Rewriting the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: Four Suggestions Designed to Promote a Fairer Trial and Evidentiary Process
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has secured a vital place at the core of Canadian criminal justice, and its substantive and remedial provisions have helped to secure a much fairer trial and evidentiary process for criminal defendants than was available in 1982. Still, the Charter is hardly a perfect document. The wording of many of the clauses was the product of compromise, and difficulties in interpretation and application have arisen over the years. This paper attempts to consider what a “new” Charter would look like if it were actually possible to re-draft certain clauses in a different manner. Focusing upon the Charter provisions directly affecting the law of evidence and the trial process, four significant changes are recommended. The Charter’s evidentiary clause — section 24(2) — is especially targeted, with two alterations suggested. First, the section should be made available to any accused challenging violations against “third parties” where evidence secured from those parties is admitted in a criminal trial. Second, the “fair trial” aspect of the exclusionary analysis is questioned as being counter-productive and rationally inconsistent. In addition, the paper recommends a change to section 11(f) — the right to a jury trial — contending that it should be extended to include the right not to choose a trial by jury. Finally, the paper suggests enacting a new Charter right — the right of an accused person not to be confronted with unreliable evidence.
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 distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".