The Patriation and Quebec Veto References: The Supreme Court Wrestles with the Political Part of the Constitution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Supreme Court’s decision in the Patriation Reference was a landmark in the jurisprudential analysis of the role of constitutional conventions in the law of the Constitution. The Court’s majority adopted Ivor Jennings’ test for identifying constitutional conventions. The two crucial components of that test are: (1) acceptance by the players involved that they are bound by a rule; and (2) the principle underlying the rule. In the Patriation Reference, applying Jennings’ test, the majority found that there was a constitutional convention requiring a substantial measure of provincial consent for requests by the federal Parliament to the U.K. Parliament to amend Canada’s Constitution in matters affecting provincial powers. That ruling ensured substantial provincial participation in working out the terms on which Canada’s Constitution would be patriated. However, in the subsequent Quebec Veto Reference, the Court ignored the fundamental agreement on which Confederation was based and considerations of principle, and found that there was no constitutional convention requiring Quebec’s consent to amendments affecting its rights and powers. The result was the breaking of the bond of trust on which Canada was founded and frustrating years of mega-constitutional politics.
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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 | 0.006 | 0.022 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.011 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".