By David Livingstone, May 30, 2025
Like many Canadians, I watched King Charles III open the 45th Parliament on May 27, 2025. The customs and conventions that surround the event are strange and marvelous, and they are central to our distinct political identify. I’ve spent much of my career trying to convey to young people what these conventions are, where they come from, the principles they represent, and why these conventions still matter. Much of what I have come to know about Canada’s political principles was inspired by the work of Professor Janet Ajzenstat.
Sadly, I learned from a colleague that Professor Ajzenstat passed away on May 27, the same day our monarch was delivering the Speech from the Throne. The timing is poignant, for it was Ajzenstat’s intention, through her careful scholarship, to bring our attention back to the political principles that form our unique constitutional order.
I completed a master’s degree in politics at the University of Alberta under the brilliant mentorship of Professor Leon Craig before continuing my journey toward earning a PhD at the University of Dallas, a school well-known at that time for its political philosophy program. What I did not expect to find was an incredibly rich American tradition of political thought stretching back to the founders of the republic and even further back into the enlightenment and pre-enlightenment figures. I was fascinated. Yet, as a Canadian studying the American Founding in a US college, the thought inevitably occurred to me: was anyone in Canada taking a similar approach to the study of our own founding documents and tradition?
When I thought back to my education in Canada, I wondered, where were the original speeches of those individuals who argued for and against Canadian Confederation? What were the principles that those who wrote the British North America Act were trying to enshrine in our most basic laws?
In trying to answer these questions, I stumbled upon the work of Janet Ajzenstat. She was already well down this path, and I found it heartening that she was willing to take on the myth that I had subconsciously absorbed, that those who met in Quebec City in 1864 for three weeks to hammer out the British North America Act had no principles to speak of; that these were merely practical men involved in political horse-trading (Globe and Mail 2025).
The Americans, by contrast, were clearly revolutionaries. When “it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” Thomas Jefferson informs us, “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation” (US National Archives 2025). But we Canadians did not rebel, and we did not need to declare the causes for our separation. The myth therefore states that we Canadians may as well forget about looking very deeply for our political principles.
Ajzenstat quotes Ramsay Cook as a purveyor of this myth: “It is well known that the Fathers of Confederation were pragmatic lawyers for the most part, more given to fine tuning the details of a constitutional act than to waxing philosophical about human rights or national goals” (Ajzenstat 2010, 8).
“Hogwash” was Professor Ajzenstat’s response. Her scholarship set out to prove the Ramsay Cooks of the world wrong, and in so doing, blaze a trail for more scholars to begin to uncover the buried threads of our own political tradition.
Professor Ajzenstat, along with Ian Gentles and William Gairdner, set out to reintroduce Canada’s founding documents to a new generation of readers and scholars so we could read for ourselves what our founders had set out to accomplish and the reasons they put forward to defend their cause. In fact, for this alone the nation should thank Professor Ajzenstat and her co-editors. So neglectful are we of our own history that the documents that one would need to assess claim about our founding were almost impossible for the ordinary citizen to access. When I was a student in America, I could wander down to any used bookstore and find copies of the speeches of Thomas Jefferson, the Federalist Papers, or the writings of Abraham Lincoln. In Canada our primary documents were hard to find. The introduction to Canada’s Founding Debates, published in 1999, states that “Many of the speeches [in the volume] have not been published since Confederation (Ajzenstat et al. 1999)” (And we wonder why civic education and knowledge of our own history is so severely lacking in this country.)
Professor Ajzenstat credits the late Allan Bloom for inspiring her own work on the Canadian founding (Ajzenstat 2008). She had the great fortune of studying with Bloom at the University of Toronto:
Allan Bloom told me to read Canadian constitutional history from the perspective of political philosophy. I’d hoped to do a PhD thesis on Rousseau, or Plato… I wasn’t going to get it. Not that he ruled out the possibility of a thesis on Rousseau. (Plato was forbidden. I didn’t have Greek.) But he urgently recommended study of Canadian political history. I was crushed. The Canadian constitution? It seemed like such a small thing to devote one’s life to. I was going to be turning my back on the world of great ideas (quoted in Livingstone 2015, 5).
