OTTAWA - In the earliest days of Canada's young confederation, our nation used as its final court of appeal the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council - a committee of the British Parliament. While Canada had created its own Supreme Court, the Dominion remained a colony, its constitution a legislative enactment of the Imperial government in London.

In 1937, the JCPC ruled in the case of Attorney General of Canada v. Attorney General of Ontario. It was a landmark ruling on several federal statutes which Ontario's government saw as infringing deeply on the province's right to regulate its own commerce. Ottawa attempted to argue that its jurisdiction over international treaties allowed it to enforce the terms of those treaties in what would otherwise be a zone of provincial law. The lords and justices of the JCPC countered that "the Dominion cannot, merely by making promises to foreign countries, clothe itself with legislative authority inconsistent with the constitution which gave it birth." In a telling summation of Canadian constitutionalism, the JCPC wrote the following:

"While the ship of state now sails on larger ventures and into foreign waters she still retains the watertight compartments which are an essential part of her original structure."

Despite Ottawa's every attempt to the contrary, Canada never lost that lesson. We remain the single most decentralized federation in the world. Earlier decisions by the JCPC had established that, within the context of Section 92 of the British North America Act, provinces held some degree of sovereignty from the federal government.

In a nod to the anniversary of the Conservative Government's 5th year in power, the chattering classes have been abuzz about the legacy of Stephen Harper. One such legacy will undoubtably be a restoration of the somewhat diminished constitutional principle of "watertight compartments" we once held so dear.

Pierre Elliott Trudeau will be remembered as a "brutal centralizer". To many, this is a good thing. But the systemic transition of sovereignty from the local level to the distant halls of Ottawa ignores a consistent theme in Canadian politics. It is the "impetus to self governance", as described by constitutional scholar David Smith. Public policy that incorporates decentralized knowledge and the circumstance of time and place will always be superior to central planning of any sort. Provincial governments in Victoria, Edmonton, Quebec City, and elsewhere will have a far greater understanding of their local needs than Ottawa ever will.

Stephen Harper will be remembered for turning back the clock on the Liberal Party's centralizing tendencies. Jean Chretien was infamous for cutting transfer payments and demanding policy coordination as a condition for restoring the fiscal lifeline. That system is dead under Stephen Harper. The Prime Minister has promised that fiscal transfers will be spared from the sword of austerity in the 2011 budget. His cuts to the GST slashed Ottawa's revenues in relation to the provinces by a significant margin.

More subtly, the Harper government has clearly shifted their priorities to policy fields more closely associated with the traditional constitutional role of the federal government. These include Arctic sovereignty, defence, the criminal law, and immigration reform. Contrast this with earlier Liberal governments under Chretien and Trudeau, in which emphasis was placed on health and education (an area of traditional provincial responsibility). By emphasizing reform in these once neglected areas, the Harper government has extended wider leeway to the provinces to legislate freely under Section 92.

On the health file, Harper has ended the practice of enforcing provincial compliance with the Canada Health Act. Such legislative bullying was a common practice under Jean Chretien. Chretien managed to cut the federal deficit by shifting costs to the provinces; Ontarians will remember the effect this had the on the Harris government's own effort to settle Ontario's deficit.

In a sense, we are seeing under the Conservatives a flourishing of Canada's traditional constitutional framework. This is a healthy step for Canadian confederation. It is Canada as it should be: a land of many sovereignties, and watertight compartments. The JCPC would be proud.