Canadian Federalism and the Principle of Subsidiarity: Should We Open Pandora's Box?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the last 10 years, the Supreme Court of Canada has referred explicitly to the principle of subsidiarity even though it is not found in the federation’s formal constitutional structure. Two examples are found in the 2010 decisions COPA and Reference re Assisted Human Reproduction Act. As a result, this paper focuses on the role currently played by the principle of subsidiarity in Canadian federalism. More specifically, it identifies the actual and potential effects of this principle on the balance of power between the federal and provincial governments. The first part briefly examines the close ties existing, at the the oretical level, between the principles of subsidiarity and federalism. The second part considers the place given to the principle of subsidiarity in Canadian constitutional law, first as a notion underlying the adoption of a federal form of government, and the n as a legal principle for regulating the exercise of powers. The paper demonstrates that the cooperative view of federalism adopted by the Supreme Court has generated a large number of de facto overlapping powers, creating fertile ground for the discreet, but increasingly apparent, emergence of a constitutional principle of subsidiarity in Canada.
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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.019 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| 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".