Bibliographic record
Abstract
Canada Supreme Court Chief Justice Lamer's 6-1 majority decision in the P.E.I. Reference (1997) is one of his most controversial judgments. At issue was the independence of provincial courts, particularly how section 11(d) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms restricted the ability of provincial governments to fix the renumeration of provincial court judges. This article responds to criticism of how Lamer CJC imposed a constitutional requirement of independent, objective and effective judicial compensation commissions in the P.E.I. Reference. Such criticism fails to account for the political context in which Lamer CJC wrote the judgment, namely the arbitrary and unfair treatment of provincial judges by their governments. To appreciate the wisdom of Lamer CJC's judgment, one must understand it as a response to a serious existing conflict between the three branches of government.The author concludes by noting that Lamer CJC's judgment opts for a more deferential approach than an attractive alternative, to make commission recommendations on judicial renumeration binding. Instead, government has the final say regarding the appropriateness of judicial renumeration, provided their position is “globally rational”. The majority decision has not resolved all conflicts between judges and governments on the issue of compensation. But the new constitutional scheme adds predictability, consistency and defined boundaries and limits to the resolution of these conflicts, and litigation will diminish as a result. Ultimately, the decision to establish a solid constitutional foundation for judicial financial independence and create an independent commission for assessing judicial renumeration was an appropriate response to the unique and deteriorating conflict in the years preceding the decision.
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 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 | 0.018 | 0.039 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.023 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.034 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.003 |
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".