An Ecologically Literate Reading of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Article will examine the extent to which the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms protects Canadians from serious state-sponsored environmental harm. Part 2 examines the international law of environmental human rights, a key interpretive tool in assessing environmental claims under the Charter. Part 3 addresses the problem of Charter application in the environmental context, concluding that the Charter does apply to a wide range of environmental harms, wherever government action has a sufficiently causal role in producing the harm in question. Part 4 analyses the place of environmental human rights in Canadian jurisprudence, and asserts that Supreme Court of Canada environmental jurisprudence strongly suggests that the Court would be open to recognizing an environmental violation of the Charter on appropriate facts. Part 5 explores in some depth the viability of environmental claims under s. 7 of the Charter, as a case study in the ecologically literate interpretation of Charter provisions. It is concluded that both the s. 7 jurisprudence from the Supreme Court of Canada and the limited body of lower court decisions addressing environmental claims under s. 7 specifically support the viability of such claims in a proper case. Part 6 briefly surveys other sections of the Charter that may be violated by state-sponsored environmental harm. Part 7 addresses the thorny question of scientific uncertainty in the evaluation of environmental claims under the Charter and suggests that courts should take a precautionary approach in evaluating scientific evidence in the context of Charter claims. Part 8 provides a brief conclusion.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| 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".