The Strategic Constitution

Historically, Canada’s Constitution has been principally viewed as a federal framework or a rights bulwark. This book offers a brand new interpretation. The “Strategic Constitution,” as proposed by Irvin Studin, can be a framework for Canada to project strategic power in the world. This framework lays the foundations for a new school of Canadian constitutional scholarship.

Studin begins by reducing the Constitution to its strategically relevant essentials or building blocks. He then provides a wide-ranging audit of the Constitution in terms of its implications for so-called factors of strategic power: the military, diplomacy, executive potency, natural resources, the economy, strategic communications, and the national population. He later applies the Strategic Constitution framework to four policy case studies: Canadian regional leadership in the Americas; bona fide war (as in Afghanistan); Arctic sovereignty; and counterterrorism.

Provocative and well-argued, this book makes the case for the Constitution being a highly flexible national framework that quietly harbours seeds of national strategic potency.