The Canadian Founding

by Ajzenstat, Janet

• ISBN13: 9780773532243
• ISBN10: 0773532242
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-06-01
• Publisher: McGill Queens Univ

Summary

Convinced that rights are inalienable and that legitimate government requires the consent of the governed, the Fathers of Confederation - whether liberal or conservative - looked to the European enlightenment and John Locke. Janet Ajzenstat analyzes the legislative debates in the colonial parliaments and the Constitution Act (1867) in a provocative reinterpretation of Canadian political history from 1864 to 1873. Ajzenstat contends that the debt to Locke is most evident in the debates on the making of Canada's Parliament: though the anti-confederates maintained that the existing provincial parliaments offered superior protection for individual rights, the confederates insisted that the union's general legislature, the Parliament of Canada, would prove equal to the task and that the promise of "life and liberty" would bring the scattered populations of British North America together as a free nation.

Table of Contents

Making parliament	p. 3
Popular sovereignty in the confederation debates	p. 22
Human rights in 1867	p. 49
Civic identity	p. 67
The political nationality	p. 88
Celebrating 1791 : two hundred years of representative government	p. 113
Canada's first constitution : Pierre Bedard on tolerance and dissent	p. 124
Modern mixed government : a liberal defence of inequality	p. 145
Collectivity and individual rights in "mainstream liberalism" : John Arthur Roebuck and the patriotes	p. 163
Parliament and today's discontent	p. 180
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