ABSTRACT
In November 1981, after years of intensive but fruitless effort to achieve constitutional reform in Canada, success was finally attained. There are very few instances of successful negotiated constitutional reform in contemporary times, and these are generally quite different in substance from the Canadian experience. In the first sixty years of Canada's existence as a nation-state, from 1867 to 1927, there was little explicit interest in constitutional reform. There are a number of possible explanations that might be offered to account for the past failures and the recent success in the long quest for constitutional amendment and reform. It has been argued that the current constitutional reform package has achieved success where all earlier efforts had failed because its content and approach are more flexible. An essential ingredient of success in any democracy is the mobilization of public support. This is particularly true of fundamental policies or measures such as constitutional reform.
