On Obligations and Contamination: The Crown-Aboriginal Relationship in the Context of Internationally-Sourced Infringements
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper considers and questions several aspects of how the jurisprudence has come to conventionalize approaches to Aboriginal rights and Crown obligations. Although intended as an exploratory work, this paper is grounded in the case study of mercury biocontamination of "country food," which provides physical and cultural sustenance to northern Aboriginal peoples. I selected this case study for the very reason that it seems to fall outside the scope that the traditional analysis of Aboriginal rights and Crown obligations embraces. Although the tight relationship between cultural integrity and practices of collecting and sharing food in the north would surely substantiate a s. 35(1) rights claim, there is no particular domestic Canadian law or regulation that can be meaningfully targeted as the infringing "smoking gun" due to the contaminant having multiple international sources. Mercury contamination arises as a general byproduct of world-wide fossil fuel based industrial activity and is also being released from Arctic sinks as a result of climate change. This fact pattern differs considerably from those that have come before Canadian courts, and so it can ground a speculative engagement concerning where the principles of s. 35(1) take us when the Crown is not responsible, per se, for a situation which threatens Aboriginal rights, but where the Crown has the power to act to try to change the situation. Within my analysis, I consider and try to address some of the inconsistencies potentially operating in the logic of how Aboriginal rights claims are often framed.
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 | 0.017 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.035 | 0.109 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Research integrity | 0.015 | 0.013 |
| 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".