Book in Progress: The British North America Act (2025)

2025-10-24 Leave a Comment

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[Version 1–October 24, 2025]

WHAT IS A BOOK IN PROGRESS?

A “Book in Progress,” quite simply, is a publication that we at PrimaryDocuments.ca are working on, but which is not yet complete. However, due to the importance of the material both to the field of scholarship and law, we felt an obligation to release the book in this imperfect format. It is our intention to publish this book, once complete, in an eBook and print edition. In the meantime, we will be updating this book in the near future—both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Quantitatively, we have already dug up more notes and drafts from the conference, including those which would be used in Pope’s work (1895). However, we have also found additional notes, which, at first glance, appear to be missing from Pope’s work. This includes bits of notes from later in the conference—for example, in February of 1867. Pope has only included notes from December of 1866. We also have many pieces of correspondence that have not yet been added to this work due to time constraints. We hope to have those transcribed and added to subsequent versions.

Qualitatively, we hope to, analyze the materials in more depth. This analysis will help us, for example, help us uncover authorship of certain documents, or, perhaps more importantly—to more accurately date materials. Sometimes, this will not be possible—for example, our drafts of Section 26 don’t have a date, but we are hopeful we can at least place them in their proper progression. For now, they should be treated as out of order. This is found in our related materials section. In that section, we hope to integrate some of the contents into their proper sections. Section 26 materials will eventually be added into Part II: The British North America Act. It is also likely that in subsequent versions of the book in progress, more materials will go into the “related materials” section until they can be properly classified.

A Note on Dates

The reader is encouraged to treat these dates as tentative for the moment although there are many documents which contain specific dates attached to them in writing. Some documents have been dated through the use of another document—either internally from other documents in this collection or externally (another source altogether). For example, the December 6^th motion creating a committee to study the financial clauses of the London Conference was authenticated using Pope (1895). In some cases, we could not pinpoint an exact date, but could determine the chronology based upon the progression of the clauses over time. In some instances, we simply don’t have a timeline yet—such as the Section 26 drafting history. Since these were part of the drafting history of the British North America Act, we can only date them using the broadest parameters. In this case January-February, 1867. For these, we also don’t have a progression—more study is needed, although we know, for example, that the word “Senate” eventually came to replace “Legislative Council” which would indicate those using the former term would be later in chronology.

A Note on Style

All documents are in a single font, whereas document information and commentary is in another. This an attempt to distinguish the primary document from our notes. Some of the documents incorporate handwritten notes and marginalia. By and large, we followed the rules found in “A Note on Transcriptions,” which follows this editor’s note. However, we did so imperfectly, since this is still a work in progress.

A Note on Footnotes

It should also be noted that all footnotes, for the moment, are tentative and being worked on. Any findings or commentary found in these notes should be taken with a grain of salt until they can be fully investigated. Whenever we mention other documents in these notes, particularly those from the volume, we have attempted to hyperlink them.

Nevertheless, we felt that these materials are necessary for understanding what would become the British North America Act, 1867—or, in its more recent nomenclature—the Constitution Act, 1867. Many of these drafts have never been published and so the current literature is insufficient for understanding the organic development of each clause of the act. What we have now is a sort of flashpoint understanding, which jumps through time missing the steps that brought the drafters to that wording—a “missing link” in the evolutionary chain. And because of that, we felt like this imperfect form, is better than no form at all. We hope that this volume will be of value by jurists, academics, and students alike.

Michael J. Scott, Editor
Charles Dumais, Editor
October, 2025

Note: *In some instances, there are numerous copies of a specific draft (i.e. a copy belonging to John A. Macdonald, and another to Alexander Galt). For this publication, we have consolidated those copies into an amalgamated version, noting the changes unique to each draft in the footnotes. Users can access this amalgamated copy by clicking the entry with the asterisk or viewing the eBook. If the user wishes to see all the copies of that version, they can scroll down to “Other Copies” at the bottom of the page.

**There are also drafts with multiple copies, but of which no meaningful amendments are made in the other copies, and we used a single copy as the standard, representative version of the draft. If the user wishes to see all the copies of that version, they can scroll down to “Other Copies” at the bottom of the page.