The American Constitution in Comparative Perspective: A Comparison of Federalism in the United States and Canada

Abstract

The evolution of the federal system in Canada contrasts significantly with the evolution of the federal system in the United States. Both the origins of the two systems and the major trends in their development differ. Yet the nature of a federal system -with its establishment of two autonomous levels of government-has generated forces and created situations in Canadian history that resemble ones at times prevailing in United States history. Examining the contrasts and the occasional resemblances can provide added perspective on the way the American Constitution, as a federal document, has shaped the history of the United States. The two systems differ markedly in their origins. The Constitution devised at Philadelphia in 1787 embodied a very limited concentration of powers in the nation's central institutions. Not only did the incorporation of the principle of the separation of powers diffuse authority among the president, the bicameral Congress, and the Supreme Court, with each exercising checks and balances on the others, but the original allocation of jurisdiction to the national government was also modest with the unspecified, but apparently broad, residue being left with the states. The emphasis on limited central power was perhaps to be expected since the establishment of the American federal system was the product of a process of aggregation evolving from the even weaker union of the Articles of Confederation. That union was the fruit of a revolution and a revolutionary war fought in the name of popular sovereignty, and many Americans of the late eighteenth century believed diffusion of power would protect popular sovereignty. The Canadian federation was born in pragmatism rather than resulting from an anti-imperial revolution and an articulated philosophical rationale. It was largely the product of the local governing and commercial elites in the British North American colonies. Those elites were attempting to break the political deadlock brought about within the colony of Canada by cultural polarization following the Act of