Introduction
In December 2024, Québec introduced Bill 1, its first standalone constitutional text, framed by Premier François Legault as a historic act of national affirmation meant to enshrine Québec’s distinct character and shared values. Presented as a unifying moment, the constitution seeks to define who the Québécois are and what binds them together. Yet Bill 1 also reveals its exclusions as clearly as its commitments. Indigenous nations are symbolically acknowledged but denied constitutional standing as sovereign peoples. Consultations with Indigenous representatives occurred only after the constitutional framework had been drafted, positioning them as observers rather than co-authors.
I. It’s Québec’s Moment
Québec is currently engaged in a long-awaited and deeply historical project. With the tabling of Bill 1, the Québec Constitution Act, the provincial government has put forward its first standalone constitutional text presented as a foundational act of nation building. Framed by Premier François Legault as a means of protecting Québec’s distinct national character, the proposed constitution seeks to enshrine the province’s founding principles, from secularism and gender equality to the primacy of the French language. Positioned alongside landmark texts such as the Québec Charter of Human Rights and Freedoms, this initiative is meant to define who “the people” of Québec are, and what values bind them together.
Yet, rather than serving as a moment of collective self-definition and reconciliation, the constitutional process reflects a more conservative vision. While consultations with Indigenous communities have been promised, they occur too late to meaningfully shape the framework itself, and the draft constitution stops short of recognizing First Nations and Inuit as sovereign peoples. By symbolically integrating Indigenous peoples into the Québec nation without acknowledging their political authority or consent, the project reproduces longstanding settler-colonial dynamics and reframes what should be a transformative nation-defining moment as one shaped from a single political standpoint.
II. What Reconciliation has come to mean in Canadian Politics
Canadian reconciliation is often framed as a moral journey from systemic racism toward justice and mutual respect, presenting acknowledgment and truth-telling as pathways to democratic renewal. Acts of recognition by the state can be powerful, as centering Indigenous knowledge and lived experience disrupts dominant national narratives and creates space for historically marginalized voices. However, reconciliation in Canada has largely evolved into a culture of redress that isolates specific historical wrongs, most notably residential schools, treating them as concluded mistakes rather than as expressions of an ongoing colonial order. By confining harm to the past, reconciliation functions more as memory management than as a confrontation with persistent systems of dispossession and political domination.
In practice, reconciliation often emphasizes empathy, apology, and symbolic acknowledgment, while questions of authority, land, and sovereignty remain largely untouched. This produces what scholars describe as “passive empathy”, a contained moral response that allows discomfort to be processed without requiring institutional change. Emotional inclusion thus becomes a substitute for political inclusion, reinforcing rather than challenging existing power structures. While initiatives like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission created important spaces for testimony, they lacked the mechanisms to translate truth-telling into substantive political or institutional transformation. As a result, reconciliation seeks closure rather than structural change, addressing the residue of colonialism while leaving its political foundations intact.
III. Consultation is not Consent
Consultation is a set standard and even may be seen as a progressive practice, as governments regularly invoke consultation as evidence of democratic inclusion. Moreover, this is used to showcase respect for Indigenous rights, framing it as a practical mechanism for improving decision-making and renewing relationships between the state and communities. Yet, as it currently operates, consultation falls short of the structural transformation required for reconciliation. Rather than redistributing authority or sovereignty, consultation is used to manage dissent while leaving the power to the state.
The duty to consult and accommodate has become the primary tool through which the state governs its relationships with Indigenous peoples. Beginning back to when the Crown had knowledge of potential Indigenous rights that may be affected by state action, consultation was a procedural requirement and _not_ a guarantee of shared decision-making. Even today it structures interactions across policy domains, from natural resource development to conservation planning and legislative reform. Even frameworks that claim to renew relationships, such as the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), often translate into processes of so-called consultation rather than legal requirements for consent or shared decision-making. Governments and industry actors present it as a “shared road map,” inviting Indigenous communities to contribute knowledge, voice their concerns, and participate in dialogue. However, it’s clear that these processes operate as an “antipolitical” strategy. They transform fundamentally political questions of land, authority, and sovereignty into technical exercises of information-gathering. Consultation is used as a form of democratic inclusion, and by focusing on the incorporation of Traditional Ecological Knowledge or the mitigation of site-specific impacts, it avoids a deeper reckoning with the colonial foundations of authority.
