Historically, Canada’s Constitution has been principally viewed as a federal framework or a rights bulwark. This book offers a brand new interpretation. The “Strategic Constitution,” as proposed by Irvin Studin, can be a framework for Canada to project strategic power in the world. This framework lays the foundations for a new school of Canadian constitutional scholarship.

Studin begins by reducing the Constitution to its strategically relevant essentials or building blocks. He then provides a wide-ranging audit of the Constitution in terms of its implications for so-called factors of strategic power: the military, diplomacy, executive potency, natural resources, the economy, strategic communications, and the national population. He later applies the Strategic Constitution framework to four policy case studies: Canadian regional leadership in the Americas; bona fide war (as in Afghanistan); Arctic sovereignty; and counterterrorism.

Provocative and well-argued, this book makes the case for the Constitution being a highly flexible national framework that quietly harbours seeds of national strategic potency.

Irvin Studin is MPP program director and assistant professor in the School of Public Policy and Governance, University of Toronto. In 2012, he was visiting senior fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy, National University of Singapore. He is co-founder of Ukraine’s Higher School of Public Administration (in Kiev). He worked for a number of years in the Privy Council Office in Ottawa, as well as in the Australian Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Canberra. Studin lectures around the world in a number of languages and has written for publications ranging from the Financial Times to the Globe and Mail, Le Devoir and the Straits Times. He is also editor-in-chief and publisher of Global Brief magazine.

Irvin Studin's profile page