The Invisible Constitution in Comparative Perspective

Quebec (Attorney General) v. Canada (Attorney General) (note 16) para. 172.

90 

This is how the ruling is described in Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens and Johanne Poirier 

“From Dualism to Cooperative Federalism and Back? Evolving and Competing Conceptions 

of Canadian Federalism” in Nathalie Des Rosiers, Patrick Macklem and Peter Oliver (eds.), The  

Oxford Handbook on the Canadian Constitution 410–11 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017).

---

 

Unwritten Constitutional Principles in Canada 

535

constitutional duty to negotiate, in the latter, the majority chose to exert little 

energy in this regard. The justices disposed of the appeal in a short, forty-four 

paragraph opinion by relying on a robust federal criminal law power. It is the 

justices in the minority who had the work cut out for them, working up an 

unwritten federalism principle, earlier identified in the Secession Reference, in 

order to restrain broad federal authority over the criminal law. Such a course of 

action could have been open to the majority, but the circumstances of the case 

likely did not force the justices’ hands as did those in the Secession Reference.

That the Court split principally along civil versus common law lines is evi-

dence of a divide that is not easily explained by invoking standard Anglophone 

accounts of judicial reasoning. Rather, the rupture may best be explained with 

reference to the differing modes of thinking utilized in the common law and 

civil law traditions. In the civilian tradition, text can be understood as an elab-

oration of a shared normativity that is the substratum underlying constitu-

tional instruments. If Gaudreault-Desbiens is correct to claim that this helps 

to explain the outcome in the Secession Reference, it may also help to explain 

the gulf between the common law and civilian justices in Quebec v. Canada.

91

It is no great surprise that the Court, in Quebec v. Canada, made no refer-

ence to foreign law or scholarship. Close readers of Supreme Court of Canada 

jurisprudence will have observed that the justices are not that interested in for-

eign constitutional law. Apart from occasional references to United Kingdom 

and United States developments, the Court has exhibited a disinterestedness 

in constitutional developments elsewhere. According to McCormick’s 2009 

study, citations from other countries, though present, have “always occurred 

at a very modest level,” ranging from 1 percent of total judicial citations 

pre-Charter of Rights to just fewer than 2 percent post-Charter.

92

 This reluc-

tance in foreign citations can be explained, in part, by Canadian anxieties 

about having a political (and constitutional) identity separate from, and dis-

tinctive of, the neighboring geopolitical hegemon to the South. Yet, there are 

good reasons to think that developments beyond the United States would be 

of interest to Canadian justices, particularly as the Supreme Court of Canada 

91 

Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens, “Underlying Principles and the Migration of Reasoning 

Templates: A Trans-Systemic Reading of the Quebec Secession Reference” in Sujit Choudhry 

(ed.), The Migration of Constitutional Ideas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) 

178, 204; also Jean-François Gaudreault-Desbiens, “Le juge comme agent de migration de 

canevas de raisonnement entre le droit civil et la common law: Quelques observations à partir 

d’évolutions récentes du droit constitutionnel canadien” in Ghislain Otis (ed.), Le juge et le