Patriations

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. The process of transferring legal authority over a constitution or law from one jurisdiction to another, particularly from a former colonial power to an independent nation; the act of bringing home governance or control previously held elsewhere; the formal adoption of national sovereignty in constitutional matters
2. The formal procedure whereby a country's constitutional authority is moved domestically from an external governing body; the act of reclaiming legal control over foundational laws from foreign rule; transferring jurisdiction and amendment powers back to the nation's own institutions
3. The event of shifting constitutional power and legal control from a distant overseer back to the citizens' homeland; the process of original constitutional adoption transitioning from external to internal authority; reclaiming sovereign legislative rights within a nation's own framework

Etymology: Patriations is the plural of "patriation", a noun that has no life outside Canadian constitutional debate. Its origin is a back-formation from "repatriation", meaning the sort of word that was assumed to have a prefix (re-) and reversed to produce a new base. Repatriation brings a person or object back to their homeland, so the word was reshaped from that older term. The meaning shift is the key point. Repatriation moves people or things across a border, but patriation shifts something from outside a nation to inside it. In the Canadian context, the term describes bringing the country's constitution home from the United Kingdom, where it had long been held in British legislation, so that Canada could amend its own founding document. The plural form appears when people discuss several such transfers or separate proposals and processes over time. It is used in discussions of Canadian constitutional history, where the repeated efforts to bring the constitution home are referred to together.

Synonyms: transfers, returns, repatriations, restorations, deliveries