Fair Opportunity to Participate: The Charter and the Regulation of Electoral Speech
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In his 1999 article, Libman v. Quebec (A.G.) and the Administration of the Process of Democracy under the Charter: The Emerging Egalitarian Model, Colin Feasby suggests that the Supreme Court of Canada endorsed an egalitarian approach to democratic participation and the regulation of electoral speech. More specifically, Feasby argues that the Court has adopted a model that draws from the philosophy of John Rawls; in particular, his supposedly egalitarian idea of the fair value of the equal political liberties. In this article, I critically examine this egalitarian thesis in the context of the Court’s more recent 2004 decisions in Harper v. Canada (Attorney General). While I agree that the Court has adopted an approach similar to the philosophy of John Rawls, I nevertheless reject the conclusion that this is an egalitarian model of democratic participation. Instead, I argue that both Rawls and the Court may be more clearly understood as endorsing a liberal fair opportunity model of elections. This liberal model rejects the egalitarian ideal that all citizens are to enjoy equality of influence in political decision making. The focus, instead, is on the liberal ideal of procedural fairness, and ensuring that all citizens have an equal opportunity or chance to influence political outcomes.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.016 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.025 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".