How very CBC it all was: 72 Hours to Remake Canada. Three days? No, 72 hours! Rush! Crisis! Decide! Agree! Will they make it? Can they do it? 72 hours! To remake Canada! How? It doesn't matter! Agree! Agree! Agree! Any suggestion that Canada might not actually be in need of remaking, or leastways not by Thursday - indeed, that it is by most measures among the highest achievements of human statecraft - was excluded from the start.

A coven of nightmarish figures was sent to torment us, screaming sibyls from a half-remembered past: Joe Clark, puffing himself up to alarming diameters, as if to ward off predators; Bob Rae, chewing, an expression meant to show concern and, yes, candour; Ovide Mercredi, a barren rockface of reproach - Oh God, make it end. You thought they had departed, these unlamented statesmen, chastened by Charlottetown, beaten at the ballot box? No. The political class endures, sleeping in little tenured crevices and feeding on televised panel discussions, a vast army of the undead waiting for constitutional night to fall.

But this time, they would not save the country alone. This time, they would work with the pliant clay of the common people. What could be more natural or unforced: take two dozen suspiciously articulate Canadians, ground through the mills of diversity down to the last demographic decimal point, and lock them up in a windowless room for three days, shining Joe Clark through the peephole at them now and again. What do you suppose their response might be? Meech Lake! Charlottetown! Two nations! Special status! Look, Ma: We're saving the country!

We have seen this sort of thing before: those tinny, self-conscious exchanges, in that hollow voice people assume when they are being spontaneous for the cameras. And always, lurking just outside the room, Hana, mad, staring Hana, ready to assault each participant as they emerged and pin them with her halogen eyes.

If it was all so drearily predictable, an exact miniature replica of the Charlottetown conferences, it is because precisely the same dynamics were at work. Consensus-based decision-making tends to the totalitarian in any event; mix in the virus of identity politics, and the results are truly frightening. The most determinedly aggrieved - in this case, a telegenic law student from Quebec - begin by raising the emotional thermostat several degrees. Everyone else feels uncomfortable, and rushes to show how reasonable and accommodating they can be. From then on, all is end-game: anyone who tries to raise a point of principle is effortlessly crushed, tried and convicted on a charge of obstructing the consensus.

The final communique, accordingly, looks much the same as every other to emerge from this process: a series of tribal war-whoops, signalling the victory of every narrow interest over the common good; an appeal to compromise, where none is evident. Canada, so far as it appears at all, is carved up into "not only a union of provinces and territories but also a partnership of two founding peoples, two societies, two nations," served on a bed of First Nations, garnished with immigrants, but nowhere described as a nation or even a country. There is no mention of national standards, nor a federalist system of government. Deliberately so.

Though as a general principle "power should be exercised where it can best serve the people," this in practice means a list of powers that "can best be exercised by the provinces," especially Quebec. The Canadian economic union "should be strengthened" (how? by whom?), but the federal government "should not use its spending power to intrude in areas of provincial jurisdiction." For that would imply an over-riding national interest, and as we know, there is no Canadian nation. Quebecers may be a "predominantly French-speaking people" - there you are, you darling little Anglos - but Canadians are, well, Canadians.

What was this publicly-funded travesty supposed to prove? That plain- folks amateurs, locked in a room for three days, can produce just as much daft wind as those for whom it is a profession? But we knew that: What we have here is the like of a coroner's jury, demanding that disposable diapers be made of fire- retardant material and equipped with clearly marked safety exits, oblivious to cost or consequence in the rush to solve the crisis of the moment, real or imagined.

Or was it that people of goodwill, brought together from every corner of the land, might open their hearts and reach out to each other? But they do that every day on Sally Jesse Raphael. People will say the most extraordinary things, if only you pay their expenses and put them on TV.