Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Constitution Act, 1982 offers two paths to Senate reform. Incremental reforms can be made by Parliament unilaterally. But changes to the method of selecting Senators or the powers of the Senate can be made only by federal-provincial consensus. The Harper government seeks to straddle these paths by proposing that Parliament unilaterally provide for the election of “Senate nominees,” who would subsequently be considered for appointment to the Senate. This article argues that because the practical effect of this reform would be to change the method of selecting Senators – Prime Ministers would invariably recommend the appointment of individuals elected pursuant to federal legislation – this reform cannot be made by Parliament unilaterally.This article also argues that the limits the Constitution Act, 1982 places on Parliament’s ability to reform the Senate have a principled basis, and that they should not be seen as precluding the possibility of future reform. These limits protect the provinces’ legitimate interest in the future of the Senate – a change in the method of selecting Senators could significantly affect their current position as the primary spokespersons for regional interests. They ensure that a significant change to the nature of our democracy – one that could affect how the principle of responsible government is applied federally – cannot be made without a meaningful national discussion. Such a national discussion could produce consensus: polls show that an overwhelming majority of Canadians want a change to the status quo. A consultative referendum, held in conjunction with a general election (like several recent provincial referenda on democratic reform), could provide a guidepost for future federal-provincial negotiations.
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 | 0.032 | 0.059 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.016 | 0.019 |
| Open science | 0.003 | 0.021 |
| Research integrity | 0.021 | 0.023 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.031 | 0.007 |
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".