Tort Lite?: Vancouver (City) v. War and the Availability of Damages for Charter Infringements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Ward is the first case in the Supreme Court of Canada where the lower courts had dismissed the tort claim but allowed damages under the Charter, thus transforming Charter damages into a “consolation prize” for plaintiffs whose claims, as a result of the law, the evidence or the pleadings, did not meet the applicable tort law standard. While the unanimous decision of the Supreme Court appears to uphold this approach, a closer reading of the decision indicates that the Court did not stray very far from basic tort law principles. The lower court decisions appear to adopt a “strict liability” approach to certain Charter claims, but the Supreme Court’s reasons indicate that something more than mere causation will have to be proven before Charter damages will be considered “appropriate and just”. A close reading of the decision indicates that the Supreme Court would have likely come to the same conclusion had the issue before it been one of damages for negligence rather than under the Charter. Accordingly, Ward will not result in a radical expansion of governmental liability beyond that already provided by the law of tort.
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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".