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What rules determine the relative priority of the various Constitution Acts among themselves? In particular, how do the Constitution Act, 1982 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms stand relative to constitutional provisions enacted after 1982? To what extent do they have the capacity to control later amendments? Various answers might be given to this question. This paper looks first at an answer with strong initial appeal. This invokes a principle of sequential ordering, which maintains that the priority between constitutional enactments is determined simply by the temporal sequence in which they were enacted. While this approach admits that …