The Forgotten Right: Section 9 of the Charter, Its Purpose and Meaning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines why section 9 of the Charter, the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned, has failed to flourish. The paper argues that the right has essentially remained dormant because the Supreme Court of Canada has not yet expressly identified the underlying purpose of this important constitutional guarantee. After briefly canvassing the current state of affairs under section 9, the paper shifts to a purposive analysis of the guarantee. Its historic antecedents, the provision’s drafting history, the international influences that helped shape its framing, the testimony of senior civil servants involved in its drafting, as well as its relationship to the other legal rights provisions, are all considered in an effort to bring to the surface the guarantee’s purpose: to protect individual liberty against unjustified state interference. With that purpose revealed, the paper turns to a critical analysis of the section 9 jurisprudence, arguing in favour of a renewed understanding of its key defining terms, “arbitrarily” and “detention”, in light of the overarching purpose of the guarantee. The paper contends that it is only through this sort of purposeful revitalization that section 9 can be transformed from a largely forgotten right to a meaningful constitutional protection of our most cherished freedom: liberty.
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 | 0.010 | 0.012 |
| 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 | 0.040 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".