The Canadian Constitution in the Twenty-First Century

• Author: Patrick J. Monahan/Byron Shaw/Padraic Ryan
• Pages: 519-527

519

CH AP TER 16

THE CANADIAN

CONSTITUTION IN THE

TWENTY‑FIRST CENTURY

A. ALL QUIET ON THE CONSTITUTIONAL

FRONT?

In February 2012, a group of retired politicians a nd scholars gathered

at the University of Toronto to debate the “Quebec question for the next

generation.” The conference was prompted by the remarkable fact that

for more than a decade, the issue of Quebec’s place in Canad a had largely

disappeared from public view. The result was th at an entire generation

of political leaders and scholars outside Quebec had developed without

any sustained immersion in issues relating to the “Quebec quest ion.”

What was unclear was whether t his silence on the constitutional front,

which had persisted for more than a f ull decade, was permanent (a “new

normal”) or whether it was merely transitory and the countr y was des-

tined to revert to a discussion of the same constitutional questions and

debates that had dominated Canadian political di scourse throughout

the 1980s and 1990s.

Although there was no consensus on this issue amongst the par-

ticipants at the Februar y 2012 Toronto gathering, few believed that the

constitutional question would re-emerge to take centre stage in Can-

adian politics any time soon. The subsequent four years have proven this

prediction to be accurate, at least in the short term. Despite a major

reconf‌iguration of the federal political landscape in the 2015 general

election, there was no re-emergence of the Bloc Québécois. A short-lived