Section 15 Jurisprudence in the Supreme Court of Canada in 2000
Bibliographic record
Abstract
A safety valve is a flap, lid or device that acts as a fail-safe. For those unfortunate to have experienced backflow into your home, a safety valve installed in a sewer line permits wastewater to exit while blocking unwanted backflow. It is a reliable and indispensable tool in this context. The legal world has adopted this term in constitutional analyses. This paper examines whether legal safety valves do provide relief. First, the paper provides an overview of how safety valves have been installed in the Supreme Court of Canada’s legal analyses. Then the paper provides a sober discussion of how this legal mechanism affects access to Charter protection at a practical level for vulnerable and marginalized persons, particularly in the immigration and refugee law context. Legal safety valves are the provisions or mechanisms in a legislative framework that courts point to as curing or diminishing any unconstitutional effects of an impugned provision or scheme. They often come in the form of alternative applications, exemptions, or an exercise of discretion. They are patchwork solutions and are not a good substitute to replacing a system that has significant implications for people subject to the law; in ideal situations, a more enduring and reliable solution could be crafted. They can be exercises of judicial or legislative power and have been referred to as “discretion, exemptions or escape clauses”. They have been found in section 7 or 12 Charter analyses. The paper asks us to return to the foundations of Charter analysis and ask what are permissible ways to cure unconstitutional legislative provisions or schemes? The paper argues there is little evidence legal safety valves do provide the necessary escape from the ambit of unconstitutional schemes and may only provide temporary solutions.
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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.034 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.018 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.011 |
| 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".