Divergent approaches to the accommodation of substate demoi in Canada and the United States

Abstract Canada and the United States both have populations in which racial and ethnic minorities, substate national societies, native peoples and majority groups coexist. In this article, I contrast the United States and Canada, focusing on their contrasting political cultures, models of federation, legal nation-building mechanisms and so forth, in order to evaluate these states’ potential for accommodating minority nations. First, I analyze how Canada’s multicultural and multinational political culture has encouraged the recognition of substate national societies through a decentralized model of federalism. By contrast, in the United States, the multiple traditions that have influenced U.S. political culture have encouraged the development of a territorial conception of federalism, which is less hospitable to the claims for recognition of stateless nations in the United States. Second, I show that both the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the U.S. Bill of Rights had a homogenizing, pan-national and majority nation-building effect. Third, I show that antidiscrimination constitutional provisions and federal statutes in the United States and Canada are ill-suited to address their stateless nations’ claims. In the United States, with its territorial conception of federalism, substate national societies are in an especially unfavorable position to have their claims for recognition addressed. In Canada, on the other hand, the Canadian model of federation may provide avenues for addressing the constitutional aspirations of substate demoi, even if at times there are tensions with individual-rights approaches.