Canada’s Amendment Rules: A Window into the Soul of a Constitution - Review essay of Richard Albert, Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions

Abstract

This Review Essay forms part of a special issue of the Manitoba Law Journal (forthcoming) dedicated to Richard Albert, Constitutional Amendments: Making, Breaking, and Changing Constitutions. Years in the making, Constitutional Amendments explains how amendment rules define a constitution’s integrity, ensuring its longevity by allowing and even inviting formal changes to its text. Albert’s work is prodigious and monumental, connecting abstract issues of textual design to the follies of constitutional amendment over diverse variables of time and place. This Review focuses selectively on Constitutional Amendments and its implications for Canadian amendment constitutionalism, exploring Albert’s view that amendment rules expose a constitution’s “deepest vulnerabilities” and reveal its “greatest strengths”. Specifically, the Review draws on Albert’s work to suggest a simple but sharp insight linking the 1867 Constitutions’s failure to provide textual amendment rules to the steadfast unamendability of the Canadian Constitution today.