Alumnus consolidates Canada’s historical and contemporary Constitutional documents in one volume

Donald F. Bur, a University of Alberta Faculty of Law alumnus, has published a sweepingly thorough yet user-friendly reference book about the Canadian Constitution.

In Laws of the Constitution: Consolidated (University of Alberta Press), Bur gathered all of the historical and contemporary constitutional documents pertaining to Canada, its provinces and its territories. He organized them thematically and topically and supported them with comprehensive lists and a thorough index.

He also weeded out documents that have been overridden or have been proved irrelevant in his quest to exhaustively present the words, ideas, and documents that have brought the Constitution into being.

“The Schedule to the Constitution Act, 1982,” refers to 30 constitutional documents, but it is clear that there are many more, “ said Bur, ‘77 LLB, and an authority on public law and issues of federalism.

“When I was writing an earlier book, Laws of the Constitution: Distribution of Power (2016, LexisNexis), I realized how difficult it was to refer to, and in fact how difficult it was to find some of those other constitutional documents. So, one of the reasons I wrote the book was to bring together all of this country’s documents in one place.”

To prepare the book, Bur dealt with more than 350 separate constitutional documents, accumulated from archives throughout Canada and the United Kingdom.

While that was time-consuming, the real difficulty was in deciding which parts had been repealed, said Bur. It required a careful reading of all the documents in chronological order to decide what should be excluded.

“One of the problems of our type of constitution is that it is often not treated like legislation, and that is in part because much of it comes from many different sources other than legislation — international treaties, domestic treaties, royal proclamations, constitutional amendment proclamations, orders in counsel, commissions, letters patent, arbitrations or petitions.

“Even when these documents come from legislation, it is unusual for the law to specify what parts of an earlier law they are repealing and what they are replacing it with.”

Bur also wanted to raise awareness of the parts of the Constitution that are often ignored. With documents arranged thematically in the book, the parts of the Constitution that are well known, such as the Constitution Act, 1867, are exhibited beside provincial constitutional provisions that do the same thing but are not as familiar.

“My hope that this will give the reader — either lawyers who practise or teach about the

Constitution or political scientists who study the Constitution — a greater awareness of some of its

provisions.”

Bur, who currently runs a public law practice in Toronto, has practised law in three provinces and holds a PhD in Constitutional Law from the University of Cambridge.