Drawing on his experience as a two-term MP and former Parliamentary Secretary, Ted McWhinney addresses the need for modernization to meet the radically new demands of the plural, multicultural Canada of the 21st century and offers new ways out of our present constitutional straight-jacket. Among the key contemporary topics discussed are the atrophy of the House of Commons and the role of MPs; the development of the "presidential" Prime Minister without any constitutional checks and balances; the emergence of judicial legislation through a Supreme Court suddenly empowered by the 1982 Charter of Rights; the provincial demands for a new cooperative federalism; and the aboriginal peoples' claims to an inherent right to self government. Proposals for reform are canvassed frankly. More importantly, practical ways out of our present constitutional straight-jacket?the result of the failure of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown accords?are put forward for debate.

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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