Toolkits and Building Blocks: Constructing a New Canada

J.L. Granatstein is a history professor at York University and author of
War and Peacekeeping and For Better or For Worse.

Canada is, as every one of us knows to our eternal regret, the site of
the world’s oldest, established, permanent, floating constitutional
crapshoot. Whole battalions of lawyers live off the public purse as they
study proposals, the energies of our politicians and journalists are
devoted to little else, and the resulting proposals become ever more
surreal. The foolishness of all this, especially since the British North
America Act of 1867 worked just fine—as did the 1982
Constitution—ought to be apparent to everyone but Jacques Parizeau.

Nonetheless, the game goes on. This book, the product of a workshop
sponsored by the C.D. Howe Institute in November 1990, is one
contribution to the debate. What we have here are brief papers and
snippets of the discussion thereof. The volume’s organization is
straightforward, moving from the context of constitutional discussion to
goals and then to federalist and antifederalist models. Much of what is
printed here has been rendered null and void by the events of the
intervening two years, but there is still good sense here that repays
reading.