Reconciling Duty and Discretion: The Attorney General in the Charter Era
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper revisits the role of the Attorney General and two duties in particular: the duty of the Attorney General of Canada to report to the House of Commons on government bills that are inconsistent with the Charter and the duty of provincial and federal Attorneys General to defend legislation that is subject to Charter challenge. The author reviews the Canadian experience with pre-legislative scrutiny, compares it to the experience under the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act, and considers various arguments that have been made for reform. He argues that the Attorney General has considerable interpretive discretion in advising the House, and should not be understood to be simply a judicial review pre-screen. The reporting duty is working well even though no reports of inconsistency have been made.The author argues that it is inappropriate for the Attorney General to purport to concede that impugned legislation is unconstitutional. Legislation subject to Charter challenge should be defended regardless of the Attorney General's or the government's view, in order to uphold the democratic values that underlie the constitutional order.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".