Immediately following the vote, Prime Minister Pierra Trudeau announced that, either with or without provincial support, he intended to make the Canadian Parliament solely responsible for Canada's constitution (Cairns 1991). Until this time, Canada's constitution, the British North America Act, had remained a legislative act of the British Parliament which had passed the necessary laws for Canada to be constituted as a country in 1867 (MLA accessed 13th September 2003). Canada's government leaders felt they needed a new set of guidelines for the occasions when they wanted to amend or change the constitution, but they had not been able to agree on what that amending formula should be. Prime Minister Trudeau was determined to give control over the constitution to the Canadian Parliament, but Quebec and most of the other provinces were opposed because they saw Trudeau's initiatives as an attempt to weaken provincial rights. Trudeau also wanted to include in the constitution a Charter of Rights and Freedoms that would guarantee Canadians the basic freedoms of speech, religion and association and would prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex, colour and creed. Eventually all premiers supported Trudeau, except Levesque, largely because Trudeau offered something each wanted (Cairns 1988). .
Quebec's refusal to accept the patriation package in 1981 caused it to feel somewhat alienated form the Canadian constitutional family (Smith 1991). This lead to renewed constitutional discussions, beginning around 1985, in which the government of Quebec made a series of proposals that, if accepted by all the provinces and the federal government, would have led to Quebec's return to the constitutional family (MLA accessed 13th September 2003). .
After 1981, a new Constitution Act was made in 1982 (Monahan 1991), where federal parliament and provincial legislatures agreed on the Constitution Act which would bring the constitution home from Britain to Canada.
