1 Most of these works are in Cairns, Alan C., Disruptions: Constitutional Struggles, from the Charter to Meech Lake, ed. by Williams, Douglas E. (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991).Google Scholar

2 Cairns, Alan C., “Citizens (Outsiders) and Governments (Insiders) in Constitution-Making: The Case of Meech Lake,” Canadian Public Policy 14 (1988), S121–45CrossRefGoogle Scholar, in Disruptions, 109.Google Scholar

3 Cairns, Alan C., “Political Science, Ethnicity, and the Canadian Constitution,” in Shugarman, David and Whitaker, Reg, eds., Federalism and Political Community: Essays in Honour of Donald Smiley (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 1989)Google Scholar, in Disruptions, 167.Google Scholar

4 Cairns, , “Citizens (Outsiders),” in Disruptions, 112–15.Google Scholar

5 Cairns, Alan C., “Federalism and the Provinces,” in Symonds, Hilda and Oberlander, H. Peter, eds., Meech Lake: From Centre to Periphery (Vancouver: University of British Columbia, Centre for Human Settlements, 1988)Google Scholar, in Disruptions, 147.Google Scholar

6 Cairns, , “Citizens (Outsiders),” in Disruptions, 112.Google Scholar

7 Cairns, Alan C., “Author's Introduction,” in Disruptions, 20.Google Scholar

8 Ibid., 30.

9 His first articles after the signing of the Meech Lake Accord focus on the comments of these leaders to the various parliamentary committees studying the Accord (see Cairns, , “Citizens [Outsiders]”Google Scholar and “Political Science, Ethnicity”); but he hints that his attention to these elite comments is motivated by an interest in the attitudes of the Canadian public when he begins one of his points with “If [the elite] briefs are even minimally representative of how Canadians feel…” (“Citizens [Outsiders],” in Disruptions, 127).Google Scholar

10 He first refers to an “Emerging Constitutional Culture,” in Cairns, Alan, “Ottawa, The Provinces and Meech Lake,” in Gibbins, Roger with Palmer, Howard, Rustad, Brian and Taras, David, eds., Meech Lake and Canada: Perspectives from the West (Edmonton: Academic Publishing, 1988)Google Scholar; in Disruptions, 159Google Scholar: “The process leading up to the 1982 Constitution Act and much of its content… have transformed the Canadian constitutional culture in a manner that explains much of the hostility that Meech Lake has aroused.”

11 We would like to thank one of the Journal's anonymous reviewers for drawing our attention to this point.

12 For example, at one point in his introduction to Disruptions the effect is specific to certain groups. “For many of the citizens' groups, however, it [the Charter] was profoundly status-enhancing. For the first time they had a major place in the constitutional order. The constitution spoke to them generally in the language of rights, and often specifically to particular groups by individual clauses that pertained especially to them” (21). He goes on to speak of “the various groups that had been catalysed into constitutional self-consciousness by the Charter” (22).

13 In the first rendition of the Citizens' Constitution Theory, the Charter has a more general effect. Cairns claims it “bypassed governments and spoke directly to Canadians by defining them as bearers of rights” (“Citizens [Outsiders],” in Disruptions, 109Google Scholar). He identifies the same general effect in the introduction to his 1991 collection. “To some extent, the Charter strengthens the civic identity of English Canada. It has generated a much greater sense of connection to the constitution for English Canadians than formerly prevailed.…” He then qualifies this statement by referring to a specific effect. “On the other hand, that consciousness of a constitutional connection is often highly particularistic, stronger at the level of women, ethnic groups, and aboriginals (although their linkage is not primarily with the Charter) than at the level of English Canada” (“Author's Introduction,” in Disruptions).

14 Cairns, , “Author's Introduction,” in Disruptions, 19.Google Scholar

15 In the US, similar analyses of the interplay between constitution-level politics and the wider political environment can be found in Franklin, Charles H. and Kosaki, Liane C., “Republican Schoolmaster: The United States Supreme Court, Public Opinion and Abortion,” American Political Science Review 83 (1989), 751–71CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Caldeira, Gregory A., “Neither the Purse Nor the Sword: Dynamics of Confidence in the Supreme Court,” American Political Science Review 80 (1986), 1209–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Barnum, David F., “The Supreme Court and Public Opinion: Judicial Decision-making in the Post-New Deal Period,” Journal of Politics 47 (1985), 652–66.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

