Challenging English-Canadian Orthodoxy on Democracy and Constitutional Change
Bibliographic record
Abstract
EnglishIn English Canada it is routinely argued that constitutional change in Canada is neither desirable nor even possible. This article challenges this view. The decline of support among Quebecois for sovereignty should not blind us to the fact that the official position of the Parti Liberal du Quebec (PLQ) is that while Quebec should remain in Canada, constitutional change will eventually be required. Some Aboriginal leaders take a similar position. Faced with the prospect of constitutional change, three claims are central to the prevailing orthodoxy in English Canada: that the constitution is now exceedingly difficult to amend, that private negotiations and elite accommodation have been replaced by a more open and democratic process, and that substantive change to the Canadian constitutional settlement must be by means of a constitutional “conversation.” This article challenges this prevailing orthodoxy by arguing that the Canadian constitution is, in fact, amendable, often by means of bilateral amendments that continue to rely on traditional elite negotiations. Moreover, while an ongoing constitutional conversation is desirable in theory, this article presents a series of considerations that must be addressed if we are to construct the kind of constitutional conversation adequate to the task of achieving meaningful constitutional change in a multinational context. francaisDans le Canada anglais, on soutient regulierement que la modification de la Constitution n’est ni souhaitable ni meme possible. L’auteur de cet article conteste ce point de vue. Le fait que l’appui des Quebecois a la souverainete soit en baisse ne devrait pas nous faire oublier la position officielle du Parti Liberal du Quebec (PLQ) : bien que le Quebec devrait continuer de faire partie du Canada, un jour une modification de la Constitution sera necessaire. Certains chefs autochtones ont adopte une position similaire. Devant la perspective d’une modification de la Constitution, l’orthodoxie courante du Canada anglais comporte trois affirmations principales : il est extremement difficile de modifier la Constitution, les negociations privees et les accommodements a l’elite ont ete remplaces par un processus plus ouvert et democratique et enfin, une modification importante a l’accord constitutionnel doit se faire au moyen d’un dialogue constitutionnel. L’auteur de cet article conteste cette orthodoxie courante en soutenant qu’il est en fait possible de modifier la Constitution canadienne, le plus souvent au moyen de modifications bilaterales qui reposent toujours sur les negociations traditionnelles de l’elite politique. En outre, bien qu’un dialogue constitutionnel continu soit souhaitable en theorie, cet article presente une serie de considerations a aborder si nous desirons avoir un dialogue constitutionnel a la hauteur de notre tâche, c’est-a-dire d’arriver a une modification constitutionnelle utile dans un contexte multinational.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".