Freedom of Religion Under the Canadian Charter of Rights: The Limits of State Neutrality
Bibliographic record
Abstract
According to the Canadian courts s. 2(a) of the Charter requires that the state remain neutral in religious matters. The state must not support the religious practices of one religious group over those of another and it must not restrict the practices of a religious group, unless this is necessary to protect a compelling public interest. Yet the neutrality requirement has not been consistently enforced by the courts. The fundamental difficulty with the neutrality requirement is that religious beliefs often have public implications. Despite the courts’ formal commitment to “neutrality” they have required the state to remain neutral only towards the “private” or spiritual dimensions of religious practice. The “public” elements of belief, which address civic concerns, remain subject to the give and take of ordinary politics. This distinction, although not expressly made by the courts, underlies the different treatment the courts have given to religious “practices”, which the state is precluded from favouring, and religious “values”, which the courts have said may play a role in political decision-making. This distinction between public and private religion, may also play a role in the courts’ accommodation decisions and account for its weak or selective protection of religious practices from state interference. Where the line is drawn between civic and spiritual spheres will reflect the courts’ assumptions about ordinary religious practice and appropriate state action. Because the line is not drawn explicitly but is instead framed as a distinction between practice and value in state support cases and is buried within the formal s. 1 balancing of interests in religious accommodation cases, the courts’ assumptions about the nature of religious practice and state action are concealed from scrutiny.
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 | 0.011 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".