Legal Aspects of Business Approval in the United States

Almost precisely one year later, on June 25, 1968, Pierre Trudeau was appointed Prime Minister of Canada. In the Canadian mythopoetic imagination, the two events—Trudeaumania and the 1960s counterculture—are generally linked, but with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that Trudeau was an improbable and unappealing 1960s avatarTrudeau was no hippy. He, like his near contemporary, John F. Kennedy (who, if he had lived, would have despised hippies), was a well-preserved remnant of the world that the young baby boomers intended to wash away in a hallucinogenic cloud of peace, love, and sandalwood. He was a balding lawyer, older than the majority of their parents, and he wore his flowers in his fitted lapel rather than his thinning hair. Far from being a new-age spiritualist or a cosmic thinker, he was a Catholic who believed in reason and its potential for scientific and social advancement. The only thing he had in common with the hippies was his girlfriends' ages.The uncertainty, which existed from the outset, is natural. Because Trudeau's liberalism shared many of the younger generation's emancipatory goals, most notably the overthrow of sexual mores (hippies in the name of free love against repression; liberals in the name of reason against irrational tradition), it was easy to see them as part of the same project. In fact, they were two branches of the Enlightenment that were diverging so quickly that the newer one was turning back on the older, devouring it rather than reinforcing it.The hippies turned the light of Enlightenment skepticism back on its own premises, discovering a hole at the center of liberalism. Whether Trudeau realized it or not, by 1968 the Age of Reason had met its match in the Age of Aquarius and was on its way out. 

The conflict between his belief in

La raison avant la passion" and the tuned-in and turned-on generation, which believed in magic and good vibrations, could be overlooked as long as they both swept tradition and convention aside. But the philosophical divide was substantial. It was most vividly demonstrated during the FLQ crisis, when Trudeau made it obvious that he had no time for bleeding hearts when they got in the way of his tanks.Trudeau's political goal, which he had been crafting in the pages of Cité Libre since the 1950s, was diametrically opposed to the consciousness-raising movement of 1960s dropouts. Trudeau, unlike the hippies, believed in objective reality that could be known by reason. So much so that he collaborated with law professor Barry Strayer for more than a decade to create a new constitutionalism for Canada based on the premise that politics might be rationally controlled and directed by neutral, unbiased judges.It's hardly revealing the ending to reveal that this isn't what happened. With final responsibility transferred a few hundred yards down Wellington Street from Parliament to the Supreme Court, the Canadian Constitution began to evolve independently, with only indirect impact from the political labor required to hold together an irrational society.After 40 years of such hothouse growth, Canada's legal Constitution today resembles a rare cultivar cultivated by an eccentric recluse. The "living" Constitution, like Des Esseintes' flowers in A Rebours, frequently appears more artificial than alive, as befits a form of government driven by a liberal rationalism that is not naturally and organically linked in theory or practice to the social reality of custom, morality, and public expectation

On April 17, 1982, the Queen signs Canada's 

constitutional proclamation in Ottawa, while Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau looks on. The Queen of Canada established its own Constitution with the stroke of a pen in Ottawa. Ron Poling/Canadian PressA Constitution out of timeTrudeau may have believed that by adopting the American concept of rights-based liberal constitutionalism, he would usher in a new era of logical politics, but it was a late-stage attempt to convert Canada to a dying faith. Trudeau's tenacious political longevity meant that by 1982, he had become a man out of time—a liberal true believer in a society split by the logical consequences of liberalism's philosophy of radical autonomy. Yes, there were constitutions fashioned after the American and Canadian models after 1982, but these were largely faulty or seemingly formal imitations of the originals. Some were liberal imperialist exercises put on freshly liberated colonies in the spirit of guilty hope, while the majority were constitutional kitsch.Canada's own Constitution was ratified at approximately the penultimate time when it was possible to do so here. Politically, the concept of individual autonomy that underpinned 

Trudeau's liberalism2 was beginning 

to show its destructive potential, fracturing the social consensus at a much deeper level than he had anticipated. One obvious result was Quebec's rejection of the new Constitution—an act of defiant self-determination that tapped into the same liberationist drive that underpinned Trudeau's Charter, albeit at the national rather than individual level. Liberalism has no response to a movement that utilized its freedom to oppose liberalism.The struggle for recognition and autonomy did not stop with Quebec. Elijah Harper refused to give unanimous agreement to the Meech Lake Accord in the Manitoba assembly, only eight years after the new Constitution was adopted. His stance demonstrated that Indigenous Canadians were no longer content to remain passive bystanders of other peoples' constitutional self-creation. Just two years later, a majority of the provinces and territories rejected the Charlottetown Accord, leaving the country divided on whether Quebec's special status should be constitutionally recognized as an atavistic oddity within the new liberal order.