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.
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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 | 0.055 | 0.071 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.058 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.023 | 0.021 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.013 |
| Research integrity | 0.018 | 0.017 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".