The Métis and Thirty Years of Section 35: How Constitutional Protection for Métis Rights Has Led to the Loss of the Rule of Law
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper chronicles the inclusion of the Métis in section 35 of the Constitution Act, 1982, their battle for a seat in the Constitutional Conferences that followed and their litigation journeys since 1990. The paper examines the lethal combination of section 35, section 52 and the urgings of the Supreme Court of Canada that reconciliation is to be accomplished by negotiations. The negotiated agreements that result from their court “victories” have been implemented (or not) according to the shifting winds of provincial politics. Métis rights are governed not by laws, but by policies and guidelines that the Métis know nothing about. Many of these policies are not published anywhere, are often not available for public scrutiny and are made without consultation. Section 35, which recognizes and affirms the Aboriginal rights of the Métis, appears to do so in a manner that is not transparent or accountable, with the unfortunate result that Métis live, unlike other Canadians, with no law.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
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".