16 Cairns, , “Ottawa, the Provinces,” in Disruptions, 160Google Scholar (emphasis added). He calls the Charter the “most important political stimulus to citizen constitutional participation, at least in English Canada…” (“Author's Introduction,” in Disruptions, 20Google Scholar). He also claims that, in constitutional talks until 1982, the idea that governments and political parties were the leading constitutional actors was sustained “by the absence of a Charter, which was later to draw Canadians directly into the constitutional order…” (ibid., 17–18). In an earlier essay, he writes of the “process leading up to the 1982 Constitution Act and much of its content,” as having “transformed the Canadian constitutional culture in a manner that explains much of the hostility that Meech Lake has aroused” (Cairns, , “Ottawa, the Provinces and Meech Lake,” in Disruptions, 159Google Scholar). In fact, he states bluntly that “The Charter fosters a participatory ethic” (160).

17 Soon after the Accord was unveiled, he writes that in “this constitutional culture that is beginning to take shape as a result of the 1982 Constitution Act, especially of the Charter, government control of the amending process, once considered natural, now appears as an arrogant elitism. The rights and recognitions entrenched in the Charter have generated beliefs that their possessors are entitled to participate in constitutional change” (Cairns, , “Ottawa, the Provinces and Meech Lake,” in Disruptions, 160Google Scholar). He later reiterates the contradiction by noting that the Meech Lake process “clearly identified Canadians as subjects of an elite government-dominated constitutional order rather than as citizen participants in its unfolding” (Cairns, , “Political Science, Ethnicity,” in Disruptions, 166).Google Scholar

18 Cairns, , “Citizens (Outsiders),” in Disruptions, 110.Google Scholar

19 Ibid., 112.

20 Inglehart, Ronald, Culture Shift in Advanced Industrial Society (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; Inglehart, Ronald, “Post-materialism in an Environment of Insecurity,” American Political Science Review 75 (1981), 880–900CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Inglehart, Ronald, “The Silent Revolution in Europe: Intergenerational Change in Post-industrial Societies,” American Political Science Review 65 (1971), 991–1017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

21 Inglehart, , Culture ShiftGoogle Scholar, and Dalton, Russell, Citizen Politics in Western Democracies (Chatham: Chatham House, 1988).Google Scholar

22 Kitschelt, Herbert, “Social Democracy and Liberal Corporatism: Swedish and Austrian Left Parties in Crisis,”Google Scholar paper presented to the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, San Francisco, 1990.

23 The link between New Politics and Elite-Challenging Political Participation is well-documented in Inglehart, , Culture ShiftGoogle Scholar, and Dalton, , Citizen PoliticsGoogle Scholar. Cairns notes the same rise in Elite-Challenging Participation in several places. In the in troduction to Disruptions he notes that by 1987, “the traditional dominance of governments in formal constitutional change no longer appeared legitimate to the representatives of the numerous groups that challenged its substance and process” (18). This drop in legitimacy for government dominance was accompanied by “constitutional pressures from below, which were especially strong in English Canada,… all [of which] contested the dominance of governments as power centres in the constitutional order…” (15). Commenting on parliamentary hearings on the Meech Lake Accord, he claims that “No reader of the proceedings of the Special Joint Committee on the Meech Lake Accord or of the Senate Committee of the Whole can fail to be struck by the vehemence and bitterness with which the spokespersons from various groups challenged the legitimacy of a closed-door elite bargaining process restricted to governments” (“Citizens [Outsiders],” in Disruptions, 113).Google Scholar

24 Again, the link between New Politics and the politicization of minority issues is well canvassed in Inglehart, Culture Shift. For evidence that the New Politics orientation is linked to such native issues as self-government, see Wohlfeld, Monika J. and Nevitte, Neil, “Postindustrial Value Change and Support for Native Issues,” Canadian Ethnic Studies 22 (1990), 56–68Google Scholar. Cairns devotes an entire essay to the link between the Charter and the politicization of minority issues. He sees “the qualitative changes in the relation of the post-1982 constitution to Canadian society” as “draw[ing] constitutional discourse into new themes of ethnicity, culture, race, and identity…” (Cairns, , “Political Science, Ethnicity,” in Disruptions, 165).Google Scholar

25 Offe, Klaus, Contradictions of the Welfare State (Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1984)Google Scholar; Dalton, Russell and Kuechler, Manfred, Challenging the Political Order: New Social and Political Movements in Western Democracies (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990)Google Scholar; and Kitschelt, , “Social Democracy.”Google Scholar

26 Maslow, A. H., Motivation and Personality (New York: Harper, 1954).Google Scholar

27 Inglehart, , Culture ShiftGoogle Scholar, and Inglehart, , “Post-materialism.”Google Scholar

28 Nevitte, Neil, “New Politics, the Charter and Political Participation,” in Bakvis, Herman, ed., Representation, Integration and Political Parties in Canada (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1991), 355–417Google Scholar, and Wohlfeld, and Nevitte, , “Postindustrial Value Change.”Google Scholar

29 While Cairns never gives a name to those who do not qualify as “Charter Canadians,” there must be a complementary category. We lump all those who are not Charter Canadians together, and label them simply “non-Charter Canadians.”

