in a room and write us a new constitution. We know which fifty it would be.

This Parliament was elected in a hung result. It is governed by an agreement no voter saw before it was signed. It has a Prime Minister nobody voted for, sitting among the hereditary peers. And this is the Parliament that proposes to reopen the covenant the people of this Realm made with their Crown in 1783? I think not. The Charter is not ours to replace. It belongs to the people and the King, and the King is fifteen. Leave it alone.

THE SPEAKER: The question is that leave be given. As many as are of that opinion, say aye. Of the contrary, no. Division. Clear the lobbies.

ALCOTT: So there will be a vote.

MORENO: There will be a vote, which nobody planned for, on a ten-minute rule bill, which is almost unheard of. The ministry’s members are free; under the Heads of Agreement this isn’t the ministry’s business. I’m watching the LSDP front bench, and they are staying in their seats. That’s an abstention, Stephen. They’re not going through either lobby.

ALCOTT: And Alternative for the Realm will vote with their leader?

MORENO: You would think so. I’m looking at the Aye lobby door, and I can see at least three AfR members going into it. One of them is Wade Carrick. That’s Ambrister’s deputy.

ALCOTT: Going in to vote for the bill.

MORENO: Going in to vote for leave for the bill, against his own leader, on the first division his leader has forced in this Parliament. I’m going to stop talking until the tellers come back.

THE SPEAKER: Order. The Ayes to the right, two hundred and fourteen. The Noes to the left, seventy-one. So the Ayes have it, the Ayes have it. Who will prepare and bring in the bill?

MANY HORSES: Myself, Mr Thomas Winslow, Mr Simon Hartwell, Ms Maren Lindqvist, and Mr Wade Carrick.

MORENO: Stephen, read that list again in your head. A Lakota Labour member from the Dakotas. The longest-serving Conservative backbencher in the House. The Liberal Federal Democrats’ Charter spokesman. A Green from Cascadia. And the deputy leader of Alternative for the Realm.

A Bill to provide for a Convention to draft a new Charter of Union, to keep the Crown, and to provide for the Convention’s Charter to be put to the people under Article XVII of the Charter.

1. The Crown. Nothing in this Act authorises the Convention to propose any change to the Crown, to the succession to the Crown, or to the style of the King.

2. The Convention. There shall be a Charter Convention of two hundred citizens chosen by lot from the rolls of electors, in numbers proportionate to the population of each polity but with at least one from each polity, the Columbia District and the Territory of Loreto; and fifty members of the two Houses, thirty-five chosen by the House of Commons and fifteen by the House of Lords, in proportion to the parties and groups in each.

3. The drafting committee. The Convention shall appoint a drafting committee of twelve lawyers, who may attend and speak but shall not vote.

4. Remit. The Convention shall draft a Charter of Union for the United Kingdom of America, and may propose any provision it thinks fit, subject to section 1.

5. The entrenched core. The Convention’s Charter shall reproduce, in the words of the Charter of 1783, the representative character of Parliament, the supremacy of the Charter, the due course of law and the lawful liberties of the people, and shall place them beyond amendment.

6. Report. The Convention shall report its Charter within two years of its first sitting.

7. Submission. Within six months of the report, a Minister of the Crown shall lay before Parliament a bill to give effect to the Convention’s Charter as a single amendment under Article XVII.

ALCOTT: Delia, a bill nobody expected to be voted on has been voted on, and passed its first stage by a hundred and forty-three. Who have you got?

MORENO: I’ve got the oldest Tory in the building, Stephen. Thomas Winslow has sat for Cape Cod and the Islands, in Plymouth, since before some of the pages were born, and he was a soldier before that. Mr Winslow, you’re a Conservative and Crown Union member backing a Labour member’s bill to replace the Charter. Your whips must be delighted.

WINSLOW: My whips have been delighted with me on perhaps four occasions in thirty years, and this is not going to be the fifth. Look. I am a monarchist. I have served the Crown in uniform and in this House for most of my life. And I have just watched a boy of fifteen become King under a Charter that does not say what a King is for, what his Governor-General may do on his behalf, or who decides when he cannot act. We found out in October. We found out by improvising. The young King deserves a Charter that says what the Crown is, and what we owe it, in words a schoolchild can read. That is the most conservative thing I have ever proposed.

MORENO: Your party’s leadership says the Charter’s silence about the premiership is its strength.

WINSLOW: My party’s leadership is entitled to its opinion, and it will find that I have voted for its opinion very many times. Not today.