Under current Canadian law, the duty to consult does not require Indigenous consent. So long as Indigenous concerns are considered (which itself is another issue), the state retains the right to proceed with its chosen course of action. Across many cases, consultation invites responses by Indigenous communities, without the authority or ability to refuse projects. In other words, consultation invites comment, whereas reconciliation requires shared authority. This pattern across Canada of participation without decision-making power repeats across domains. In water governance, provincial governments rely on site-by-site consultation to allocate water resources, ignoring Indigenous nations’ inherent rights to govern their own watersheds. In conservation and parks management, consultation has been used to manufacture consent for tourism developments that benefit governments and private actors while ignoring Indigenous claims. Across all contexts, consultation manages conflict in the eyes of the state without allowing for Indigenous control over their land.
The case of Jasper National Park in Alberta illustrates this dynamic clearly. In the development of the Glacier Skywalk project, consultation was used to create the appearance of inclusion, even as the park’s ultimate decision-making authority remained unquestioned and firmly centralized. Indigenous participation was solicited, but only within the parameters already defined by the state. The result was what is being observed here in Québec, participation without power.
This distinction matters in any context of consultation for communities, but even more profoundly in a context of constitutional creation. Constitutions legally codify power, and procedural consultation cannot substitute for recognition at that level. Reconciliation requires institutional and constitutional transformation precisely because Canada exists on Indigenous land, not alongside it. When Indigenous peoples are treated as stakeholders to be informed rather than as peoples with inherent political authority, foundational political arrangements continue to remain unchanged. In the moments Québec was drafting Bill 1, consultation was done to signal openness, but without recognition for reconciliation. Nevertheless, it continues to position Indigenous nations as subjects of state authority.
IV. Indigenous Governance is not Peripheral or Undeveloped
Indigenous political orders in what is now Canada are not emerging or incomplete systems awaiting recognition, but long-standing and sophisticated forms of governance that predate European arrival. Indigenous nations developed constitutional traditions that organized authority, resolved conflict, and sustained collective life, even if these did not resemble centralized Western models. The continued marginalization of Indigenous governance within Canadian political institutions reflects a Eurocentric understanding of legitimacy that equates authority with statehood alone.
This exclusion is not accidental. While the British Crown initially recognized Indigenous nations as political partners through agreements such as the Treaty of Niagara, this nation-to-nation relationship was abandoned as the Canadian state consolidated sovereignty. Subsequent legislation, most notably the Indian Act, actively displaced Indigenous governance by imposing federally supervised structures in place of existing political orders. Indigenous governance has not disappeared; it has been deliberately sidelined.
In the context of Québec’s proposed constitution, this pattern persists. By refusing to recognize First Nations and Inuit as peoples with inherent political authority, the constitutional project reproduces a long-standing practice of erasure while asserting authority over Indigenous territories. The question, then, is not whether reconciliation could be constitutionally embedded in Québec, but why it was not.
V. How Constitutions Define “the People”
Constitutions are often presented as technical instruments that organize power, allocate jurisdiction, and entrench rights. From a state perspective, they stabilize political order by formalizing authority and projecting continuity. From the perspective of “the people,” however, constitutions do more than regulate power: they define political membership. By naming who belongs, a constitution constructs a demos and establishes norms of belonging and legitimacy. Inclusion signals recognition as part of the sovereign community, while exclusion marks political marginality. Constitutional moments are therefore inherently political, as they create boundaries between those who fully belong and those who do not.
This dynamic is central to Québec’s current constitutional project. Bill 1 seeks to protect a distinct Québécois nation by enshrining French as the common language, secularism as a foundational value, and a shared identity as the basis of political cohesion. This inward-looking definition of nationhood carries significant consequences. By grounding political belonging in a singular historical and cultural lineage, the constitutional narrative implicitly positions those who do not share that lineage outside the core political community. Such a vision leaves little room for shared sovereignty, particularly given Québec’s colonial context.
In the draft constitution, First Nations and Inuit are described as “descendants of the first inhabitants,” symbolically acknowledged but denied recognition as sovereign peoples with political authority. This language reproduces a long-standing pattern of incomplete constitutional inclusion, where Indigenous presence is recognized while Indigenous political standing is withheld. By treating Indigenous peoples as consultees rather than constitutional partners, Bill 1 defines who “the people” of Québec are, and Indigenous nations are excluded from that definition.
