Disruptions: Constitutional Struggles, from the Charter to Meech Lake

Andrew Thomson is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of
Guelph.

Cairns is a political scientist from the University of British Columbia
who has written often, and well, on constitutional questions in Canada.
This book is a collection of articles and speeches that reflect the
evolution of Cairns’s opinions in the period between the
constitutional discussions of 1980-1982 (which led to patriation and the
Charter of Rights) and the collapse of the Meech Lake Accord in 1990.

Cairns argues that the introduction of the Charter into the Canadian
constitution in 1982 has had an irrevocable impact on the process of
constitutional change in this country. He suggests that by explicitly
including such groups as women, aboriginal peoples, and the disabled,
the 1982 package has given these groups, and the elites that lead them,
a stake in constitutional change that must be recognized. The flaw in
the Meech Lake case, as Cairns perceives it, was that these groups felt
they had been left out of the process and therefore feared that the
gains they had made under the Charter would be threatened by the new
package. The book suggests that the new challenge of Canadian
constitutional change is to find a viable process that allows the input
of groups and elites beyond the traditional government bodies.

The essays in Disruptions are uniformly insightful and well written.
One in particular, “Ritual, Taboo and Bias,” provides a detailed
discussion of many of the questions that politicians and academics have
avoided. Cairns raises practical questions about how Native
self-government would, or could, work and attacks the unwillingness of
English-Canadian leaders and academics to give serious thought to the
questions that would face a Canada without Quebec. The concluding essay,
“Passing Judgement on Meech Lake,” provides a clear summary of the
procedural and perceptual problems that killed the Accord, and argues
that a new and more open process must be found.

Written before the current constitutional discussions began, Cairns’s
work offers a clear explanation of the events that have brought us to a
constitutional impasse.