Charlottetown Accord - Background

Background

Until 1982, the British North America Act, 1867 and later amendments served as the basis of Canada's constitution. As an act of the British Parliament, however, this left Canada in the anomalous position of having to petition another country's government to amend its own constitution. Since the Statute of Westminster 1931, the British government was willing to relinquish this role, but Canadian federal and provincial governments were unable to agree on a new amending formula. Various unsuccessful attempts were made to patriate the constitution. Notable among these was the Victoria Charter of 1971.

In 1981, a round of negotiations led by Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau reached a patriation agreement that formed the basis of the Constitution Act of 1982. Although this agreement passed into law, augmenting the British North America Acts as the constitution of the land, it was reached over the objections of Quebec Premier René Lévesque, the Liberals under the leadership of Claude Ryan, and the Quebec National Assembly refused to approve the amendment. However, the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, the majority of them (7 out of 9) appointed by Trudeau (Bora Laskin, Robert Dickson, Jean Beetz, Willard Estey, William McIntyre, Bertha Wilson, Antonio Lamer), ruled in the Patriation Reference and the Quebec Veto Reference that neither Quebec nor any other province had a veto to prevent the federal government from petitioning the British Parliament to pass the Canada Act 1982, and that the new constitution applied to all provinces notwithstanding their disagreement.

Brian Mulroney defeated Trudeau's successor, Prime Minister John Turner, in the 1984 federal election. One of Mulroney's campaign promises was to pursue an agreement that would allow Quebec's government to sanction the Constitution. Led by Mulroney, the federal and provincial governments signed the Meech Lake Accord in 1987. However, when the 1990 deadline for ratification was reached, two provincial legislatures, Manitoba and Newfoundland, had not ratified the agreement, and thus it was defeated. This defeat, in turn, led to a resurgence in the Quebec sovereignty movement.

In the next two years, the future of Quebec dominated the national agenda. The Quebec government set up the Allaire Committee and the Bélanger-Campeau Committee to discuss Quebec's future inside or outside of Canada. The federal government struck the Beaudoin-Edwards Committee and the Spicer commission to find ways to resolve English Canada's concerns. Former Prime Minister Joe Clark was appointed Minister of Constitutional Affairs, and was responsible for pulling all of this together to forge a new constitutional agreement.

On August 28, 1992, after intensive negotiations in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, the federal, provincial and territorial governments, and representatives from the Assembly of First Nations, the Native Council of Canada, the Inuit Tapirisat of Canada and the Métis National Council, came to the agreement known as the "Charlottetown Accord".