Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Canada-United States Safe Third Country Agreement (“STCA”) requires refugee claimants travelling overland to seek protection in the first country of arrival as between Canada and the United States. The Federal Court determined that the United States’ detention practices did not comply with minimum human rights standards, such that Canada breached section 7 obligations to the applicant refugee claimants by deflecting them back to the United States. The Federal Court of Appeal overturned the decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada dismissed the appeal. The authors review the CCR judgment and present it as a cautionary tale about how a court can evade its constitutional duty in practice without appearing to depart from its liberal-constitutional commitments. Importantly, the judgment affirms that section 7 is engaged by the refugee determination process. However, it shrinks from the implications of that recognition in two ways. First, the Court launders the Federal Court’s findings of fact to overturn the finding of a risk of abusive detention conditions in the United States. Second, the Court rules that routine violations directed by the operation of the law can be caught and corrected by “safety valves” – discretionary immigration status applications elsewhere in the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act (“IRPA”). This substitution of discretionary relief for the Court’s remedial power under section 52 of the Charter not only abandons refugees to statutory remedies that are, in fact, illusory. It also incentivizes governance through discretion (rather than law) as an instrument that more effectively insulates government from constitutional challenge. While the judgment in CCR might be understood as exemplary of immigration exceptionalism, it is too soon to know whether the attractions of governing through discretion, and specifically through safety valves, will extend into other fields of law. Those at greatest risk will be other marginalized groups whose constitutional claims are prone to being framed as matters of deservingness rather than right.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".