This chapter is concerned with steps taken by Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, successfully completed only in the last few years, to end their constitutional ties with the United Kingdom Parliament and Government, to examine the present legal foundations of the Constitutions of those countries, and to see what has happened to the notion of ‘the Crown’.

In Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, many academics in fields of law, politics, and history have had difficulty in answering a frequently asked question from foreign scholars: ‘When did your country obtain its independence from Britain?’ At times the courts have also adverted to that question and have been just as perplexed. The difficulty is that, unlike the case with other Commonwealth countries, one cannot point to an occasion when one flag was lowered and another raised at midnight amid sentiments of joy and nostalgia.

In a desperate effort to find some exact date for the event, the Balfour Declaration of 1926 or the Statute of Westminster of 1931 are seized on as roughly approximating independence days. Yet in 1939 and 1940 the Governments of Australia and New Zealand assumed that they were automatically at war with Germany and Italy when Britain was at war. Amendments to the British North America Act were made by, and could only be made by, the United Kingdom Parliament at various times up to and including 1982.