Arbitration Using Sharia Law in Canada: A Constitutional and Human Rights Perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recently, Canadian media reports warned that the Government of Ontario was considering the implementation of Sharia law as a judicial equivalent to Ontario law.1 Such reports were not accurate. Rather, the issue was whether arbitration by Islamic tribunals using Muslim law, which is often called Sharia law by non- Muslims, ought to be allowed under the auspices of general arbitration statutes.2 A cross-section of Muslim Canadians actively mobilized to oppose such a possibility through coalition- building and letter-writing campaigns.3 In June 2004, Marion Boyd was commissioned by the province to examine the issues surrounding the use of private arbitration to resolve family and inheritance cases, and the impact of the same on vulnerable people. The Boyd Report, tabled in December 2004, recommended that religious institutions be allowed to arbitrate such disputes on the basis of religious law, provided that a list of forty-six safeguards were adhered to.4 After the Boyd Report, some religious groups argued in favour of religious adjudications.5 Much public debate ensued, leading to a vociferous statement by Premier Dalton McGuinty, who vocally rejected religious adjudication.6 Further, the Government of Ontario outlined that it “will ensure that the law of the land in Ontario is not compromised, that there will be no binding family arbitration in Ontario that uses a set of rules or laws that discriminate against women.”7 The province amended its Arbitration Act8 and Family Law Act9 to provide that family arbitrations were conducted “in accordance with Ontario law or the law of another Canadian jurisdiction.”
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 | 0.008 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.039 | 0.028 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.015 | 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 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".