Not a General Regulatory Power: A Comment on Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction Act
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction Act is the Supreme Court of Canada’s most important ruling on the criminal law power in more than a decade. It demonstrates that the Court has become uncomfortable with the federal government’s use of section 91(27) of the Constitution Act, 1867 as Parliament’s general regulatory power. The paper begins with a review of the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, with particular reference to those aspects of the statute at issue in the Reference. Next, the three opinions delivered in the Reference are analyzed and their doctrinal significance identified. Finally, consideration is given to the implications for future federalism cases of the principles flowing from the Reference and how in its wake the regulation of health generally and of assisted reproduction technologies particularly should proceed. The author argues that the federalism principles emerging from the Reference are to be welcomed as they will assist in ensuring that the criminal law power does not become the source of wide-ranging civic regulation.
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 | 0.021 | 0.051 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.009 |
| Open science | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.128 | 0.097 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".