Courting Confusion? Three Recent Alberta Cases on Equality Rights Post-Kapp
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines current confusion surrounding how courts are to analyze challenges brought under s. 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The authors begin with a review of the 2008 Supreme Court of Canada decision in R. v. Kapp, which gave s. 15(2) independent status to shield ameliorative laws, programs, and activities from the finding of discrimination, but left the application of s. 15(1) unclear. The authors then articulate how three recent Alberta cases on equality post-Kapp illustrate the new uncertainty surrounding how courts are to address equality rights. Through an analysis of the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ermineskin Band and Nation v. Canada, and subsequent decisions of the Alberta Court of Appeal in Morrow v. Zhang and Cunningham v. Alberta (Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development), this article explores the Supreme Court’s failure to adequately guide lower courts and tribunals on how to apply s. 15 post-Kapp. For example, a framework for reconciling the new role of s. 15(2) and claims of under-inclusive ameliorative programs has yet to be developed. Further, the authors argue that the guidance that has been delivered has improperly narrowed the definition of discrimination to stereotyping and prejudice.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".