 Hello, this is Waylon Chao and welcome to the Constitution of Canada. This is the first of a three-part series. In this first part, we'll first look at the history behind the creation and evolution of the Canadian Constitution, and then explain what exactly is a Constitution, and more specifically how does the Constitution create our system of government, and lastly, we'll look at the rules for amending the Constitution. Let's go over a very brief history of what led to the Constitution of Canada, and how it has changed over the years. We start back in 1864, so at that time, Canada was still a colony of the United Kingdom. So this is a painting of the fathers, or what's called the Fathers of Confederation at the very centre there, near the centre standing up, is the first Prime Minister of Canada, Sir John A. MacDonald. So this is the Fathers of Confederation getting together to discuss and agree to the terms of Confederation, making Canada into an independent country. Now, because Canada was merely a colony of the UK, they had to then get the UK Parliament to pass legislation to make Canada into an independent country. So that piece of British legislation is called the British North America Act, or BNA Act, for short. So it applied to, as you can see from the title, the Union of Canada, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. So Canada refers to Upper Canada, which we now know as Ontario, Lower Canada, which we now know as Quebec, and Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Those are the four original provinces of Canada. And once Parliament approved the BNA Act, Queen Victoria gave her royal assent to the BNA Act and issued a royal proclamation proclaiming that Canada was now one Dominion under the name of Canada. So here's a map of Canada as it was at the beginning on July 1, 1867. So the lands that are in sort of light beige colour, Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia is what constituted Canada at the very beginning on July 1, 1867. You'll notice that Ontario, Quebec is much smaller than what it is now. So over the years Canada has expanded to a much larger territory. That is what we see today with the ten provinces from coast to coast to coast and also three territories, the Yukon Territory, North West Territory and Nunavut. Now the next major change in terms of the Canadian constitution was in 1982 because if you recall I just mentioned that the BNA Act, the British North America Act, was a piece of British legislation, an act of the British Parliament. And the BNA Act was the Canadian constitution for many years. So that piece of British legislation was our Canadian constitution. I guess it wasn't really Canadian. And that's why in 1982 our then Prime Minister repatriated our constitution to Canada. So what that meant was to make our constitution now a piece of Canadian legislation instead of a British legislation. So you hear it, you see in this picture sitting at the table on the left is Pierre Elliott Trudeau who was the Prime Minister at that time. So he's the father of Justin just in case you didn't know. And signing the new constitution is Queen Elizabeth II. So what she was signing was the new constitution which is made up of two acts of parliament. We have the Constitution Act 1867 and the Constitution Act 1982. So the Constitution Act 1867 is essentially the BNA Act renamed but now is a piece of Canadian legislation instead of British legislation. And what was added to the constitution most notably was the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms which is contained in the Constitution Act 1982. Let's now explain what is a constitution. In other words, how does the constitution create our current system of government that we know in Canada? So here's our beautiful country as we know it today and let's imagine our country being this one big house. And within this house are our various governments. We have the federal government or federal parliament that is located in Ottawa which and acts laws that are applicable throughout Canada. And we also have our provincial governments in the form of provincial legislatures in each of the ten provinces. So what built this house? So in other words, what created these two different levels of government? So we look to the BNA Act or what is now known as the Constitution Act 1867. So there are specific sections that created these different governments. So there is section 17 which created the parliament for Canada and there are three other sections which created the legislative assemblies for each of the four original provinces of Canada being Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. So now that these governments have been created by the Constitution Act 1867, we now need to look at what are the house rules we have in this house? So what are governments able to do or not do? What are the rules that determine that? The first set of rules or the overall general rule is contained in the Constitution Act 1982. So there it says that the Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada which means that any law that's passed by any government in Canada has to be consistent with the rules in the Constitution. If any law is not consistent with the Constitution then that law can be declared to be invalid or in other words of no force or effect. So what are these specific rules within the Constitution? The first major set of rules is called the Division of Lawmaking Powers or Division of Powers for short. And that's found, those rules are found in the Constitution Act 1867. So there are specific sections in there which have like a list of powers that are allocated to the federal parliament and a different list of powers that are allocated to the provincial legislatures. And we'll talk more in depth about the Division of Lawmaking Powers in the next part, in the next video. The other set of rules that determine what governments can or cannot do in the Constitution is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So this was added in 1982 to our Constitution. The role of the charter is essentially to restrict the ability of government. So when governments are exercising their lawmaking powers under the Constitution Act 1867 in that exercise, they cannot contravene basic rights and freedoms that are protected by the charter. And we'll talk about the charter more in depth in Part 3. If we ever want to change or amend the Constitution, there are specific rules in the Constitution which set up the requirements that need to be met. Those rules are often referred to as the amending formula. The amending formula requires that any amendment needs to be approved by both the federal parliament. So remember, the federal parliament is made up of the House of Commons and the Senate, so both of those houses of parliament need to approve of the amendment. And the second requirement is the approval of the legislatures of at least two-thirds of the provinces that have at least 50% of the population of Canada. So let's unpack that second requirement. So we need the approval of at least two-thirds of the provinces. There are 10 provinces, so we need at least seven provinces to approve of an amendment. And those provinces that approve of the amendment, the total population of those provinces has to be at least 50% of the total population of Canada. So you can see very quickly, based on this amending formula, that at the very least, no one government, whether it be federal or provincial in Canada, can on its own amend the Constitution. There has to be some high level of consensus within the country to have an amendment to the Constitution. So if you look at the map here, I've put in the percentage population figures for each of the provinces. So if you do some very quick and rudimentary math, you'll realize that to be able to satisfy that 50% of the population requirement, we need the approval of at least either Ontario or Quebec for any constitutional amendment to be successful. If both of those provinces, both Ontario and Quebec, do not approve of a constitutional amendment, it's just not possible, based on these current census figures, to be able to meet that 50% population requirement.