And Then There Was One: Freedom of Religion in Canada – the Incredible Shrinking Concept
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Defining religion for the purposes of constitutional or human rights protection is a challenge shared by UK and Canadian courts in this era after the enactment of the Human Rights Act 1988 and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms 1985, respectively: neither defines what is to be protected. Canadian courts have been impressed with this task since 1982 and, unsurprisingly, the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) has considered the content and scope of section 2(a), the fundamental right to freedom of conscience and religion, on a number of occasions, most recently in Syndicat Northcrest v Amselem. The outcome in Amselem is a salutary reminder that, for post-modern courts, religion can be whatever they want it to be, and, indeed, be nothing in particular, which merits protection or not at the whim of these courts. In Amselem, a 5–4 majority of the SCC reduced religion for Charter purposes to any beliefs which the complainant calls religion and persuades a court to be sincerely held. A court then has the discretion to decide whether to extend legal protection to those beliefs (and their allegedly offensive practice) without giving credible reasons beyond the complainant's sincere belief in them. Amselem may, therefore, be of considerable interest to British lawyers regarding the potential lurking within ostensibly generous constitutional protections for religion ultimately to reduce religion to nonsense undeserving of legal protection.
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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 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 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".