“True Strong and Free” is part of a project to reclaim Canada’s heritage. It includes a draft  constitution that restores the foundations of parliamentary self-government and liberty under law, and two other documentaries in the Constitutional trilogy: Magna Carta: Our Shared Legacy of Liberty and A Right to Arms. I undertook the project because Canada’s Constitution is an jumbled annoying mess and if we stumble into another crisis over how Parliament works, how we hold elections, Quebec or anything else including the increasingly pressing problem of Western alienation, its incoherence and lack of legitimate connection with the people could have disastrous results.

The film looks at the history of government in Canada from the origins of liberty under law in Saxon England to the coming of representative government in the British colonies that later became the Dominion of Canada. And it discusses the genius of the British North America Act, the first genuine parliamentary federation in the world. But also the defects even in our original Constitution, from excessive centralization to the excessive reliance on unwritten conventions of decency and restraint among politicians.

It also examines the gradual erosion of parliamentary government throughout the English-speaking world from the late 19th century on as the executive branch increasingly came to dominate legislators, and the role of 20th century crises in the growth of government, and of executive branch discretion, both in parliamentary systems and for comparative purposes in the United States.

Then it examines the 1982 Constitution, a botched response to the wrong problems that disposed of British parliamentary sovereignty without bringing in American popular sovereignty, leaving us a bizarre self-contradictory document that couldn’t be fixed or even understood.

The Constitution we got in 1867 was generally solid. It gave too much power to Ottawa, and relied too much on restraint by the political class. But it was a system of parliamentary self-government under a constitutional monarch.

The 1982 Constitution is not solid. It mixes up individual and collective rights, makes vague promises, doesn’t address what was going wrong with parliamentary government around the globe and, worst of all, excludes the people.

It wasn’t made by the people, either directly through a referendum or constitutional convention or indirectly by holding elections federally and provincially on the clear understanding that a new Constitution would be their main order of business. It was a backroom deal, kluged together by exhausted politicians whose devotion to principle was tenuous at the best of times. And every attempt to fix it degenerates into a similar distasteful act of unprincipled improvisation, further alienating citizens.

Canada deserves better. And we can do better if we’re prepared to think boldly about fundamentals.  The draft constitution that accompanied the documentary respects our heritage of liberty under law, preserves parliamentary self-government under a constitutional monarch, protects individual liberty (including property rights) against the arrogance of politicians and bureaucrats, and restores popular legitimacy because, like Magna Carta, the old British Constitution and the American one, it comes from the people.