A Renewal of the Loyalist Tradition
Dominion Loyalist is a project to recover and renew the constitutional inheritance of Canada — its Crown, its Parliament, and the British North American tradition that predates the ideological parties of the present age. We hold that this inheritance is not merely historical, but politically urgent.
Arms of Canada
Papers & Essays
Further papers forthcoming.
This repository is presently in preparation.
Principles
The Crown
Constitutional monarchy is not ornamental. The Crown is the source of executive authority, the guarantor of parliamentary sovereignty, and the surest bulwark against elected despotism.
Parliament
The House of Commons derives its authority from the people and must remain supreme over both the executive and the judiciary. Responsible government — the confidence convention — is the animating principle of our democracy.
The Common Law
Canada's constitution is not only what is written. The unwritten principles — parliamentary privilege, the rule of law, constitutional conventions — are as binding as any statute, and as worthy of defence.
Confederation
The Confederation bargain of 1867 recognized the diversity of the Dominion. Provincial autonomy is not an obstacle to national unity but its precondition.
Continuity
Reform, where it is necessary, proceeds through the precedents of the constitutional order — not against them. We are suspicious of revolutionary change and of ideological systems imported from abroad.
Disposition, Not Doctrine
We take our bearings from Burke, not from a programme. Ours is a disposition — sceptical of abstraction, attentive to circumstance, patient with what has proven durable — not an ideology to be applied uniformly. We judge a policy by whether it fits the inherited constitution and the temper of the people, not by its conformity to an imported creed of the left or the right.
Dominion Loyalist publishes original scholarship on the constitutional foundations of Canada — the nature of the Crown, the powers of Parliament, the role of vice-regal prerogative, and the inheritance of the common law and Westminster tradition.
The papers collected here are offered in the conviction that the Canadian constitution is not a mere statute but a living inheritance — one that demands careful study and vigorous defence. But this project is more than an archive. It is the beginning of a political argument: that Canada deserves a politics rooted in its own tradition, distinct from the ideological imports that presently dominate both the Conservative and Liberal parties.
Ours is a Burkean conservatism: a disposition rather than a doctrine. We do not begin from first principles or five-point programmes, and we do not mistake ideology — of the left or of the right — for statesmanship. We ask, in each case, what the inherited constitution and the prudence of experience actually require, not what an imported system prescribes. This is not a call to stand still; it is a call to change carefully, in continuity with what came before.
The loyalist tradition — High Tory, constitutionalist, sceptical of American influence — has not had a serious political home since the old Progressive Conservative party was absorbed into something else entirely. Dominion Loyalist intends to change that: not merely as an archive of ideas, but, in time, as the seed of one.