Shaping the Constitutional Dialogue on Federalism: Canada's Supreme Court as Meta-Political Actor
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article challenges the view that the Supreme Court has become the predominant authority on the constitutional distribution of rights and entitlements among governments in the Canadian federation. By assuming this position of supremacy, critics continue, the Court has usurped key policy functions that belong to political actors, a move that has undermined democratic governance in Canada. Against this view, we argue that the management of Canada's federal constitutional architecture is a responsibility the courts share with key political actors. We describe the Court's role as meta-political, whereby the Court's federalism jurisprudence supplements rather than subverts the constitutional role of political actors. We develop our thesis in relation to two subnational constituencies with a distinctive constitutional status in Canada: the province of Quebec and Aboriginal First Nations.
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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 | 0.009 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.031 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".