The Death of Deference: National Policy-Making in the Aftermath of the Meech Lake and Charlottetown Accords

Abstract

It has been suggested that there has been a decline in Canadians’ traditional deference to

elites in recent decades, and that the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (the Charter) is

either a reflection of the decline in deference or a cause of it.1 Deference, however, seems not

merely in decline; it is not “pining for the fjords”, as Monty Python would put it, but is “pushing

up the daisies”. It is dead; it was a lingering death, one which lasted between June 1987 and

June 1990, and the deathbed was the Meech Lake Accord. To take the analogy further,

deference’s funeral procession was the long, slow and, for many of the participants, painful

march to the Charlottetown Accord; its burial was the defeat of that Accord in the October 1992

referendum. The implications of this death remain with us still, even if they are but poorly

integrated into the practice of intergovernmental relations in Canada, and require a fundamental

and more pluralist reconception of the norms of national policy-making.