The Acadian

Even when the 1995 Quebec referendum resulted in victory for the No side, by a mere 50,000 votes, the province’s right to secede unilaterally remained a subject of debate. The stakes were high, and the federal government referred the question to the Supreme Court. Three years later, the court released its judgment in the Quebec secession reference. At the time, Marc Cousineau, a law professor at the Université d’Ottawa, could discern a key voice in the decision, saying, “There is obviously some Bastarache in there.”

At that point, in 1998, one could only surmise Michel Bastarache’s influence in that unanimous decision, which defined the four unwritten principles underlying the Constitution: federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and protection of minority rights. Several writers have since described the process behind the decision, including Philip Slayton in his 2011 Mighty Judgment: How the Supreme Court of Canada Runs Your Life. In...