The Theory and Doctrine of Unconstitutional Constitutional Amendment in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
It has become increasingly common for courts in constitutional democracies to invalidate constitutional amendments. Courts have enforced both written and unwritten limits on how political actors may exercise the formal amendment power. They have relied either on constitutional texts that expressly entrench provisions against formal amendment or on their own interpretation of these texts as implicitly establishing an unalterable constitutional core. Although the Supreme Court of Canada has not yet invalidated a constitutional amendment, modern case law provides the constitutional basis for the Court to declare that a future constitutional amendment violates either the text or spirit of the Constitution of Canada. In this Article, I trace the origins and evolution of the theory and doctrine of unconstitutional constitutional amendment, I explain how the theory and doctrine may apply today in Canada, and I suggest a detailed framework to evaluate when and how the Supreme Court of Canada may exercise the extraordinary residual constitutional authority to invalidate a constitutional amendment.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".