MORENO: Mr Hartwell, the Liberal Federal Democrats. You’re the party’s Charter spokesman, and I’m told you carry a draft confidence clause in your pocket.

HARTWELL: I do. This is the fifth version. I wrote the first in 2012, when I was still teaching constitutional law at Albany and had never stood for anything. It’s one sentence. “The Governor-General shall commission as Prime Minister the person who commands the confidence of the House of Commons, and the Ministry holds office while it holds that confidence.” That’s the whole of how we are governed, and it isn’t in the Charter. My leader has said this afternoon, at the despatch box, that the ministry has no time for it. She has also said, as my leader, that we’ve argued for it for forty years. Both are true.

MORENO: Ms Lindqvist, you sit for a Cascadian seat for the Greens.

LINDQVIST: Cascadia has had the citizens’ initiative since 1908. We have amended our own constitution by petition more times than I can count, and the sky has stayed up. If Cascadia can do it, the Realm can sit two hundred people in a room and ask them to draft something. And I want the environment in it. The Dakotas wrote it into theirs yesterday. It’s the twenty-first century. The Charter is from the eighteenth.

MORENO: Your party’s minister for the treaty nations, Lena Whitefeather, was in the chamber for the speech. She hasn’t said anything.

LINDQVIST: She’s a minister. Ministers don’t. She was there.

MORENO: And the gentleman some yards to my left, whom nobody else has stood next to all afternoon. Mr Carrick, you’re the deputy leader of Alternative for the Realm, and you’ve just voted against your leader in his first division of this Parliament.

CARRICK: I voted for leave for a bill. That’s all I did.

MORENO: Your leader said it would be the political class writing itself a new constitution.

CARRICK: My leader founded this party, and I followed him out of the Conservative and Crown Union in 2016, and I’d do it again. But the party was founded on the idea that the people had nowhere to go. Here’s somewhere. A convention can look at the double majority, which lets twenty-five small polities stop what the Realm wants, and at a House of Lords that can veto the Charter and that nobody elected. Those are our causes. They’ve been our causes for twelve years. Somebody’s offered us a room to make the case in, and I’m not going to refuse to go in because of who opened the door.

MORENO: Have you spoken to Mr Ambrister?

CARRICK: Not yet.

MORENO: Stephen, that “not yet” is the most important thing anybody has said in this lobby this afternoon.

ALCOTT: Joseph Many Horses, three hours ago you asked for leave to bring in a bill to replace the Charter. The House gave it to you by two hundred and fourteen to seventy-one, and the Prime Minister has just said in the Lords that the question deserves an answer. Did you expect any of that?

MANY HORSES: I expected to make a speech to about forty people and go home. I did not expect the leader of the Opposition, and I certainly did not expect his deputy.

ALCOTT: Let me start with the hardest question I have, because it’s the one my producers say people are asking. Your nation’s land in the Black Hills was taken under the Crown. It was taken by a March, under the Crown’s Lord Warden. Why would a Lakota lawyer want to keep the Crown?

MANY HORSES: Because the treaties were made with the Crown. Not with this Parliament, not with the polities, not with the Prime Minister. With the Crown. The Crown broke them, and the Crown is the party we hold to them. When the Fourteenth Amendment said in 1989 that our treaties must be read as our nations understood them, it was the Crown’s word it was reading. The nations have never asked to lose their other party. We’ve asked for it to keep its word. A republic would be a stranger to our treaties. The King is not.

ALCOTT: You know that some people will hear “replace the Charter” and think “republic by stages”.

MANY HORSES: Then they haven’t read section one of my bill, which puts the Crown outside the convention’s reach. I don’t know how to be clearer than a section one.

ALCOTT: Here’s the lawyers’ question. Article XVII.8 says no amendment shall abolish “the supremacy of this Charter”. You want to replace it. How can you replace a document whose supremacy can’t be abolished?

MANY HORSES: By keeping its supremacy. The new Charter would carry over the entrenched words, the representative character of Parliament, the supremacy of the Charter, the due course of law, the lawful liberties of the people, exactly as they stand. It would be supreme in the same words. What changes is everything the old Charter never said. I’ve had four lawyers tell me that works and three tell me it doesn’t, which in my profession is a majority.

ALCOTT: Why a convention? Why not just propose amendments, one at a time, the way the Charter has always been changed?

