Formal Amendment of the Constitution of Canada

Abstract

for amendments to be made in the same way as the BNA Act itself-by the imperial Parliament. Until 1982, that was Canada's amending procedure: amendments to the BNA Act had to be enacted by the United Kingdom (imperial) Parliament. Even in 1931, when the Statute of Westminster conferred upon Canada and the other dominions the power to repeal or amend imperial statutes applying to them, the BNA Act and its amendments were excluded from the new power at Canada's insistence. This was done so that the BNA Act should not be subject to easy amendment by ordinary legislation of either the federal Parliament or a provincial legislature. The idea was, and still is, that a constitution should be more difficult to amend than, for example, an income tax act. After the Statute of Westminster, while other imperial statutes had lost their protected status, the BNA Act could still be amended only by the U.K. Parliament. This did not mean, however, that Canadians had no control over the amending process. At the imperial conference of 1930 (the same conference that recommended the enactment of the Statute of Westminster), the prime ministers of the United Kingdom and all the dominions agreed that the British Parliament would not enact any statute applying to a dominion except at the request and with the consent of that dominion. This agreement, which reflected already long-standing practice, created a binding, although not formally enacted, constitutional convention. The convention did not specify which governmental bodies in Canada were to request, and which were to consent to, proposed amendments to the