By the beginning of 1964 public debate about the terms on which French and English culture could continue to co-exist within a single Canadian federal state had become intense. Many causes could be assigned for the intensity of the debate, but one of them evidently was the lack of clear formulation of the problems.

It was in these circumstances that the Association of Canadian Law Teachers and the Canadian Political Science Association used their annual meeting at Charlottetown in 1964 to get, on each of four aspects of the current problem of Canadian federalism, a vigorously reasoned statement, by a French-Canadian and an English-Canadian scholar, of the essentials of the problem as he saw it and then, by way of invited commentaries, to bring the ideas more fully into play. The four aspects were: competing concepts of federalism, economic problems peculiar to our federal state, legal and political attitudes towards the BNA Act, and institutional problems of a revision of the Act.

Paul-André Crepeau (1926-2011) was Emeritus Wainwright Professor of Civil Law in the Faculty of Law at McGill University.

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C.B. Macpherson was a renowned writer and academic who held the position of Professor of Political Science at the University of Toronto. He was also an Officer of the Order of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Macpherson's books include Democracy in Alberta, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism, Burke, and the Rise and Fall of Economic Justice, and Other Papers. He died in 1987.

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