If there is a politico-historical thread running from Louis Riel and the buffalo-hunting Métis rebels in Confederation-era Manitoba, via Ottawa’s creation of three second-class Prairie provinces, followed by decades of friction over resource ownership and taxation, all the way to the convoys of diesel-powered trucks that rumbled into Ottawa to protest federal vaccine mandates in the winter of 2022, few have taken note. David Solway is one. As the main convoy leaders await a court verdict, Solway is taking the long view. He asserts that the truckers’ protest is a powerful contemporary manifestation of a recurring theme – perhaps the defining theme – of how Canada is governed, and to whose benefit. But while Canada’s late-19th century leaders were flawed men who made mistakes, Solway finds, the country’s current federal leadership appears outright bent on destruction.

Canada’s western lands, wrote one prominent academic, became provinces “in the Roman sense” – acquired possessions that, once vanquished, were there to be exploited. Laurentian Canada regarded the hinterlands as existing primarily to serve the interests of the heartland. And the current holders of office in Ottawa often behave as if the Constitution’s federal-provincial distribution of powers is at best advisory, if it needs to be acknowledged at all. Reviewing this history, Barry Cooper places Alberta’s widely criticized Sovereignty Act in the context of the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens. Canada is a federation, notes Cooper. Provinces do have rights. Constitutions do mean something. And when they are no longer working, they can be changed.

Demographics is destiny, we’re often told. But while Canada’s fastest-growing provinces – primarily in the West – have every right to expect that their increasing share of the country’s population will be matched in their political representation at the federal level, the morass of Canadian federalism stands in the way. Barry Cooper takes a close look at a recent Bloc Québécois motion demanding Quebec be given more MPs even as its share of Canada’s population continues to sag. This affront to the basic democratic principle that every person’s vote should carry equal weight was supported by all parties, including many Conservative MPs. And it might soon become law. Cooper untangles the perverted logic, backstory and future implications.

Canada’s constitutional deck – or at least the cards our Supreme Court justices keep drawing – seems increasingly loaded towards centralism, with established provincial jurisdiction and clear division of power becoming quaint habits of a bygone era. Last month’s carbon tax ruling threatens to supercharge that trend, cementing federal dominance and relegating provinces to the level of glorified municipalities carrying out Ottawa’s wishes. Constitutional scholar F.L. (Ted) Morton reminds us that previous provincial premiers overcame seemingly crushing legal defeats through imaginative policy ideas and determined inter-provincial cooperation.

It is one sign of the remorseless march of the administrative state that appeals to Canada’s Constitution appear almost quaint, as well as typically toothless. The news media often frame provincial objections to federal encroachments as claims or perceptions rather than testable assertions, as if Canada’s constitutional documents comprise long-lost secret scrolls written in a dead language. It has been Canada’s judges, however, who have most decisively tipped the balance in favour of federal supremacy in more and more areas. No case has proved too small to keep the process rolling. Not even, as Grant A. Brown reports, a dispute over a simple Ontario government sticker that even the judge had to concede was factually accurate.