I am tempted to apply the same explanation to the constitutional schism that divides this country. Apologists for the new orthodoxy of devolution and special status always protest that they wish only to return Canada to the constitutional status quo, circa 1867, before that mad heretic Trudeau and his centralizing, homogenizing and, oh yes, Americanizing ideas. This "Trudeau vision of Canada," as The Globe put it in its eulogy of Clyde Wells, "challenged the very assumptions upon which Confederation itself was achieved."

This is the Book of Meech. If the federal government withdraws from any responsibility for social programs, well, weren't health, education and welfare assigned to the provinces in the 1867 Constitution? If it also withdraws from a number of areas of federal jurisdiction in favour of the government of Quebec, well, wasn't Quebec always treated a little differently? And if some Canadians have more rights than others, well, let's not get too hung up on this notion of equality, which is, after all, an American idea. Like democracy.

A lot of people believe this. I can only conclude that they must have stopped reading the Constitution part way through: after the bit about provincial powers. If the British North America Act is to be our Bible - Lucien Bouchard speaks reverently of "the constitution of our ancestors" - does it not also include the federal powers of disallowance, of reservation, of Peace, Order and Good Government? Should the Government of Canada regularly revoke acts of provincial legislatures, as it did in the days of Sir John A.?

The idea that the Fathers of Confederation, in the immediate wake of the American Civil War, meant the Constitution to be a bill of provincial rights is the most grotesque misreading of Canadian history. If anything, they erred on the side of centralism. The fact that power has since slipped to the provinces, whether by judicial interpretation or by political expedience - sometimes both at once - should not obscure its centralized origins. Pierre Trudeau's centralism, by comparison, was quite mild, less centralist than federalist; the 1982 Constitution was, on balance, a decentralizing document.

At any rate, the "Trudeau vision of Canada" is hardly the personal oddity the phrase would suggest. It is squarely in the mainstream of our political history, in a line from Macdonald, Laurier, King and St. Laurent. Mr. Trudeau did not invent the Canadian tradition of liberty - "Canada is free," Laurier said, "and freedom is its nationality"; nor was the idea of enshrining rights in law something he smuggled across the border. It was John Diefenbaker, George Grant's anti- American hero, who brought us the Canadian Bill of Rights.

If Canadians, urged on by Mr. Trudeau, reject such constitutional absurdities as special status, or the "two nations" theory that underpins it, it is not because they harbour dog-in-the-manger grudges against Quebec. It may be that they understand it would make the federation unworkable. And they are far more firmly rooted in Canadian history in this respect than are their presumptive betters.

Historians as diverse in outlooks as Donald Creighton and Frank Underhill agree: Confederation was not in any way a compact between two founding nations, English and French. Prof. Underhill first:

"This interpretation is a modern Laurentian fantasy, which can only be fitted into the historical facts by a painful straining of evidence. The conferences out of which the British North America Act originated were conferences among delegates from the colonies of Canada, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland. The Canadian delegates were the members of the Canadian coalition cabinet of 1864; they spoke for Canada as a whole; they did not divide on racial lines. There were no delegates there who had been chosen by a French-Canadian or English- Canadian 'race' or 'nation.' If the Canadian delegates at these conferences spoke in any role but that of Canadians, they spoke as Conservatives and Reformers."

Now hear Prof. Creighton:

"Before 1867, British North America still remained, and was still regarded not as a cultural duality but, in the words of Georges Cartier, as 'a diversity of races.'. . . Language was only one of the many components that made up (this) curious cultural medley. . . . National origin and national tradition - Irish, Scotch and English, as well as French - might be equally influential, and religion, so often sharpened by sectarian bitterness, was perhaps the most important of all. The Fathers of Confederation had to take account of these differences; but their great aim was not the perpetuation of cultural diversity but the establishment of a united nation."

As it was in the beginning, etc. etc. Amen.