More and more I am convinced that there are not several constitutional questions. There is one. The only reason this clutch of frozen satrapies should ever have formed a federation was to establish a federal government, and the only reason to establish a federal government was to do the things that only federal governments can do.

But we will not entrust it to do those things until we recover the sense that it is our government, and we will not make that mental leap without root and branch reform of every one of its institutions: reforms that involve and implicate the people in the business of the nation.

Or to retrace our steps: out of democratic reform comes popular legitimacy, out of legitimacy comes a revival of federal authority, and out of federal authority ñ our collective capacity to do good, for each other and for the world ñ comes the whole idea of Canada.

I do not mean to imply, as so many nationalists do, that the state is the nation. But the state, as the vehicle for collective moral action, gives purpose to the nation ñ or at least, to a nation conceived as a moral agent. For without the nation ñ that sense of ourselves as members of a single decision- making body; that set of tradeoffs and understandings whereby minorities agree to be bound by majorities, majorities agree to respect minorities, and so on ñ there can be no state.

How to engender that sense of national feeling has of course been the theme of most of our history. Yet through it all our nationbuilders have overlooked the one element most essential to its realization: democratic reform.

It is for lack of an elected Senate that the premiers have been permitted to wander about the countryside posing as the guardians of regional interests. It is for lack of effective representation in the lower house, where "majority" governments elected with 40 per cent of the vote enforce the democratic world's most rigid system of party discipline, that the notion of devolving federal powers to the provinces has found such a following.

And it is for lack of any democratic input whatever into the appointments to the Supreme Court of Canada that the campaign against "judicial activism" has begun to take shape. As ever, it is the Reform party, its antennae tuned to the low-frequency rumblings of popular discontent, that is taking up the cause.

As threats to the common weal go, this is pretty thin. There will always be a constituency, from High Tory to Low Lefty, for whom any exercise of judicial review, however mild, is an intolerable affront to democratic principle. "Judicial activism" is in this case simply another word for Charter of Rights, reviled by both the left and the right for its tiresome insistence that their respective designs for society should conform to certain elementary standards of human rights.

But if that is indeed their worry, they needn't trouble themselves. Far from the runaway Court of much recent caricature, the Supremes have if anything distinguished themselves by their timidity, their habitual deference to the legislatures in many cases forcing them into intellectual backflips to avoid setting aside legislation, where it was the clear sense of the Charter that they should.

Yet the notion has taken hold, nevertheless, that the Court is engaged in an elaborate plot to undermine democratic government. True, this sentiment seems to be particularly aroused by the court's pronouncements on a single issue ñ equal rights for homosexuals. But the Court's critics have successfully translated this narrow unease into a more generalized sense of democratic violation.

In the west, moreover, this has been overlaid with accusations of central Canadian bias. A "foreign court," it is said, is imposing "alien values" on the people of the western provinces. At a time when the court is being asked to rule, in another part of the country, whether the rule of law itself should apply, when the very unity of the country might depend on the court's legitimacy, this is dangerous stuff.

But such sentiments will continue to fester so long as appointments to the court are made in the same secretive, autocratic way, with so little democratic input or even public knowledge of the appointee's legal and political philosophy. The Charter isn't the problem. It's the process.