MANY HORSES: Because it’s been changed fourteen times in two hundred and forty-five years, and not once since 1989, and every one of those changes was the one thing a generation could agree on. You can’t write down how you’re governed one clause at a time. The Prime Minister, the Cabinet, confidence, the Governor-General’s powers, they fit together, and they have to be written together, by people who sit down to do nothing else. Iceland wrote a constitution with people who weren’t lawyers. The Dakotas did it with a historian, nine nations and a teachers’ union. We can do it with two hundred citizens and fifty of us.

ALCOTT: And a million signatures.

MANY HORSES: And a million signatures. The Charter lets the people propose an amendment by petition, if Parliament says how many. Parliament said a million in 1919, after the temperance amendment, which was proposed by petition and which everybody has regretted since. Nobody has got a million since. We launch the petition tonight. Ruth Olson, who’s a civics teacher in Sioux Falls and sat on the Dakotas commission, is going to make the first speech, because she’s the one who asked me the question.

ALCOTT: Which question?

MANY HORSES: She asked me where the Prime Minister is in the Charter. I said he isn’t. She said, well then.

ALCOTT: Last one. The ministry’s business is fixed by the Heads of Agreement. Your own party is in that ministry and abstained this afternoon. The bill won’t be reached in March. What’s the realistic outcome?

MANY HORSES: The realistic outcome is that a great many people find out tonight that the Charter doesn’t mention the Prime Minister, and some of them decide they mind. The rest is up to them.

BARROW: Good evening. Two hundred thousand people have signed a petition for a new Charter in three hours. The campaign launched at eight o’clock tonight, a few streets from Parliament, after the House of Commons gave leave this afternoon to a bill for a constitutional convention keeping the Crown. The petition needs a million signatures to propose an amendment under the Charter, and has two years to find them. Delia Moreno is outside the hall. Delia, two hundred thousand.

MORENO: Naomi, two hundred and four thousand, when I last looked at the screen inside, and it was still moving. To put that in some context, the Charter Petitions Act has been on the books since 1919, and the clerks tell me no petition under it has passed a hundred thousand in its first month in living memory. These people did twice that between eight and eleven, on a Thursday night in November. There are about eight hundred people out here who couldn’t get into the hall, and a good number of them have been signing paper sheets on the bonnets of cars.

BARROW: Who spoke?

MORENO: The first speaker was a schoolteacher from Sioux Falls, Ruth Olson, who sat on the commission that wrote the Dakotas’ constitution, and I think she’s the reason a lot of these people are standing in the cold. We recorded it.

OLSON: [recorded] I teach civics. Every September I hand my seniors the Charter, and the first thing I ask them to do is find the Prime Minister. They look for twenty minutes. Some of them read it twice. And then one of them puts her hand up and says, Mrs Olson, he isn’t in here. And I say, that’s right. And she says, then how do we know he’s allowed?

[laughter]

I want to read you two things. The first is from our Supreme Court in the Dakotas, four years ago. It said our old constitution was “no longer a constitution a citizen of this State can read and know what it requires”. We fixed that. Yesterday. The second is Article IV of the Charter of Union, and I’ll read you all of the part about who runs the government, which won’t take long. [pause] That’s it. That’s the part. There isn’t any more.

So I’ll ask you what I ask my seniors. Where is the Prime Minister?

[the hall: “He isn’t in here.”]

MORENO: That’s the chant, Naomi. “He isn’t in here.” They’ve been doing it all evening.

BARROW: We also have a poll tonight.

MORENO: We do. The ABC asked a polling company to telephone about a thousand people this evening, which is a rough instrument, and they’re the first to say so. Asked whether they would support a convention to write a new Charter keeping the Crown, forty-six per cent said yes, thirty-four per cent no, and twenty per cent didn’t know. I’ll be honest, Naomi, that surprised us more than the petition did. Nobody has polled the question in years, and nobody expected a plurality for it.

BARROW: And the Palace?

MORENO: Grace Ebanks has been at Columbia Palace all day, and the Palace has said nothing, which is what it is required to do. A Palace that commented on a proposal to rewrite the Charter would be taking part in the argument, and the Queen, who is acting as Regent for His Majesty, will not do that. Grace says the only sign of the day at the Palace gates tonight was a handwritten placard somebody had tied to the railings. It said: “God save the King. Write it down.”

BARROW: Delia Moreno, outside the hall. The bill is set down for second reading on the sixteenth of March. The petition count, as we come off air, is two hundred and eleven thousand.