I was reading Ryan Alford's By Authority of Parliament and thinking about how our modern commercial markets and domestic institutions operate on a silent, unexamined assumption that constitutional stability is a permanent fixture. In the daily execution of corporate transactions we take for granted that our legal frameworks are insulated from arbitrary legislative or executive overreach. Alford’s exploration of Canada's constitutional inheritance reveals that this stability is not actually an organic baseline but instead a product of historical crises (p. 9, 158-9). Our entire legal order is built upon "unspoken parameters of constitutional innovation" designed to replace the "spurious loyalty" of arbitrary colonial-era rule (p. 129) with a durable, predictable system of governance. The 1982 patriation of the Constitution was supposed to decisively resolve this by establishing constitutional supremacy. Under Section 52 , the Constitution became the supreme...