Examines how international issues are handled between the Canadian federal government and its provinces.
The ability to make decisions impacting international affairs can be a thorny subject for a federal state like Canada. Provinces wield considerable powers, but does their legal authority extend beyond provincial borders? How is foreign affairs power defined within the law? Foreign Affairs in the Canadian Constitution breaks new ground with a rigorous exploration of these questions.
Scott Fairley explores federal-provincial confrontations over foreign affairs, beginning with the free-trade debate of the 1980s. To contextualize the issues, he traces Canada’s evolution from a semi-colonial to an autonomous nation-state and offers comparative analyses of legal approaches in other federal states, such as Australia and the United States.
Fairley proposes that over time, governmental practice and judicial interpretation have construed foreign affairs as a constitutionally supported field of federal jurisdiction. This meticulously argued conclusion allows us a better understanding of Canada as a unified nation-state within the community of nations.
H. Scott Fairley is a partner at Cambridge LLP, Toronto, with extensive experience litigating constitutional and international issues before all levels of Canadian courts, including the Supreme Court of Canada. He was formerly a tenured professor at the University of Windsor, and served as constitutional counsel to the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General before entering private practice. Dr. Fairley holds two advanced degrees in law, an LL.M from New York University and an SJD from Harvard University. A past president of the Canadian Council on International Law, he has lectured widely and published over seventy articles, comments, and chapters in books. He is also the principal co-author of International Law, a title within the Canadian Encyclopedic Digest.
