If there was ever any lingering doubt that constitutional tinkerings are divisive, nasty and ultimately coma-inducing, our good friend Niccolo Machiavelli has dispatched them, utterly.

Niccolo, attentive readers will know, was the last Republican chancellor of the Florentine city-state. He was also the author of that handy how-to manual on eviscerating one’s political enemies, The Prince. In the political skulduggery and deceit department, Niccolo was without parallel, and the practitioners of the dark arts owe him a great debt.

But Nick knew trouble when he saw it. In 1513, the original spin medico had this to say about Prime Minister Jean Chretien’s newfangled Clarity Act: “There is nothing more difficult to arrange, more doubtful of success, and more dangerous to carry through, than initiating changes in a state’s constitution.”

Well, alright, mea culpa. Mr. Machiavelli wasn’t exactly offering his view about the Clarity Act, given that the dates are admittedly incongruous. Nor was he offering his analysis on the constitutional codswallop that would preoccupy – and occasionally paralyze – Canadian parliamentarians, endlessly, in the years ahead. His views on the political dangers associated with constitutional miasma are still worth heeding, however. Just ask Joe Clark, Preston Manning, Lucien Bouchard, the Bloc Quebecois and that person who leads the New Democratic Party, whose name escapes me (and most of Canada’s registered voters). They know the truth of Niccolo’s pithy observation: constitutions, and politics related thereto, are darn dangerous.

The background, here, is worth repeating. Following up on a Throne Speech commitment, Mr.Chretien’s designated constitutional pitbull, Intergovernmental Affairs minister Stephan Dion, tabled the innocuously-named Clarity Act in December 1999. Distilled down to its base elements, the legislation defines what conditions will have to be met for the federal government to enter into negotiations following a referendum on secession. The wording of the act scrupulously adheres to the wording of the 1998 Supreme Court of Canada ruling on secession – a ruling, historians will note, that Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard welcomed with open arms, and a dollop of Gallic bon hommie.

In case you are still awake, recall that the Supremes declared that it was up to “the political actors” to determine what constitutes “a clear majority on a clear question.” Being a political actor, as it were, the Prime Minister set to work..

Having depicted Jean Chretien as an oaf and a poltroon for so long, Messrs. Clark, Manning, Bouchard et al. (and even a few ambitious federal Liberals) made a political miscalculation of gargantuan proportions: they didn’t believe that the Prime Minister knew what he was doing when he started ruminating out loud about the need for constitutional clarity. In fact, they swallowed their own rhetoric about the Liberal leader’s shortcomings. As Niccolo Machiavelli will tell you, that has always been the political equivalent of playing Russian roulette with a shiny new surface-to-air missile.

Had any one of the Prime Minister’s detractors paused to consider the political implications of the Clarity Act – or, better yet, paused to consult their own pollsters - they would have found what the Angus Reid polling organization already knew: namely, that Canadians adored the Prime Minister’s legislation. They loved it to pieces, even. The pollsters’ figures were of the stop-the-presses variety: in Western Canada, 86 per cent of the 2,800 people contacted supported Mr. Chretien’s manoeuvre. And in Quebec, the figures were almost as encouraging: four out of five Quebeckers – French and English – agreed with the need for a clear majority on a clear question. And that even included Parti Quebecois and Bloc Quebecois supporters (77 per cent and 75 per cent, respectively).

Press sentiment was pretty unanimous, too. “The federal government won,” said Alain Dubuc in La Presse. “The big winner of this manoeuvre is Jean Chretien,” opined Le Nouvelliste. “Chretien speaks for most Canadians,” the Kingston Whig-Standard wrote – while the Toronto Star’s editorial board noted that only Jean Chretien had spoken “forcefully for the rule of law.” Out West, it was the same: “Bravo, Jean!” wrote the Victoria Times Colonist. Even the editorial board at the National Post – no great fans of the Prime Minister, most days – applauded his “principled leadership.”

In the immediate aftermath to this political anthrax outbreak, the political corpses of Joe Clark, Preston Manning, that NDP person and Lucien Bouchard (along with Lucien’s concubines in the Bloc) could be seen littering the landscape. Sensing danger too late, Mr. Manning – who had initially excoriated Mr. Chretien’s plans - did a 180-degree turn on the Clarity Act that was rapid enough to cause whiplash. Joe Clark lost the public support of his deputy leader and members of his puny caucus. The NDP’s leader. whatsername, criticized the bill, then supported it, then lost her senior Quebecois advisor as a result. Mr. Bouchard, meanwhile, was again rumoured to be considering a departure for sunnier climes.

The building and protection of constitutions is indeed, as Niccolo Machiavelli declared, a dangerous business. But sometimes the danger is felt most acutely by the knee-jerk nay-sayers, and not those seeking to build and protect what we already have.

[Warren Kinsella is a public policy lawyer with McMillan Binch and a former Liberal candidate.]