Quiet Constitutionalism in Canada: The International Political Economy of Domestic Institutional Change

Extract

The idea that Canada is experiencing a "post-constitutional" era is misleading because it is based only on lack of changes to the formal codified constitution. Through an examination of international economic agreements, considered as untraditional mechanisms having a constitutional effect, a case is made that Canada's constitution has undergone significant, but little noticed, change over the last decade. Using Stephen Krasner's typology of sovereignty, it is shown that several aspects of Canada's sovereignty have been diminished. The effect is that the balance between liberalism and democracy in Canada's liberal democratic polity has been altered, to the detriment of the democratic component.