The Supreme Court of Canada, Ameliorative Programs, and Disability: Not Getting It
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent Supreme Court of Canada decisions on section 15(2) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms raise concerns for the equality rights of persons with disabilities. Although Kapp gave independent force to the protection of ameliorative programs as an aspect of substantive equality, Cunningham gave governments significant deference even in relation to targeted benefit programs that are under-inclusive and potentially discriminatory. This paper examines the impact of the Supreme Court’s recent section 15(2) jurisprudence on people with disabilities. We argue that the Court’s extreme deference to targeted benefit programs may perpetuate the social exclusion and marginalization of persons with disabilities to whom the government denies benefits. The Court’s section 15(2) approach also runs the risks of reinforcing essentialized, categorical, medicalized views of disability and creating hierarchies of disability. These risks are of particular concern in the current climate of fiscal restraint. While the recent Supreme Court decisions on section 15(2) do not deal specifically with issues of discrimination on the basis of disability, we argue that the Court’s apparent failure to think through how its decisions would impact people with disabilities is a serious shortcoming indicative of Pothier and Devlin’s notion of “dis-citizenship.”
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 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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 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".