Equality as a Comparative Concept: Mirror, Mirror, on the Wall, What's the Fairest of Them All?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Law Society of British Columbia v. Andrews, its first decision interpreting section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the Supreme Court of Canada characterized equality as follows: It is a comparative concept, the condition of which may only be attained or discerned by comparison with the condition of others in the social and political setting in which the question arises. It must be recognized at once, however, that every difference in treatment between individuals under the law will not necessarily result in inequality and, as well, that identical treatment may frequently produce serious inequality.The Court did not significantly elaborate on the comparative nature of equality, but it is noteworthy that in the above passage, this comparative notion was immediately linked to the inadequacies of a formal equality analysis. In rejecting a similarly situate test as deficient, the Supreme Court of Canada began its section 15 interpretation by embracing substantive equality.In this article, I explore two themes arising from the notion of equality as a comparative concept. The first is that equality concerns relative, rather than absolute, claims. The second is that the difference between formal and substantive equality is crucial to the nature of the comparisons which an equality analysis demands. In my assessment, Canadian equality jurisprudence is sometimes, and increasingly, wanting because of its inattention to both of these foundational precepts. The early promise of Andrews has not been realized.
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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 | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.056 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".