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Constitutional amendment ordinarily channels public deliberation through formal, transparent and predictable procedures designed to express the informed aggregated choices of political, popular and institutional actors. Yet the Government of Canada's proposed senator selection reforms concealed a democratically problematic strategy to innovate an informal, obscure and irregular method of constitutional amendment: constitutional amendment by stealth. There are three distinguishing features of constitutional amendment by stealth—distinctions that make stealth amendment stand apart from other types of informal constitutional change: the circumvention of formal amendment rules, the intentional creation of a convention, and the twinned consequences of both promoting and weakening democracy. Constitutional amendment by stealth occurs where political actors consciously establish a new democratic practice whose repetition is intended to compel their successors into compliance. Over time, this practice matures into an unwritten constitutional convention, and consequently becomes informally entrenched in the constitution, though without the democratic legitimacy we commonly associate with an amendment. In this Article, I theorize constitutional amendment by stealth from legal, theoretical and comparative perspectives, and consider its consequences for the rule of law.

Frontmatter -- Preface -- Foreword / Dawson, R. MacGregor -- Contents -- Introduction -- Part I: The Constitution Of Canada -- I. The Constitution Defined -- II. The Flexibility of the Constitution -- Part II. How Past Amendments Were Secured -- III. How Past Amendments Were Secured -- Part III. The Amending Process To-Day -- IV. An Address from Both Houses of Parliament -- V. The Participation of the Provinces -- VI. The Role of the British Parliament -- VII. Conflicting Views on the Amending Process -- Part IV. Proposals For A New Amending Machinery -- VIII. Changes of Procedure Advocated in the Past -- IX. An Approach to the Future -- Appendices -- Bibliography -- Index

No part of a constitution is more important than the rules that govern its amendment and its entrenchment against it. Given the important functions served by formal constitutional amendment rules, we might expect constitutional designers to entrench them against ordinary amendment, for instance by requiring a higher-than-usual quantum of agreement for their amendment or by making them altogether unamendable. Yet relatively few constitutional democracies set a higher threshold for formally amending formal amendment rules. In this Article, I demonstrate that existing written and unwritten limits to formally amending formal amendment rules are unsatisfactory, and I offer modest textual entrenchment strategies to insulate formal amendment rules against ordinary formal amendment in constitutional democracies where the constitutional text exerts an appreciable constraint on political actors. I draw from historical, theoretical and comparative perspectives to suggest that two principles — intertemporality and relativity — should guide constitutional designers in designing formal amendment rules in constitutional democracies.