Rethinking the Constitution: Perspectives on Canadian Constitutional Reform, Interpretation, and Theory

Eric P. Mintz is an associate professor of political science at Sir
Wilfred Grenfell College, The Memorial University of Newfoundland.

Readers suffering from constitutional fatigue will be relieved to
discover that this collection of essays deals in only a limited way with
Canada’s various attempts at constitutional reform. Instead, the
contributors are concerned primarily with defending the principles of
liberal constitutionalism, which they see as threatened by the Charter
of Rights and Freedoms, by political correctness, and by attempts to
engage in social engineering through constitutional change.

Several contributors attack the Charter and recent constitutional
reform attempts for undermining the notions of the limited state, the
rule of law, and equal rights for all individuals. Other contributors
are critical of relativism (which is seen as related to
multiculturalism), arguing that the Constitution needs to be based on a
moral vision and moral standards. Standing apart

from the critical consensus about the direction Canada has taken is H.D.
Forbes, who provides a positive evaluation of Trudeau’s moral vision
based on bilingualism, multiculturalism, and the Charter.

Generally, the contributors are concerned with attacking the legal,
academic, and political “orthodoxy” that uses the Charter, the
courts, and constitutional reforms to pursue unrealistic and unnatural
egalitarian and collectivist projects. However, while critiques of
orthodoxies (whether left, right, or feminist) are useful, some of the
contributors exaggerate the courts’ use of the Charter to move Canada
in new ideological directions. As well, the book would have benefited
from a more thorough examination of the central theme of liberal
constitutionalism, along with a discussion of the contradictions between
analyses based on classical liberal assumptions and those based on moral
conservative assumptions.