Canada's third National Policy: The epiphenomenal or the real Constitution?

The idea of the National Policy as both a collective endeavour and a framework for detailed policy analysis is more constitutive of the Canadian state and its governing instruments than is any of its renamed Constitution Acts. National policies originate in the actions and demands of citizens and are often framed by cultural and economic elites before being appropriated by politicians. This essay begins with a descriptive genealogy of Canada's three National Policies (NP1, from the 1840s through the 1930s; NP2, from the 1930s through the 1970s; and NP3, from 1980 onward). In subsequent sections, the essay elaborates the principles and components of Canada's contemporary National Policy, based on the notion of embedded citizen agency. It then explores a set of hypotheses about integrative action in the traditional analytic registers for thinking about the National Policy: economic, communications, and social policy. Canada's third National Policy is an emerging fact reflected in a number of initiatives taken by both Liberal and Conservative governments over the past thirty years. That said, the substantive policy commitments that this third National Policy entails are not fully predetermined but remain open for continuing political decision. Debating those possibilities will shape the country more profoundly than any attempts to perfect Canada's formal institutional arrangements, the epiphenomenal constitution.