Back to Basics: A Critical Look at the Irwin Toy Framework for Freedom of Expression
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The author argues that the analytical framework that the Supreme Court of Canada developed in 1989 in Irwin Toy Ltd v Quebec to resolve freedom of expression cases under s 2(b) of the Charter, and that the Court still uses today, is seriously flawed. He focuses on the two main elements of that framework-the exceedingly broad understanding of freedom of expression on which it is based and the complex set of rules it prescribes for finding an infringement on freedom of expression. His concerns in relation to those elements are that: (1) the meaning the Court has given to freedom of expression for the purposes of s 2(b) lacks a solid justificatory basis, ignores general interpretive principles the Court has adopted in relation to the Charter, encourages pointless and wasteful litigation, and fails to appreciate the symbolic function that an instrument like the Charter performs; and (2) the road-map the Court prescribes for determining whether or not governmental action infringes on freedom of expression is inconsistent with the Court's own prior jurisprudence on this feature of Charter analysis, lacks logical coherence, misapplies a feature of American free speech jurisprudence of questionable merit, and is incomplete.
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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 | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.018 | 0.100 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.020 | 0.023 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.021 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".