In March 1973 this Journal published an article in which I attempted to show that section 51 of the British North America Act had been wrongly applied when seats in the House of Commons were allocated amongst the provinces as a result of the 1971 decennial census. I pointed out that my analysis was in conflict with that of the Representation Commissioner, the official having the legal duty to implement the section in question. In my penultimate paragraph I wrote: “There is a pressing need for some authoritative person or institution to analyse the present ambiguities and to decide which interpretation is correct and for what reasons. Alternatively the Canadian Parliament could clarify the situation by amending section 51 of the bna Act while at the same time retroactively applying the amended rules to the post-1971 redistribution.” While writing these words I actually expected that someone would take some interest in the problem I had discovered and would show me where I had erred. The reference to the bna Act was a theoretical flourish.
More than two years after the publication of this article no one has shown my interpretation to be wrong, although Stanley Knowles has made a number of relevant comments. In general, however, it seems that nobody cared about an argument which was admittedly obscure and even legalistic (surely the ultimate sin in modern political science). Those constitutional lawyers who might have been exposed to the article were no doubt put off by the complicated arithmetic.