Bibliographic record
Abstract
The adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms has marked a revolutionary change to our legal and political institutions and practices. While parliament used to have the final say in defining the details and limits of the rights of Canadians, the Supreme Court is now the ultimate arbiter of our rights as it has the authority to determine the meaning of the Charter and decide when legislation contradicts the letter and spirit of the Charter. The question of whether the entrenchment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the subsequent practice of Charter-based judicial review are beneficial developments to our political culture is the topic of this dissertation. I argue that entrenched Charters of rights in general, and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in particular, are unnecessary in mature democracies which already have adequate institutions and practices which protect rights. My central claim is that Charters of rights and judicial review are not only unnecessary, but they are also fundamentally undemocratic; Charters and judicial review limit the ability of citizens, acting through their democratic representatives, to make important decisions concerning rights. First I explore Jeremy Waldron's rights-based critique of Charters of rights and judicial review to argue that Charters and judicial review are undemocratic and then defend Waldron's critique against three major arguments which claim that Charters and judicial review do not necessarily conflict with our commitments to democracy and might also be mandated by our democratic principles. Then I explore two major consequentialist arguments supporting Charters of rights and judicial review: the "tyranny of the majority" argument, and the institutional argument. I critique these two influential arguments and conclude that the fear of the "tyranny of the majority" is an exaggerated fear based on simplistic conceptions of "majorities" and "minorities" which does not recognize the limits of majority rule within a parliamentary democracy, while the institutional argument is based upon questionable assumptions of voter and legislative motivations and behaviour. Finally, I argue that Charters of rights and judicial review might subtly undermine our commitments to democracy by reinforcing unrealistic attitudes concerning rights and cynicism toward democratic politics. Furthermore, I argue that Charters of rights and judicial review imply that there are "correct answers" and moral expertise concerning rights debates which also undermine our commitment to democracy. Finally, I offer some democratic alternatives to Charters of rights and judicial review which could help protect rights without having the democratic illegitimacy of Charters and judicial review.
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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 | 0.010 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".