The Patriation and Legitimacy of the Canadian Constitution
Exclusive English transcript of Barry Lee Strayer’s (1982)
Cronkite Lectures
This is a page-by-page transcript of the original, using the original pagination.
The 1982 constitution was a coup d’état, and not a constitutional amendment
as admitted by its principal architect.
The importance of these lectures lies in the fact that the author, Barry Lee Strayer, who advised Pierre Trudeau for over 20 years on the implementation of a Charter of Rights, admits that the “patriation” of 1982 lacked legality and constituted a Southern Rhodesian-style coup d’état; a constitutional and parliamentary coup on the country.
Civil lawyer, Robert Martin, a law professorat the University of Western Ontario at the time, in his 1993 Eugene Forsey Memorial Lecture, A Lament for British North America, pointed out:
As of 17 April 1982, the day the Canada Act 1982 took effect, Canada ceased to be British North America.
Where did the idea of making this change come from? I have not been able to discover an answer to this question. I turned initially to two persons who had been important in constitutional reform.
Barry L. Strayer, now a judge of the Federal Court of Canada, is generally regarded as having played the leading role in drafting the Canada Act 1982 and its appendices. He could not recall who originated the idea nor did he remember any discussion of it.5
Source: 5. Telephone conversation with Mr. Justice Strayer, 29 March 1993.
His having admitted the truth of the coup in the present “law” lectures, Barry Lee Strayer was unlikely not to have known that the point of the coup was to implement Pierre Trudeau’s planned recolonization of Canada in his 1962 essay, “New Treason of the Clerics,” where he called allegiance to the nation “treason.” He happily foresaw the end of Canada, the “disappearance” (genocide) of the French Canadians, and the reduction (genocide) of the founding Britanno (English-speaking Canadians) to a strict minority in the land of their ancestors. (This would happen because they were to be stripped of their institutions required for their survival as a people. And they were stripped of them, by Trudeau himself, with help from Strayer, in 1982.)
What do we mean by a “Southern Rhodesian-style coup d’état”? Simply this:
There is no legal continuity between the 1867 constitution and the constitution imposed in 1982. Like Ian Smith and his executive in 1965 in Southern Rhodesia, those who betrayed their oath by taking advantage of their office to replace Canada’s legal constitution with a new one, thus destroyed the source of their office under the 1867 constitution. They continued to govern, under their own new constitution, but without even a semblance of legal authority, because they had not been elected or appointed under that constitution. They were “de facto” not “de jure”.
The adjective “de facto ” means “in fact” in Latin. It is often used instead of “real” to indicate that the court will consider as a fact the exercise of an authority or an entity acting as if it had authority, even if the legal requirements have not been met. “De jure ” is a Latin adjective meaning ‘legal’, as opposed to de facto (not legal, but factual).
In reality, Canada’s governments, both federal and provincial, have been “de facto” rather than “de jure” since 1982. Appointment and election under the coup constitution provide only a fig leaf for Canada’s rogue regimes.
A selection of Strayer’s quotes highlighting the 1982 coup has been compiled and linked in the sidebar, and is also available here as a free PDF download. Or click here to read them now. A scan of the original lectures in English can also be downloaded free of charge.