30 Barnes, Samuel, Kaase, Max et al. , Political Action (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1979)Google Scholar, and Dalton, , Citizen Politics.Google Scholar

31 Przeworski, Adam and Teune, Henry, The Logic of Comparative Social Inquiry (New York: J. Wiley and Sons, 1970), 20–26.Google Scholar

32 The case of Andrews v. Law Society of B.C., [1988]Google Scholar 1 S.C.R., 143, is the leading interpretation of section 15. It found that discrimination against non-citizens (immigrants) violated section 15. Discrimination on the basis of sex is explicitly prohibited in sections 15 and 28 of the Charter. Age is similarly explicitly mentioned as a prohibited ground of discrimination in section 15.

33 Alpha test of reliability: 6.

34 Cairns includes women, native peoples, official-language minorities, ethnic minorities and the disabled in his category of “Charter Canadians.” Since natives, members of official-language minorities and persons with disabilities constitute only a small part of our sample, we have only counted non-British, non-French ethnic minorities in our category of “Charter Canadians.” Women constitute such a large part of this sample (N = 842) that to count them as “Charter Canadians” would make the category very large and reduce its ability to discriminate. Nonetheless, including women in the Charter Canadian category does not increase the explanatory power of the Charter Canadian/non-Charter Canadian dichotomy. In fact, it strengthens the distinctions between the two groups in the opposite direction expected by our rendering of the Citizens' Constitution Theory.

35 Using women's groups as a case study of the court activities of Charter Canadians, Cairns finds that “Like Ontario Premier Oliver Mowat of an earlier generation, women's groups see the courts as a potential ally and they have established legal funds to serve their litigation strategy” (Cairns, , “Citizens [Outsiders],” in Disruptions, 118–19Google Scholar; emphasis added).

36 Interestingly, again adherents of both value orientations are more confident in the legal system than in Parliament.

37 Here, we use a standard indicator of unconventional political participation, or protest behaviour, as our measure of elite-challenging participation (Barnes, , Kaase, et al. , Political ActionGoogle Scholar, and Dalton, , Citizen Politics).Google Scholar

38 In fact, Cairns's formulation of the Citizens' Constitution Theory crystallized as the debates surrounding the Accord proceeded.

39 “For women,” he says, “Meech Lake was seen as a setback” (Cairns, , “Citizens [Outsiders],” in Disruptions, 118Google Scholar). Ethnic groups see the primacy of English and French in Meech Lake as “a rebuff, as the latest indication that the multicultural components of Canadian society are not to enjoy equivalent constitutional status with founding peoples” (12). Furthermore, “Meech Lake confirmed aboriginals' weakness” (122).

40 The 1990 Canadian segment of the World Values Survey was conducted in mid-June, after the marathon meeting of the first ministers in Ottawa that tried to salvage the Accord. Therefore, the timing of the survey field work may have “contaminated” the results. Fortunately, the 1988 Canadian National Election Survey allows us to verify our findings. The 1988 NES also asked Canadians about the Accord. In 1988 Charter and non-Charter Canadians outside Quebec did not have statistically significant differences of opinion about the Accord (chi-square 4.37; p = 11). Yet, postmaterialists were significantly more likely than materialists to oppose the Accord (chi-square 28.03; p = 00). Thus, two completely different data sets conducted at different times produce the same direction of relationships.

41 The reasons are summarized by Pedhazur, E. J., Multiple Regression in Behavioral Research: Explanation and Prediction (Toronto: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1973).Google Scholar

42 The major advantage of path analysis over, say, multiple regression is that path analysis evaluates both the direct and indirect effects of the variables that are hypothesized to cause the observed effects (ibid., 580).

43 In fact, the World Values Survey only included francophones in Quebec. Thus Table 2 only includes responses from Quebec francophones.

44 Materialists and postmaterialists in Quebec have almost the same levels of trust in the legal system.

45 Dalton and Kuechler, Challenging the Political Order.