Abstract

The author considers the existence of a regional territory and guarantees for its conservation to be an implicitly necessary and preliminary condition for the distribution of the legislative, financial and statutory competences on which regional autonomy is based. Starting from this assumption, the essay analyses all the Canadian constitutional and infra-institutional norms that recognize the territory as providing as a strong institutional guarantee for the Provinces and the Territories. An entire section is devoted to the legal sources that recognize the right of the indigenous peoples that originally inhabited the territory; a right regarded as a corollary to that of self-government and recognition of a native cultural and linguistic identity.