Is Money No Object: Can the Government Rely on Financial Considerations Under Charter Section 1
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Government programs have increasingly been challenged under the Charter on the grounds that they are provided inappropriately to a limited number of beneficiaries and that the benefits provided are set at insufficient levels. Courts have thus been asked to determine how governments should allocate finite resources in a world of infinite need. In this paper, the authors explore the question of the place of financial considerations for the purposes of section 1 of the Charter. In Martin (2003), the government of Nova Scotia attempted to rely on financial considerations in order to justify the exclusion of chronic pain sufferers from the regular compensation scheme provided by the Workers’ Compensation Act. Relying on dicta from the Schachter (1992) and Judges’ Reference (1997) decisions, the Supreme Court dismissed this argument and held that budgetary considerations could not be put forward by governments as a free-standing pressing and substantial objective for the purposes of section 1 of the Charter. However, the Court also acknowledged that “in certain circumstances”, financial considerations may constitute a pressing and substantial objective. The Court found it unnecessary to decide this point in Martin, and the question remains unanswered. Using examples from tort and administrative law, as well as lower court Charter decisions, the authors argue that courts cannot ignore the realities imposed on governments by fiscal limitations. If courts take on a greater role in policy-making, they must give serious consideration not only to arguments based on financial considerations, but also to the financial implications of their decisions.
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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 | 0.014 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.035 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.022 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.002 |
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".