Yet, to her amazement, she discovered she was not turning her back on the world of great ideas. There they were, in the speeches of the Canadians who were wrestling with the problem of a broken constitutional order, the result of the Act of Union 1840. It was falling apart. It was becoming apparent to men like George Brown, John A. Macdonald, George Etienne-Cartier and Thomas D’Arcy McGee that the old structure – the old regime – would have to be replaced. The “constitution” that had united Upper and Lower Canada into the single Province of Canada in the 1840s was lying in tatters. The legislative assembly had suspended as many as thirty of its provisions and, just as importantly for people like McGee, “it was not the act of the people of Canada. It was imposed on the people of Canada by Imperial authority alone.” The Canadians were not satisfied with this “imperial imposition.” They were seeking to create a constitution themselves.
Though this was not a revolutionary effort, it still required them to state their principles, to debate them, and to codify them in the British North America Act (Government of Canada 2025). It’s true, the document ultimately had to be passed by the British Parliament, but the point is, it was created by the Canadians for Canadians. Reflecting on it later, George Brown proudly asserted that “There is no instance of record of a colony peacefully remodeling its own constitution.” Instead, “such changes having been always the work of the parent state and not the colonists themselves.” Yet, he asserted, “Canada is rightly setting the example of a new and better state of things” (quoted in Moore 2015, 46).
And so, armed with such knowledge from the primary documents, Professor Ajzenstat was keen to set the record straight and to call attention to our own history of constitution making: “The ‘Victorian gentlemen’ who made Canada believed it their task, first and last, to secure the blessings of British liberty for their fellows and their descendants. It is more than time to restore to them the dignity and honour that is their due and to transform them from simple-minded Victorian forerunners to intelligent and thoughtful men who designed a great and innovative political constitution” (Ajzenstat 2010, 8–10).
Ajzenstat rejected the view of historians like Donald Creighton who maintained that “colonials who had grown up in a political system which they valued, and which they had not the slightest intention of trying to change by revolution. For them the favourite myths of the Enlightenment did not possess even a quaintly antiquarian interest” (quoted in Ajzenstat 2010, 8). On the contrary, Ajzenstat discovered that these “colonials” were fervently interested in discussing issues of liberty and equality and how to enshrine those in law. They knew their history, and they cited works of philosophers and statesmen during their debates about the constitution they were forming. These were “men who were well read, intellectually vigorous, and rhetorically accomplished. Canada indeed stands on stronger and more philosophical foundations, foundations more steeped in a concern with liberty, than Creighton supposed. We have every reason to be proud of those whose minds and energies gave us Canada” (Ajzenstat 2010, 9).
My own work on the thought of Thomas D’Arcy McGee is largely inspired by Janet Ajzenstat. I also have the dubious honour of producing an edited collection in 2015 entitled Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime (McGill-Queens University Press) that contains the last essay Professor Ajzenstat published. I say dubious only because it is an honour I neither sought nor wished for. We all would have been better off and better informed had she produced more scholarship. Her essay came out just shorty after her book Discovering Confederation: A Canadian’s Story (McGill-Queen’s Press 2014).
I often have the students in my introduction to Canadian politics and government courses read Professor Ajzenstat’s essay as a way of getting them to see the importance of knowing our own tradition and the roots of our regime. I remind them that the conventions of responsible government in Canada, which Professor Ajzenstat explored at length and with depth and sophistication, came about through hard work and sacrifice. They are central to who we are and how our founders chose to project freedom and the rule of law. Yet I also insist that my students understand that conventions, unlike laws, are not enforced by courts or by police. Conventions need to be enforced “politically,” which means they need to be enforced not least of all by us, the citizens. But we will only be able to enforce them if we know what those conventions are and why they matter. We have Janet Ajzenstat to thank for reminding Canadians about precisely those things.
