The debate over ‘renewing’ Canadian federalism in response to the ‘Quiet Revolution’ in Quebec and the more recent economic demands of English-speaking provinces forms part of a great response to the challenging problem of rebuilding the federal system and the Canadian constitution in an attempt to meet new cultural, social, and economic demands.
This volume follows on Professor McWhinney’s Quebec and the Constitution 1960-1978 but is more than a mere sequel. McWhinney draws on wide knowledge and extensive personal contacts to portray the players and the events in this last, complex chapter in the patriation drama. He shows how Quebec’s special claims have given way to a regional approach; how the prime minister sacrificed the possibility of a genuine Canadian-made constitution by trying the old ‘made-in-Britain’ amending route one last time; how the British government properly and firmly resisted the meddling in Canadian matters proposed by the Kershaw committee; how the Supreme court has taken an increasingly activist role in interpreting constitutional law; and how the people of Canada may yet take a major role in the coming second phase of constitution-making now that the BNA Act has finally come home.
Extensive appendixes provide invaluable primary material: various versions of the constitutional resolution, including the complete final version approved by the Canadian and British parliaments; the Guy Fawkes Day accord between the prime minister and the nine premiers; and extracts from the Supreme Court’s decision on Senate reform, from the decisions on patriation by the courts of appeal of Manitoba, Newfoundland, and Quebec, and from the Supreme Court’s famous ruling on the ‘legality’ and ‘conventionality’ of unilateral patriation, which produced the final round of constitutional negotiations between Ottawa and the provinces.

PROFESSOR EDWARD McWHINNEY of the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto has been an Assistant Professor at Yale University; and also a Visiting Professor at New York University, at the Ecole Libre des Hautes Etudes, and at the Max-Planck-Institut (Volkerrecht) in Heidelberg. He has also been a Legal Consultant to the United Nations. He is author of Judicial Review in the English-speaking World, now in its second edition, and of Constitutionalism in Germany; he was also Editor and contributor to the symposium volume Canadian Jurisprudence. He has published many articles in such journals as the Harvard Law Review, the American Journal of Internal Law, the Revue Internatinoale de Droit Compare, the Archiv fur Rechts und Sozialphilosphie. He is a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

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