Furthering Substantive Equality Through Administrative Law: Charter Values in Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent decisions in the realm of Canadian public law have opened the door to Charter values. Administrative decision-makers must have regard to these values when making decisions. Through the use of a fictional example, this paper is intended provide a guide for laypersons, lawyers, judges, administrators, arbitrators and academics on how to further substantive equality through administrative law. The authors’ focus is on education law, but the proposed framework is capable of application across a wide range of areas. Those in other jurisdictions can replace Charter values with “constitutional values” and adopt a similar analysis. The obligation to educate children about a “diversity of opinions and cultures” is at the heart of the authors’ exploration of administrative decision-making in the education system. They argue, however, that the obligation to pay attention to Charter values provides the lifeblood of substantive equality in the administrative law context. The concept of applying Charter values as a juridical tool in decision-making, while not new, has been given a more dominant role in administrative decision-making by the Supreme Court of Canada in its 2012 Doré decision. While the exact meanings and practical applications of this concept are as yet unclear, this paper makes a small step towards imagining the contours of Charter values. In particular the authors attempt to establish, as a first principle, the role of substantive equality as Charter values begin to solidify and take shape in the jurisprudence. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part presents a fictional administrative law decision-making scenario located within the public school system. This scenario provides a concrete backdrop against which to imagine the function of substantive equality within Charter values. It also discusses the public school system in Canada as a key site for the application of Charter values, and the authors lay out the empirical evidence showing that GLBTQ students and the children of GLBTQ parents suffer an equality deficit in Canadian public schools, a deficit which, in the authors’ view, can be addressed through the proper application of Charter values by decision-makers within the education system. The second part develops an administrative law framework for furthering substantive equality. Specifically, it situates substantive equality within the existing framework of administrative law, and provides a blueprint for what substantive claims might look like under the authors’ proposed framework. The third part treats the precise role of substantive equality, outlining a methodology for blending
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".