VI. A Missed Opportunity
Seen in this light, Québec’s proposed constitution represented a rare political opening. The government’s ambition to define the province’s common values and collective identity for the long term created a moment in which Québec’s political order could have been modernized in a meaningful way. In theory, this process could have gone beyond cultural affirmation to constitutionally acknowledge that Québec governs a multinational society composed of overlapping political orders, including Indigenous nations whose authority predates the province itself. Such recognition would not have resolved disputes over land or jurisdiction, nor would it have produced immediate institutional harmonization. But constitutional recognition operates first as a political declaration. It establishes who is entitled to stand on equal footing within the state and to be recognized as a co-author of political authority. This moment mattered not because it promised consensus, but because it created space to name political relationships honestly and openly.
What makes this omission especially consequential is not only what Bill 1 fails to say, but what it actively chooses to constitutionalize. The draft elevates a specific set of “founding principles” to the highest legal status, including the primacy of the French language, secularism, and the territorial integrity of Québec. These choices are not neutral. By constitutionalizing territorial indivisibility without acknowledging Indigenous territorial authority, the text pre-empts debates over shared jurisdiction and fixes the boundaries of legitimacy in advance. The constitution is thus oriented less toward negotiating political coexistence than toward securing a unified national narrative grounded in centralized authority. Indigenous peoples, already denied political status through symbolic language, are further constrained by a framework that narrows avenues for contestation and reinterpretation. The assertion of Québec’s territorial integrity effectively subordinates Indigenous territorial claims to the state’s sovereign narrative. At the same time, the legislation seeks to limit counter-powers by restricting the capacity of publicly funded organizations to challenge laws deemed to be in the “interest of the nation,” creating a chilling effect on rights-based litigation and further narrowing the space for dissent, particularly for Indigenous communities.
The CAQ government ultimately missed this moment. Both the process and the substance of the constitutional project reinforce colonial power relations rather than unsettling them. Procedurally, the constitution was drafted largely behind closed doors and introduced through the ordinary legislative process, adopted by a simple majority vote despite its explicitly foundational and permanent character. This approach undermined the possibility of broad social consensus and foreclosed meaningful participation, especially from Indigenous nations whose political status was already precarious. Indigenous peoples were not only excluded from authorship but symbolically erased through language that integrates them into the Québec nation rather than recognizing them as distinct political communities. Parliamentary hearings with Indigenous representatives were announced only after the core architecture of the constitution had been fixed, limiting their capacity to influence substantive choices.
This reflects a familiar pattern in settler governance. Consultation functions as a technique of management rather than a mechanism of shared authority, transforming political claims into administrative feedback while leaving decision-making power intact. In the context of constitution-making, this logic is especially problematic. Constitutions are not instruments designed for incremental adjustment; they are foundational texts. Consultation after the fact denies the possibility of shared constitutional authorship and positions Indigenous nations as an audience to decisions already taken. They are invited to comment on how they might fit within a predetermined framework, rather than to participate in determining its structure.
This is not simply a failure of sincerity, but a structural misalignment between consultation and the task of constitution-making itself. Constitutions demand co-creation, not commentary. Democracy demands deliberation, not declaration. Reconciliation demands consent, not consultation. By treating Indigenous nations as participants in information sessions rather than partners in constitutional authorship, the CAQ reaffirmed an existing hierarchy of authority at precisely the moment when it could have been renegotiated.
None of this was inevitable. The constitutional moment offered multiple paths toward reconciliation, and none were taken. The state could have recognized Indigenous sovereignty as predating the Crown, embedded the principles of UNDRIP, including free, prior, and informed consent, or constitutionally protected the inherent right to self-government already recognized under section 35. By declining these options, the government did not act cautiously. It forfeited a rare opportunity to move reconciliation from symbolic commitment into the structure of political authority in Québec.
Conclusion
Québec’s constitutional moment has passed, along with a rare opportunity to move reconciliation into institutional form. Rather than renewing democratic life, Bill 1 formalizes existing power relations while foreclosing alternative futures. By constitutionalizing territorial indivisibility without recognizing Indigenous political authority, the state entrenches a vision of nationhood that treats Indigenous peoples as cultural symbols rather than political partners. The language of “descendants of the first inhabitants” acknowledges presence while denying standing, managing to be both symbolically inclusive and structurally colonial.
This failure is not unique to Québec. Across Canada, reconciliation routinely substitutes consultation for consent, recognition for sovereignty, and apology for redistribution of power. These are not implementation gaps but features of a framework designed to preserve state authority. Constitutions endure, shaping political life across generations. By missing this moment, Québec has not postponed reconciliation but constitutionalized its limits. Whether those limits will one day be reopened remains an open political question.
Edited by Syona Vashisth and Norah Nehme.
