Discrimination in the Name of Secularism: A Ban on Religious Symbols in Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This comment will argue that the Charter of Quebec Values and the Berlin Neutrality Law, are not only unconstitutional and discriminatory nationally, but also illegal under international law. I will juxtapose the two laws because of their similarities in terms of text and because Berlin and Quebec are both provinces in their respective countries, and therefore the legal effects of both laws will not reach beyond the provinces. In Section II, I will describe the socio-political climate in Canada and specifically in Quebec, to demonstrate how and why the Parti Quebecois arrived at the decision to propose the Charter. I will compare my findings to the socio-political climate in Germany that led to the Berlin Neutrality Law. I will compare the texts of the two laws, before I analyze the constitutionality of each law. I will demonstrate why the Berlin Neutrality Law is constitutional under the German Constitution. I will then ultimately argue that the Quebec Charter of Values is unconstitutional under Canadian law because it violates the fundamental right of religious freedom. In Section IV, I will argue that both the Quebec Charter and the Berlin Neutrality Law are illegal under international laws that Canada and Germany have ratified. Finally, I will advise Quebec not to pass the Charter of Quebec Values in its current form because it is unconstitutional under Canadian law and illegal under international law as well.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".