Suggested by Pierre Trudeau as a last-gasp attempt to resolve the federal- provincial impasse over patriation, it was accepted on the spot by Rene Levesque -- to the horror of his fellow members of the Gang of Eight, the premiers who opposed Trudeau's constitutional reforms.

There is little doubt it would have passed: even in Quebec, polls showed the package was extremely popular, especially the Charter. Had the other premiers, fearing a federal victory, not been stampeded into cutting a deal with Ottawa, had the referendum gone ahead, we might have avoided the isolation of Quebec, and thus deprived Quebec nationalists of a useful grievance. At the same time, we would have established the precedent that major constitutional changes must be endorsed by the people: that the Constitution, indeed, belongs to the people, not the premiers.

Perhaps most important, we might also have got a better Charter, without the weasel clauses that were tacked on to gain the premiers' support, notably the notwithstanding clause; a Charter all the more robust for having been entrenched, not just in the Constitution, but in a formal popular mandate. All of which might have meant that this week, on the 15th anniversary of the Charter, the country might actually be celebrating.

As it is, the Charter has become the orphan child of the constitution, unloved and undernourished. The left reviles it as a charter of corporate rights, all right for rich white men but no use to anyone else. Conservatives abominate it as the trojan horse of social engineers, chosen weapon of gays, feminists and Clifford Olson. Quebec nationalists and their fellow-travellers denounce it as the imposition of an alien (read: English) creed of individualism upon Quebec's more collectivist culture.

Communitarians wonder why there is no equivalent Charter of Responsibilities, whatever these might be. Libertarians would consign the whole document to the trash bin for lack of a property rights clause. And everyone joins in the traditional High Tory lament: that the Charter has empowered unelected judges to make law; that it has subverted the sovereignty of Parliament; that it has cast aside the subtleties of convention and the common law for the alien (read: American, or possibly French) creed of written constitutions.

To hear these exquisites moan, you'd never know there was such a thing as the British North America Act -- a work committed to paper, if memory serves, unless it was passed down to us by wandering minstrels. The Supreme Court, and before it the Privy Council, was engaged in "making law" long before the Charter, as the arbiter of disputes between governments. If one government believed another had intruded upon its rights, it took it to court, seeking the protection of the constitution.

All the Charter did was to let the citizens in on the game. The line of demarcation was no longer just between governments, but between Government and the public. Not that the Charter marked the introduction of this idea into Canadian political life. It was remember, that arch-Tory John Diefenbaker who brought the Canadian Bill of Rights into being, some twenty years before. The Charter's guarantees are similar to those in the Bill of Rights; it differs from it chiefly in the difficulty of amending it.

Which is to say that the difference between a constitution and an ordinary law is more in degree than in kind. The same complaints that critics make about the Charter may be advanced against the whole body of written law: all laws give judges licence to "make law," so far as they require interpretation and application. All laws bind future Parliaments, until they are changed. All laws, not just the Charter, originate in distrust of arbitrary power, even in the hands of elected legislators: that's why we make them put it in writing.

The complaints of the critics, then, are not just with the Charter, but with the rule of law itself. Not to mention democracy: contrary to what some of the rhetoric would imply, the Charter was not dropped on us from a passing jet.

It was approved by a democratically elected Parliament. When the Supreme Court invalidates a piece of legislation as contrary to the Charter, it is not taking the law into its own hands. It is ensuring one law is consistent with another. Parliament decreed that individual rights should be protected; the Supreme Court is merely holding Parliament to its word -- as Parliament has instructed it to do.

It is hard to find anything undemocratic in this. True, the Charter has not quite the democratic credentials it might have had if ratified by referendum.

But it is a strange notion of Parliamentary sovereignty that would forbid Parliament to bind itself if it chooses.