Access to the discharge in Canadian bankruptcy law and the new role of surplus income: a historical perspective
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction While Canadian debtors have never had an unconditional entitlement to a discharge in bankruptcy, Canadian courts have long recognised the important function that the discharge plays in the rehabilitation of the debtor. The Canadian discharge, originally based upon the English model, has differed from the American concept of fresh start in that Canada has traditionally relied on judicial discretion to impose conditions or limitations on the order of discharge in appropriate circumstances. Although the courts in Canada have had the ability to impose conditional discharges upon bankrupts, including requirements to pay money from future income, conditional discharges under the traditional regime are only one option and courts have had the discretion to grant an unconditional discharge where it has been merited. The often cited rationale for the release of debts is that it permits the debtor's ‘rehabilitation as a citizen, unfettered by past debts’. The discharge, it is argued, allows the debtor to once again become a productive member of the open market economy. More recently, however, there has been a reconceptualisation of the role of the discharge in bankruptcy law and perhaps more broadly a new view of debtor rehabilitation has emerged. The rising number of consumer bankruptcies over the last decade led many to claim that something must be done to stem the rising tide. The assumption was that many debtors could really afford to pay more to their creditors and that the bankruptcy regime was too easy on debtors.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| 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".