Getting it Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation by Paul Romney (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999)

Very rarely does a book come along in Canadian constitutional and political history in which the author sets out to debunk, in such a comprehensive fashion, the orthodox interpretation of the events and personalities of Confederation.In this case, our illustrious centralist Fathers of Confederation and their legions of supporters over the past century get thrown out unceremoniously with the old constitutional bath-water!Even more rarely does an author go on to contend that, had Canadians continued to embrace the appropriate interpretation of Canada's constitutional development (essentially the Upper Canadian Reformers' highly decentralist interpretation), then Canada would have avoided the destabilizing mega-constitutional politics of the past four decades.If, according to the author, Canadians had continued to embrace the true nature of their Confederation -a dual compact of provinces and two nationalitiesthey would have rejected Pierre-Elliott Trudeau's anti-Quebec Constitution Act, 1982 1 with its America-inspired Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 2 both responsible for the near-death political high drama of the 1995 referendum on Quebec's secession from Canada.Paul Romney's Getting It Wrong: How Canadians Forgot Their Past and Imperilled Confederation 3 is just such a book.(An alternative title could very well be, Lament for Canada's Forgotten Compacts!)Given the author's grandiose claim, I looked forward to the nature of historical evidence and the arguments that he would marshall to his cause.I was anxious to scrutinize his interpretation of the evidence which would substantiate, in an irrefutable fashion, his long-held view that Canada's constitution resided on two non-legal, but historically-grounded, conventional compacts: one provincial and the other racial.I hoped that Getting It Wrong would serve as a longoverdue counterpoint to the accepted interpretation of Confederation, thereby helping to enliven discussions in my graduate seminar on Canadian federalism.Unfortunately, Getting It Wrong does not live up to its promise.Why? First, Romney's evidence is entirely of a circumstantial historical nature and rings true, in part, only for the 19th century.Second, because the author, in trying to restore balance to the debate about the origins, design, and implementation of the British North America Act, 1867, 4 overstates his politically motivated decentralist interpretation of events and personalities.Romney is a modem Clear Grit Ontario Firster who maintains that Confederation was classically federal rather than "quasi-federal."So eager to slay the dragon of centralist constitutional orthodoxy -propounded by J.A. Macdonald and

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