{"id":265926,"date":"2018-02-06T21:13:36","date_gmt":"2018-02-07T02:13:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/issues\/a-few-modest-amendments-to-the-constitution\/"},"modified":"2025-10-07T21:58:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-08T01:58:17","slug":"a-few-modest-amendments-to-the-constitution","status":"publish","type":"issues","link":"https:\/\/policyoptions.irpp.org\/fr\/2018\/02\/a-few-modest-amendments-to-the-constitution\/","title":{"rendered":"A few modest amendments to the Constitution"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Canada\u2019s 7th Parliamentary Poet Laureate (2016-17), I never accepted Plato\u2019s notion that poets should not be entrusted with any say over statecraft. Nor have I ever been satisfied with Percy Shelley\u2019s idea that poets are \u201cunacknowledged legislators.\u201d What if we could be \u201cacknowledged,\u201d eh?<\/p>\n

Being a poet, now, who has \u2014 to quote Shakespeare\u2019s Othello, \u201cdone the State some service,\u201d I want now to provoke some thought about what might yet be done to improve the Constitution.<\/p>\n

In my role as a visiting artist-in-residence last November at the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS) at the University of British Columbia (UBC), I had the privilege of convening a \u201cconstitutional assembly,\u201d which was attended by 20 UBC professors and students from anthropology, creative writing, English, environmental sciences and law.<\/p>\n

The purpose of this constitutional assembly was to expose my thinking about potential adjustments to The Constitution Act<\/em> to the thinking of an ad hoc assortment of other Canadian intellectuals, to see if my ideas had any traction, but also to suss out what others think should be done to improve on the work of the first ministers of the last century.<\/p>\n

I was tasked with typing up the recommendations that emerged from the gathering.\u00a0 Some of them are fairly radical, but all of them were the products of long deliberation, given that several proponents of these amendments arrived at the assembly with ready-made lists, the result of classroom debates, especially in law and environmental sciences.<\/p>\n

Generally, the import of these suggestions is to ask us all to imagine a Canada where Indigenous peoples and concepts are central (not in any way marginal or tokenistic); environmentalism enjoys constitutional heft; multiculturalism is de rigueur <\/em>(dislodging any apparent WASP overlordship); social democracy is exalted over private enterprise and its \u201crights\u201d; major cities have as much prestige and power as provinces; voting has real consequences (in terms of proportional representation) and not voting is illegal, thus upping the possibility for a truly participatory democracy; and where we could add like-minded territories and provinces beyond our current geographical limits. (Admittedly, the most whimsical amendments are my own.)<\/p>\n

The constitutional assembly idealists and visionaries demonstrated that matters are not settled!\u00a0 There is work to be done to flesh out the promise of 1982\u2019s patriation of the Constitution.<\/p>\n

It remains my duty to report that the constitutional assembly produced the following amendments, bearing in mind that the PWIAS and UBC cannot accept either responsibility or credit for the ideas put forward:<\/p>\n

On Indigeneity<\/strong><\/p>\n