The Journalist-Source Privilege in Quebec Civil Law: Globe and Mail v. Canada (Attorney General)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper analyzes the recognition of the journalist-source privilege in legal proceedings in Quebec, namely, in the context of the examination of witnesses aiming at identifying a journalist’s secret source. It first presents an overview of the state of the law in foreign jurisdictions and the n proceeds with the analysis of the development of a journalist-source privilege in Canada and Quebec, up to the Supreme Court of Canada’s recent decision in Globe and Mail v. Canada (Attorney General). The Supreme Court of Canada developed a clear analytical framework for recognizing journalist-source privilege on a case-by-case basis. Before ordering a journalist to answer questions likely to reveal the identity of a confidential source, the courts must perform the four-pronged analysis developed by the Supreme Court of Canada, inspired by the common law “Wigmore Doctrine”. The analysis of the Supreme Court confirmed the mixed nature of Quebec’s civil procedure and evidence law, and established an analytical framework to determine in which circumstances journalist-source privilege will be recognized, meanwhile reaffirming the essential role played by the media in the preservation of democracy.
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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 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| 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".