A Constitutional Question

[dewline]

budgie_uk posted an opinion piece on his new Wordpress blog suggesting that it's past time that the UK wrote itself a Constitution.

Which got me thinking about our own set-up.

If memory serves, ours here in Canada is spread across a couple of documents, classic UK-style:

1) The British North America Act of 1867
2) The Constitution Act of 1982, which includes...
3) ...the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Am I wrong in suspecting that there's other components to the mix that I'm forgetting?

Comments

[jsburbidge.livejournal.com]

There's a whole set of constitutional documents between 1867 and 1982 which are minor amendments to the (then) BNA Act (e.g. including new provinces in Canada in addition to the four in 1867). There is also, more generally, the Statute of Westminster of 1931.

We also usually count statutes like the Quebec Act as constitutional documents (to say nothing of those like the Act of Succession which are received as part of the law of the UK).

It's worth noting that having a single written constitution in the UK would really just be tidying up what they already have -- the thing that makes (say) the Canadian or US Constitution difficult to change is the federal state model, requiring multiple ratifications by different bodies to modify them. The doctrine of the supremacy of parliament plus the unitary state in the UK would mean that any constitution passed by Westminster would be unable to bind subsequent parliaments and would be "just another statute".