The Nature and Scope of Provincial Autonomy: Oliver Mowat, the Quebec Resolutions and the Construction of theBritish North America Act

Abstract

AbstractIn the 1930s, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council was criticized for allegedly perverting the meaning of theBritish North America Actand the intentions of its framers. This notion persists, partly because its historiographical basis—the idea that the Fathers of Confederation envisaged a dominant federal government—remains substantially intact. To the Ontario Reformers, however, the Confederation agreement had not established federal dominance. On the contrary, it had implemented the broad claims to local autonomy which Reformers had been advancing ever since the 1820s. And while those claims rested on a legally heterodox conception of colonial constitutional status, the BNA Act gave legal effect to that conception as applied to federal-provincial relations. This allowed Oliver Mowat to do what earlier Reform leaders could not have done: enforce the local claims in court.