Bibliographic record
Abstract
In September 2009, the Canadian Human Rights Tribunal waded into a highly public and acrimonious debate about the role of human rights tribunals and commissions, especially in policing hate speech. In Warman v Lemire,1 the Tribunal held that section 13(1) of the Canadian Human Rights Act2 (CHRA), which prohibits the communication of hate messages, infringed the constitutional guarantee of freedom of expression, section 2(b) of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.3 The decision added to a firestorm of media, political and academic debate about whether anti-discrimination statutes should prohibit hate speech. The Warman decision is complicated by a twenty-year-old Supreme Court ruling, in a 4–3 decision, that a predecessor provision in the CHRA is constitutional. In this article, I argue that the Tribunal’s decision is logically unsound and likely the result of ends-based or teleological reasoning. In my view, ends-based reasoning does not assist in Charter analysis as it produces decisions that call into question the legitimacy of the courts. This article first outlines the facts in Warman and the Tribunal’s holding on the constitutional issues. It goes on to survey the legal and constitutional background to the Warman decision and discuss the Taylor precedent. It then describes the Tribunal’s reasoning on constitutional issues, including the Taylor decision and amendments to the CHRA after Taylor. Finally, it criticizes the Tribunal’s ends-based reasoning and argues that this type of reasoning is illegitimate in constitutional decision-making.
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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.056 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.039 | 0.045 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".