Canada’s constitution is made up of several pieces of legislation. The most important of these are the Quebec Act of 1774, the Constitution Act of 1791, the Uniting Canada Act of 1840, the British North America Act of 1867, and the Constitution Act of 1982, the last of the constitutional acts passed by the British Parliament.

Canada’s written constitution, unlike the U.S. Constitution, is not a coherent document and is not codified. In addition to other documents, it includes 25 major acts enshrined in the Constitutional Act of 1982: fourteen acts of the British Parliament, seven of the Canadian Parliament, and four acts on behalf of the English monarch and Privy Council. The pivotal act in this body of law remains the British North America Act of March 29, 1867. Today the Act, defined as the Constitutional Act of 1867, is still in force and is one of the building blocks of the Canadian Constitution. The 1867 Act created the unification of the colonial possessions of the northern North American subcontinent into a single territorial entity, Canada, which was given pre-minority status. This status meant at the time a certain level of self-government and autonomy over domestic affairs. The British North America Act gave life to a federation, a new state.

Although when the 1867 Act was passed the framers intended to give Canada a constitution, they did not use the term in any of its provisions. Only after the British North America Act (No. 2) of 1949, which further amended the 1867 Act (s. 91), was the term “constitution” (or rather “constitutional act”) mentioned. In 1965 the Canadian government extended the term by publishing a White Paper entitled “Changing the Constitution of Canada. The country has long been influenced by English law, which has had direct effect in this state. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the extraterritorial effect of English law was first limited by statute law (the Colonial Act of 1865), and then by the Westminster Statute of 1931, adopted by the British Parliament. By this charter the rights of the dominions, including Canada, were greatly extended, and they essentially gained independence. But with the former metropolis some constitutional-legal ties were retained, which have been narrowed over time. These ties determine the peculiarities of the form of government.

After the adoption of the Law of 1867 until the early 80s of the 20th century, there were about thirty acts adopted, which changed and supplemented its content. But it was as early as April 17, 1982, when Canada’s Parliament enacted the definitive Constitutional Act. Today, it allows Canada to amend or supplement the Constitution in accordance with constitutional procedure. The Canadian Constitution of 1982 (Art. 2) specifically states that no act of the English Parliament, which was passed after the Constitution, can be applied to Canada or become part of its domestic law. Canada thus received its own Basic Law.

Note the twelve important provisions of Canada’s written Constitution, together with the amendments made up to the end of 1981:

1 -the creation of a federation, provinces, territories, a national parliament, provincial legislative institutions, and some cabinets;
2 – the national parliament was given the power to form new provinces from the territories, to change provincial boundaries in consultation with the latter;
3 – the powers of parliament and provincial legislative institutions were defined;
4 – Official executive power was transferred to the King and the creation of the Royal Privy Council for Canada (the legal basis of the federal Cabinet) was proclaimed;
5 – Parliament was given the power to form the Supreme Court of Canada (it was created in 1875);
6- Certain rights are guaranteed for the use of English and French in the federal parliament and courts, as well as in the legislative institutions and courts of Quebec and Manitoba;
7-a) guaranteed separate schooling for the Protestant and Roman Catholic minorities; b) secured special articles for Manitoba (formed in 1870), more limited guarantees for Alberta and Saskatchewan (formed in 1905) and for Newfoundland (which became part of the Federation in 1949); c) guaranteed separate schools for members of numerous Christian denominations;
8 – Guaranteed a special civil right for Quebec;

9 – Granted parliament the right to assume authority in legal matters of property and public rights, and to influence provincial issues by consent (this right was never used);
10 – prohibited provincial tariffs;
11 – granted to the provincial legislature the power to amend provincial constitutions, except with respect to the office of lieutenant governor;
12 – Granted to the national government (the Governor General’s Council, i.e., the federal Cabinet) certain rights to control the provinces:

(a) appointing, instructing, and dismissing Lieutenant-Governors;
(b) the rejection of provincial laws within one year of their passage;
c) the use of the Lieutenant-Governors’ power to send provincial bills to Ottawa without being authorized to do so (under these conditions a bill does not become law until it has been authorized by the central executive within a year); in this connection, of 70 such bills (the last filed in 1961) from all but Newfoundland, only 14 have become law. These basic principles of the written Constitution by the end of 1981 were described by Prime Minister Sir Robert Borden as “the exercise of ordinary common sense,” which allowed Canada to regulate social relations, to maneuver, to embody the new, to compromise, to come to an agreement.