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Ainsi, dans les mots restés célèbres de l'Acte de l'Amérique du Nord britannique, notre première Constitution, le but de notre union politique est « la paix, l'ordre et le bon gouvernement », ce qui tranche avec la vision de Jefferson, axée sur « la vie, la liberté et la recherche du bonheur ». Toutes les traditions politiques, y compris celles de nos voisins du Sud, doivent trouver le juste équilibre entre la liberté, l'ordre, la libre entreprise et l'intervention gouvernementale.
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This tradition gives a significantly different inflection to our democratic values. Thus in the famous words of the British North America Act, our first constitution, we define the purpose of our political union as “peace, order and good government”, in explicit contrast to the Jeffersonian vision of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”. All political traditions, including those to the south of us, have to balance liberty and order, free enterprise and government action. We balance with the belief that freedom without order risks violence and liberty without government action risks injustice and inequality. These commitments, first articulated in the BNA Act, remain anchored in our Charter. There are deep historical reasons why we have chosen to give this weighting to our primary political values. A heterogeneous population, without common myths of origin, thinly spread across 5000 miles of inhospitable terrain, has good reason to believe that what holds political community together is honest, responsive, decentralized and democratic government. A country with a relatively small domestic market has learned that it cannot leave the creation of a common infrastructure to the market alone: government must work with business to create the public goods that make a country cohere. Finally, a people with two languages and a rich heritage of aboriginal and immigrant tongues, knows that we are held together not by common myths of origin or shared ethnic or religious roots, but by political institutions –– Parliaments, provincial legislatures, courts, political parties and a free press –– and by the political creed enshrined in our Charter.
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