Sunshine Cases of a Little Constitution

This essay revisits some of Canada's constitutional and literary history, taking as its starting point the view that the development of Canadian law and literature has been an ongoing process of national self-contemplation. It explores the disjointed nature of both projects, comparing the Privy Council's leading constitutional cases from the turn of the twentieth century with the writings of the same era's leading Canadian literary figure, Stephen Leacock. It observes that Canada's constitutional jurisprudence has historically been characterized more by its fractured quality than its rational synthesis, while its literary output has been characterized more by incompleteness and diversity than by stylistic or thematic unity. In short, it asks whether we can ever really know Mariposa-whether Canadians are capable of a coherent national discourse, or whether they are, as Robertson Davies put it, "just too divided in attitudes and feelings and climates and everything else to have a single outlook that would work in a [constitution/novel] of the whole country."