Bibliographic record
Abstract
We are still in the early stages of working out what it means for the Canadian state to be both officially secular and supportive of religious pluralism. In this period of uneasy transition, the respective roles of secular and religious norms in shaping public policy are matters of considerable political debate and scholarly attention. The Supreme Court has had a few opportunities to contribute to these debates in recent years. The author discusses three significant 2004 rulings on religious freedoms: Syndicate Northcrest v. Amselem, the Same-Sex Marriage Reference and Congregation des témoins de Jéhovah de St-Jérôme-Lafontaine v. Lafontaine (Village). While the majority in Lafontaine avoided the religious freedom issue, Lebel J.’s dissent introduced the language of religious neutrality into the Court’s jurisprudence and his thoughtful discussion of its implications ought to contribute to future debates. The Court’s opinion in the Same-Sex Marriage Reference was commendable by so clearly stating that religious freedom is in no way threatened by the federal government’s Proposed Act (Bill C-38 in Parliament). The move from a definition of civil marriage rooted in Christendom to one aimed at fulfilling the secular ideals of the Charter is consistent with the state’s duty of religious neutrality, and the Court’s opinion played a valuable role in removing any legal objections to its attainment. Justice Iacobucci’s opinion for the majority in Amselem is the Court’s most ambitious contribution to the jurisprudence on freedom of religion since the Big M ruling. His emphasis on personal choice may pave the way for the development of a broad conception of freedom of conscience in the future.
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 | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.047 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".