No, it's much, much more. The Statute of Westminster settled one, but only one, issue. It didn't even settle that fully. It settled that where United Kingdom laws and the laws of any of the now independent, autonomous nation-states of the Commonwealth were in collision--let's say New Zealand had a law on trust that was different from the U.K. law on trust--the New Zealand law, or any of the Commonwealth domestic laws, would prevail, with one exception, and that was Canada. Because our constitution remained an act of the U.K. Parliament until 1982, that particular British law remained sovereign, superior in force to any Canadian law. It was to settle that issue that there were two or three meetings of prime ministers leading to it, which Mr. Bennett was part of in the early days of his administration, and that was the basic issue.
In fact, the key problem with the Statute of Westminster was finding a solution to the Canadian problem. But the big issue was on foreign affairs particularly; the Balfour Declaration is particularly pertinent for foreign affairs. Take a declaration of war. In 1914, the United Kingdom declared war and we were at war like that. In 1939, because of the Balfour Declaration, the United Kingdom declared war and our Prime Minister said, “Well, we'll have a discussion, and I think we'll probably be there.” But we weren't automatically at war.
There's nothing in the Statute of Westminster about that. Declarations of wars aren't acts. The Balfour Declaration is fundamental to the equality of the member nation states of the Commonwealth.