Non Constitutional Renewal

The 1997 volume in the Canada: The State of the Federation series explores the theme of non-constitutional change. Contributors assess the progress of federal and provincial governments in renewing the federation through means other than constitutional change.Keith Banting (Queen's) deals with the lessons learned from the decline of the post-World War II social union, John Richards (Simon Fraser) lays out three propositions for a successful social union, and Harvey Lazar (Queen's) documents and analyses recent changes in the federal strategy toward the social union. Robert Knox (former executive director of the Internal Trade Secretariat) reviews progress on implementation of the Internal Trade Agreement. Patrick Fafard (Queen's) and Audrey Doerr (former official at Indian and Northern Affairs) focus on federal-provincial relations pertaining to environmental and Aboriginal issues respectively. Rejean Pelletier (Laval) analyses whether the change from Parizeau to Bouchard has affected Quebec's positions on non-constitutional files, Roger Gibbins (Calgary) explains factors that helped the government of Alberta become so influential in the intergovernmental arena in recent years, and Sid Noel (Western) looks at Ontario's radical refashioning of its approach to intergovernmental relations. Rob Howse (Toronto) analyses how the non-constitutional focuses fit well with the need to blend a community of association (Canada) with the different communities of identity that exist within Canadian borders. Harvey Lazar, in an introductory essay, provides an overall report card on the renewal process.

From 1960 to 1982 Barry L. Strayer was instrumental in the design of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the patriation of Canada's Constitution. Here Dr. Strayer shares his experiences as a key legal advisor with a clear, personal voice that yields an insightful contribution to Canadian history and political memoir. He discusses the personal philosophies of Pierre Trudeau and F.R. Scott in addition to his meticulous accounts of the events and people involved in Canada's constitutional reform, and the consequences of that reform, which reveal that it was truly a revolution. This is an accessible primary source for experts and non-specialists interested in constitutional history studies, political history of patriation and The Charter, interpretation of The Charter, and the nature of judicial review.

In October 1999, some fifteen academic experts and government practitio ners from Germany and North America gathered for two days at the Uni ver sity of Augsburg to discuss the topic of "Constitutional Reform and Consti tutional Jurisprudence in Canada and the United States." The present volume documents the results of that conference, a collaborative effort of the De partment of Political Science, University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, and the Institute for Canadian Studies, University of Augsburg. In organizing this workshop, we were guided by two basic sets of ideas and assumptions: First, all "established" democracies are regularly confron ted with the need to adjust their constitutional order to changes in their envi ronment lest democratic stability be transformed into rigidity; in many wes tern nations, including Canada and the United States, developments such as the crisis of the Keynesian welfare-state or the emergence of increasingly heterogeneous, postmodern societies have ushered in an era of heightened, yet not always successful constitutional reform activity. Secondly, however, there is no unique path towards, or model of, an "optimal" constitutional order, however defined; rather, constitutional reform processes, their under Iying normative principles and their outcomes are strongly path and context dependent. Therefore, the participants of the workshop and authors of this volume were asked to examine the specific preconditions, context, nature and impact of recent constitutional reform processes in the Uni ted States and Canada.

The Canadian Senate has long been considered an institutional pariah, viewed as an undemocratic, outmoded warehouse for patronage appointments and mired in spending and workload scandals. In 2014, the federal government was compelled to refer constitutional questions to the Supreme Court relating to its attempts to enact senatorial elections and term limits. Constitutional Pariah explores the aftermath of Reference re Senate Reform, which barred major unilateral alteration of the Senate by Parliament. Ironically, the decision resulted in one of the most sweeping parliamentary reforms in Canadian history, creating a pathway to informal changes in the appointments process that have curbed patronage and partisanship. Despite reinvigorating the Senate, Reference re Senate Reform has far-reaching implications for constitutional reform in other contexts. Macfarlane’s sharp critique suggests that the Court’s nebulous approach to the amending formula raises the spectre of a frozen constitution, unable to evolve with the country.