Over the past thirty years, political scientist Alan Cairns has become recognized as perhaps the leading authority on the evolving Canadian constitution and its relationship to government actors (political leaders, the judiciary, the bureaucracy) and to ordinary citizens. In this third volumeof his essays, Cairns examines how Canada and Canadians have changed in recent years and why this change has been both traumatic and halting. As he writes in the Introduction, "In nearly every essay, the past is a brooding visitor, shaping the issues we confront, influencing the criteria andprocessess by which we respond, defining the communities that struggle for constitutional living space, or surviving as memories in the minds of the constitutional participants." And those participants have changed greatly in less than a generation from the eleven male political leaders of executivefederalism to include women, Aboriginals, the disabled, "third-force" ethnic Canadians, and yet others, such as gays and lesbians, who are knocking on the doors of the state for constitutional recognition. Divided into six parts - "The Past, Present, and Future of the Canadian State," "Where WeHave Come From," "The New Constitutional Culture," "Citizenship and the Constitution," "Constitutional Reform," and "The Constitutional Future" - the thirteen essays in Reconfigurations, while never veering too far away from the tremendous impact of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and of the tworecent failures at constitutional renewal (Meech Lake and Charlottetown), consider how constitutional change has affected and not affected the embedded state and its burgeoning bureaucracy, Aboriginal Canadians, third-force Canadians, and our political leaders. Also prominent in these extendeddiscussions is the inescapable fact of the English and French "founding peoples," and in the concluding chapter, written expecially for this volume, Cairns looks at Canada's constitutional future through the lens of the September, 1994, Quebec provincial election.

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