It’s been said that the scholar Leo Strauss revived the study of political philosophy and restored it to its rightful place in the academy after it had languished for decades. I believe we have Janet Ajzenstat to thank for her work in restoring Canadian political thought to its rightful place in the academy. Our entire nation is the better for it.
In that final essay she published, Professor Ajzenstat concludes by asking the perennial questions – who are we as Canadians? What do have in common? These are questions on the minds of many people these days:
Let me suggest that what we have in common is our citizenship in a country made by the Fathers of Confederation and the ratifying legislators. Many things have changed in this country since Confederation, but Canada is still a federal regime governed by parliamentary institutions. Its foundations are rooted in the political philosophy of the European Enlightenment, and Locke’s philosophy of liberty. What we have in common is that precious heritage of equal liberty and consent (Ajzenstat 2015, 40).
Occasionally, coincidences occur in political history that make one pause for a moment and wonder whether, indeed, we are merely players in larger drama unfolding according to a higher plan. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, two great protagonists in the unfolding of the American revolution, died on the same day: July 4, 1826 – precisely fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
Janet Ajzenstat passed away in the company of her family on the day that the elected members of the Canadian House of Commons were led to the Senate by the Usher of the Black Rod to listen to our King read the Speech from the Throne. This was one of only three occasions when the monarch personally opened the Canadian Parliament, and in doing so enacted the conventions central to responsible government whose origins we can trace back through English constitutional history to at least 1640 if not even further back to the Magna Carta of 1215. These are the very conventions and constitutional principles that define Canada, and that Professor Ajzenstat insisted we must know and cherish if we are to be heirs worthy of sustaining this precious trust bequeathed to us by our forbearers. Those of us who follow in her footsteps owe it to the next generation to extend her work and to enlighten our fellow citizens about the principles of our free government.
Rest in peace, Professor Janet Ajzenstat.
About the author
David Livingstone is a professor of liberal studies and political studies at Vancouver Island University and a contributing writer to the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
References
Ajzenstat, Janet. 2008. “What Allan Bloom Told Me.” The Idea File, May 7, 2008. Available at https://janetajzenstat.wordpress.com/2008/05/07/what-allan-bloom-told-me/
Ajzenstat, Janet. 2010. “Confederation and Individual Liberty,” Canada’s Founding Ideas, Macdonald-Laurier Institute. Available at https://macdonaldlaurier.ca/mli-files/pdf/ConfederationLiberty.pdf
Ajzenstat, Janet. 2015. “When Canadians Rewrote Their History: Discarding ‘Liberty’ and Embracing ‘Community.’” In Liberal Education, Civic Education, and the Canadian Regime: Past Principles and Present Challenges, ed. by David W. Livingstone. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Available at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10457097.2016.1179550.
Ajzenstat, Janet, Paul Romney, Ian Gentles, and William Gairdner. 1999. Canada’s Founding Debates. Stoddart Publishing/University of Toronto Press. Available at https://utppublishing.com/doi/book/10.3138/9780802086075.
Globe and Mail. 2025. “Janet Ajzenstat.” Via Legacy.com. Obituary, (May 29–June 2, 2025). Available at https://www.legacy.com/ca/obituaries/theglobeandmail/name/janet-ajzenstat-obituary?id=58501362.
Government of Canada. 2025. British North America Act, 1867 – Enactment no. 1. Accessed May 2025. Available at https://justice.gc.ca/eng/rp-pr/csj-sjc/constitution/lawreg-loireg/p1t11.html.
Moore, Christopher. 2015. Three Weeks in Quebec City: The Meeting that Made Canada. Allen Lane. Available at https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/417245/the-history-of-canada-series-three-weeks-in-quebec-city-by-christopher-moore/9780143194507.
US National Archives. 2025. “Declaration of Independence: A Transcription.” America’s Founding Documents. Accessed May 2025. Available at https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/declaration-transcript.
