John Bourinot's advice on constitutional issues was sought by governors general and prime ministers but, because it was generally given behind the scenes, Canadian history books and biographies of late nineteenth-century statesmen give him little if any credit. In Sir John George Bourinot, Victorian Canadian Margaret Banks corrects this oversight and shows the importance of his work.

As clerk of the House of Commons, Bourinot advised the speaker and other members of the house on parliamentary procedure; he also wrote the standard Canadian work on the subject. A founding member of the Royal Society of Canada, he played a leading role during the Society's first twenty years. Ahead of his time in writing intellectual history, Bourinot was also an early supporter of higher education for women. He was a man of contrasts, an early Canadian nationalist as well as an imperialist. In spite of the constitutional changes of 1982, there is still much in Bourinot's writing that is relevant today.