Child Representation in Alberta: Role and Responsibilities of Counsel for the Child in Family Proceedings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There has been an increase in the number of family law cases in Alberta where counsel is appointed to represent a child, but there is a lack of guidance and there is controversy about the role and responsibilities of counsel for the child. In other jurisdictions government agencies, the courts, the legislature or the law society have provided clear direction, though taking different approaches to resolving the controversies about counselfor the child. This article reviews the different roles adopted by counsel appointed to represent a child in afamily proceeding: the child advocate, the best interests guardian and the friend ofthe court. It is argued that in Alberta there is no single role that is appropriatefor alt cases. While the child's wishes should always be placed before the court, counsel should only advocate based on those wishes if the child has capacity to instruct counsel. This article offers detailed suggestions for the professional responsibilities of counsel for the child, and concludes by making recommendationsfor action by the Law Society ofAlberta and Government of the Province if these bodies are to meet their responsibilities to children.
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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 | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".