R. v. Bryan: The Supreme Court and the Electoral Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper provides an overview of recent Supreme Court of Canada jurisprudence in the area of freedom of expression in the political context, focusing on Thomson Newspapers Co. v.Canada (Attorney General), Harper v. Canada (Attorney General) and R. v. Bryan. In R. v. Bryan, the Court was faced with a constitutional challenge under section 2(b) of the Charter to section 329 of the Canada Elections Act, which prohibits the transmission of election results in one electoral district to another electoral district before the close of all polling stations in that other district. A majority of the Court held that the Attorney General was justified in limiting political expression. The paper critiques the elevation of “informational equality” to a democratic imperative. The paper also discusses how the Court has extended the “reasoned apprehension of harm” test from its origins in speech at the fringes to political expression at the core of the section 2(b) guarantee. Finally, the paper considers the majority’s unquestioning deference to government in the electoral process. The paper’s conclusion is that the Supreme Court of Canada is not providing core political expression with the protections that are demanded.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".